Teaching others is the most efficient way to learn. However, if you teach someone something that you donāt understand properly, it is a big pain in the ass for the person being taught. because they are often taught incorrectly and their explanations are vague and difficult to understand. Before you teach others, you must first understand them properly.
As I wrote in āThe Intellectual Production of Engineersā, āteaching others is a more efficient way to learnā means āif you explain what you have learned with the intention of teaching others, your memory will be better retainedā, so there is no need to constrain the person who is teaching you.
- Intellectual Production of Engineers p.140 (4.5.3.3) Teaching others teach others.
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Making materials to teach others also reinforces your own memory. After solving a puzzle, writing an explanation of how to solve it will ā¦ There are experiments that show that test scores improve significantly. Just creating the material is effective without actually teaching it.
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- An experiment that showed that taking the time to verbalize how to solve a problem, rather than simply solving it, improved subsequent performance.
Understanding
- I think āIāll do it when I understand it properly.ā is not a good guideline, because a small-minded person will forever feel that he/she doesnāt understand it properly no matter how much he/she studies, and a not-so-small-minded person will feel confident with not enough knowledge at all. I think itās not a good guideline. - Dunning-Kruger effect
- As I also wrote in āThe Engineerās Art of Intellectual Production,ā subjective feelings of āunderstandingā are often wrong, so āUnderstanding is a hypothesisā and without āan experiment to test the hypothesis,ā it is impossible to know if you really understand. Writing an explanation of what you think you understand is useful for this experiment.
- As a result of our experiments in trying to explain, we often find ourselves saying, āHuh? This is a bit fuzzy in my understanding. As we find and eliminate such vague points, a ādense network of interconnected informationā is created in our brains. Once this is in place, it is useful to be able to trace the connections and pull them out as needed.
- The Intellectual Production of Engineers p.44
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You may feel like you know something, but that is no guarantee that you really do. You have to verify that the model in your brain that you think is correct is really correct by actually using that brain model and observing the results.
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