I woulnd't even be on this blog if it wasnt for the mentoring of an old friend of mine, W.W.
This friend guided me through the process of establishing this blog, so I think this blog should spring from a conversation that we had earlier in the day, an example of which has led me to the subject here, mentoring.
We have many ways of learning, and much to learn about how to learn. I am not going to delve into the huge variety of ways we learn, but specifically expand upon what I think to be the second most effective, mentoring. The most effective learning technique is experience, the second is mentoring, the third is directed self-education, and the fourth is up for grabs. It could be necessity, coercion, formal education, imprinting, modeling, peer pressure, belief-immersions, or many other learning techniques.
I believe that old saying, "experience is the best teacher". I don't think a valid argument can be made against this. For example, look how detached a general populace is from a far-away war, or from a homeless person on the street. But get that person shot on a battlefield, and they are going to learn about wounds. Or have an office manager one day recognize that the huddled person on the street corner is the beloved mother of a childhood friend, and watch the helping hand extend. In both cases, experience has made one care, made one learn about something, because it is personal.
Mentoring is also personal, but it is proactive, instead of reactive, as experience is. Mentoring is a personally guided tour into learning. Its effectiveness depends on an inborn concern for another to progress, and so is based on selflessness, more than personal gain. Students rely more on this than on expertise, as they cannot recognize expertise as easily as they can friendship or caring. For this reason, mentoring is often ephemeral, as mentors are rarely available for extensive learning situations, except occasionally in the rare combination of broad specific mentor expertise with strong bonds based on trust. In such cases, mentoring is not the primary relationship, friendship is. Mentoring is only an occasional, if at all, occurence in these instances. Friendship does not depend on it. It is a gift when mentoring occurs in friendship, it is not a required characteistic.
In summary, experience is the best teacher, and mentoring the second best. To discover a mentor, be a friend. Mentoring works both ways, and occurs because of benificence, not demand.
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2 comments:
"up for grabs, eh?" That must include just about every form of formal education that there is & tutoring too, since I think your definition of mentoring precluded it. I think paid tutoring probably surpasses self-directed education for most learners. The effectiveness of self-directed learning is highly dependent on both the nature and the motivation of the learner. For the motivated learner with a strong foundation and good study habits, though, I would agree with your ranking it above most formal processes - but even then it may depend on some proximity of the material to be learned to knowledge that the learner has already acquired.
Welcome to blogland!
Good points, Walker. Actually, I considered paid tutoring before making the bold statement that self directed learning is the third best learning method, surpassing learning techniques like paid tutoring, or formal education.
First things first. By learning the best ways to learn, an individual develops abilities to learn from a wide range of resources. Once experienced in this, can can assess one piece of a 'teacher's' info on a subject by comparing it to another 'teacher's' info on the same subject. One needs this ability to roughly evaluate the value of this 'teacher', even if it is a paid tutor.
Assessment accuracy is achieved through self-directed education. We all do this to some extent. For example, look at computer search engines. The more skilled one gets at using them, the quicker one can get a broad, more accurate education on a subject, and assess each website's offering by comparing it to like websites' offerings.
The pinnacle of formal education is expressed in one-on-one attention in professional services. This category includes everything from personal trainers and individual piano teachers to the plumber and pysciatrist.
The problem with paid tutoring at this pinnacle level of paid tutoring is that the flow of info is inherently restricted to basic information for which the buyer pays. The scope and depth of info gets more restricted the more expensive the professional values their time.
For example, lets look at a practitioner in one of the lower end of professional services, a piano lesson teacher. A piano teacher will give fingering lessons and direct aural identification of specific chords, and some pracitce music homework.
Now, lets now look at an example in the higher end of professional services, a regular doctor.
This professional's time is so important, that this doctor will simply write out an antibiotics prescription for an infection, and perhaps identify it as one of several possible staph strains.
In both cases, the quality of learning on either subject is much more dependent on the student that on the 'teacher'. Although the piano student may learn to recognize a one-four-five chord
progression from a teacher in a simple folksong, they won't assimlate it until they can actively identify it as it appears in a radio song and somehow then incorporate it into their own performance of that song.
Yes, the average doctors patient will probably find themself at the mercy of their doctor's professional judgement. This is a dangerous deferment of one's health to another's specialized knowledge, often difficult to obtain.
Unless one actively participates in their own medical education, they are ulikely to learn much about staph. But they are certainly less likely to learn much from a doctor's visit, except for the immediate solution of antibiotics.
But a self educated person, using their learning abilities, could independently discover and evolve both effective preventative and treatments for staph infections. Although many spurn such self-educated endeavors, it is because they are looking at these endeavors from within the context of specialized culture.
But what happens when specialized culture is interrupted? Let's say that a regional catastrophe occurs, like a 9.0 earthquake or a huge global-warming spawned superstorm. In this case, most emergency medical access would be unavailabble to most of the regional population, although such access will be in high demand at such times.
At this time, the value of locally available self-educated medical learning will be much more valuable than inaccesible specialized medical services.
Instances like the above illustrate the inherent dangers with relying too much on formal education, too much on specialized professionals. If everyone paints themself into a specific square in a room, they are going to have some real challenges when the roof collapses, and they find themself unprepared for camping out in the woods.
I am not discarding the value of either paid tutoring or formal education. In fact, it occasionally can play a leading role in self-directed education. But as illutrated, it is only one of many possible components in one's self-directed education.
With the advent of the informational age, self-directed edcuation will supplant cultural trends of specialization driven by competition. As this happens, a higher quantity of informed individuals will contribute world-view asssesments on specialized subjects.
One way or another, we are trending to becoming one with the earth.
earth to glen
glen to earth
oops, I almost forgot there is a self-educated geographer hereabouts
glen to blogland
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