Thoughts on Andy Matuschak Article on Teaching Mediums 🌱

Andy Matuschak wrote this article discussing why books, lectures, and textbooks (the conventional mediums for teaching concepts) are ineffective, and I have to agree with him. In school, I’ve always learned the most when solving problems on the homeworks. Homework problems forced me to go back and actually learn topics that I was supposed to have learned in lectures or from textbooks in order to answer the questions for the assignment. I was listening to The Knowledge Project Podcast episode featuring Maria Konnikova, and I was captivated with her mentor’s teaching techniques. Maria Konnikova, a writer for The New Yorker, who had never played poker before approached a famous poker player Erik Seidel and essentially asked him to teach her how to play. For some reason, he agreed to teach a complete neophyte, but his mentorship helped propell Maria Konnikova to become a professional poker player with over $300,000 in winnings. He taught Maria Konnikova by being mostly far removed and having her do her own research. He gave her reading recommendations and answered questions she had when reading, referred her to various experts to discuss different parts of poker, and walked through her games while asking “why did you make this decision here?”. I think that this mostly self-guided method of teaching, is how we should be emphasizing teaching in education today. Personally, I don’t learn well from being told what to do, I need to know why. Erik Seidel enabled Maria Konnikova to become a fantastic poker player because she developed her own heuristics for the game through experience and then iteratively tuned these intuitions in ways that made sense to her based on Erik Seidel’s guidance. Maria Konnikova undoubtedly has a tremendous amount of grit to be able to start with no poker experience and become a successful professional player, especially since she mostly taught herself. But, I believe much of her success (and anyone’s success for that matter) can be partially attributed to how she learned the skills she needed to become successful. I think that it is very important that students and mentors adopt learning and teaching methods that are the most conducive to success.