Live and let learn

It’s always a shock to step into a completely unfamiliar environment - an environment so unfamiliar that you feel completely useless and unable to contribute anything of your own. These holidays I had the chance to help a mate who’s extending his house. Now, I know absolutely nothing about joists and batons and power tools - I feel about as useful on a construction site as a barbecue in a bushfire. But a couple of days working on my mates construction site as an absolute beginner has re-emphasised two critical points for me as a learner.

First, it’s incredibly motivating to be able to do something useful as we learn or work - whether building something of our own or helping someone else. But this fact is more powerful in the negative: it is incredibly demotivating - even stifling - to feel useless and unable to contribute as we learn or work. My biggest fear while helping my mate building his house was that I’d slow him down, be unable to do the things he expected of me and break his tools. In my own professional area of ICT I’m constantly tackling unknown problems and learning new skills with confidence, so it was strange to feel this fear so strongly - I can only put it down to the alien environment (a construction site) where I have zero confidence. Yet I’m guessing this is exactly what some students have to go through when they join our web design class from other trades or professions.

The solution for me was simple: get my hands dirty straight away and do something useful - even mundane tasks, like being a “gofor” (fetching tools and materials) or sorting the recycled material builds, are helpful tasks for building my confidence that I can contribute on a construction site.

Related to this, as much as I love people learning to learn themselves, expert guidance is usually necessary to jump-start our learning so that we can do something useful before our motivation is drowned by frustration. Even if I was incredibly patient and didn’t become frustrated, it would be a massive waste of time and resources (wood, saw blades, etc.) for me to discover on my own how to cut the right bird-mouth joint on 12 batons. The advice and example of an expert is invaluable to get us up-and-running constructing something useful as soon as possible as we start learning. Without expert guidance to jump-start our learning in the form of a demonstration or a good tutorial, we can easily lose motivation before we get to the stage of creating something useful with our new learning.

These points have been hammered home for me before (see “Good boy Daddy - Intervention and learning“) and every educational text will emphasise their importance. But this time I was the learner. I was the one whose biggest fear was being useless. I was the one who appreciated someone else’s expert guidence, grace and patience. I can’t help thinking how useful it has been to be thrown into a completely unfamiliar environment as an absolute beginner - maybe we should be intentional about throwing ourselves into these situations more often?

I guess we all tend to stick to environments that we understand and can contribute to with confidence - both socially and professionally. We don’t often put ourselves in situations where we know we’re going to feel utterly useless by choice. And yet that’s exactly what some students have to do when they enrol in classes - knowingly put themselves in a situation where they might feel useless or unable to contribute. Do you understand what that feels like? When was the last time you were an absolute beginner? How do you deal with the situation?