Language of obfuscation

I was thinking about teaching and learning. About simplification and abstraction. About how some disciplines, probably some people, create barriers to knowledge. Some people are born teachers. They are able to simplify and explain. To break things down without dumbing them down.

We understand things differently. We need to see things for ourselves to make sense of them. A particular text book doesn't fit the bill for everyone. That's why there are so many books on the same topic. Browse any book store and on their shelves, you'll see different versions of the same topic. Explained this way, or that way.

We take things in through our eyes and ears mainly. Our sense of smell and touch isn't used in this knowledge based world which handicaps the motor minded people. Those who absorb better when they see action. Movement. Books are great, but they also don't satisfy the visually minded or the aurally minded, those who learn best by visualising or hearing. With books, words, the visually minded person has to close their eyes and picture the subject. It can be difficult if the subject is mathematics. For those who learn best by hearing, attending a lecture and sitting back while listening, or buying the audio version of the book sometimes helps.

But in this day of information and technology, it's sad to note that educators aren't taking the art of teaching more seriously. Those who write believe that since they are subject matter experts they automatically qualify to teach the subject. Moreover, they feel that those who are not subject matter experts have no right to espouse what they know about the topic. Some experts in their fields are great educators. But there are few of those. Bjarne Stroustroup, the father of the computer programming language C++ is one of those. Not only did he invent the programming language, but he wrote the seminal book on it. He's a great teacher. The authors of the book The C Programming Language also fall into this category. The first edition of that book was only 228 pages long and not only covered the entire programming language but it was full of practise exercises. The authors, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, understood very clearly that in order to learn computer programming you had to write computer programs. The more computer programs you wrote, the more you understood the programming language and the better the programmer you became. They applied the principles of learning a foreign language to computer languages. I loved reading that book and still try some of the exercises.

But there are literally thousands, hundreds of thousands, of books on computer languages, a great many of which are terribly written in a boring long hand, obfuscated with jargon which is tersely explained in a fleetingly by the way manner. There are some disciplines that have totally given up trying to teach. For example, Architecture. For the most part, there's an assumption that the Architecture student, by tedious repetition, voluminous production of work will eventually get it. The words used in lectures subliminally affect the consciousness to produce images which can then be manipulated in the mind of the student and turned into structure. The form magically appears. When asked to explain how the form appeared, words are then used to wrap around the image in a matter of fact way. Have you ever heard Architects speaking and trying to explain their process? It's laughable. A friend of mine, former student in Architecture like me, once explained it to me in terms of ego. The discipline is full of them and survival depends on you being as abstract as possible. As though you're a magician with secrets that mere mortals can only wish they understood but which will forever lie beyond their reach.

Teachers, educators, instructors, tutors, those with knowledge, often believe that the inability of the student, the apprentice, the learner, that the problem lies with the person and not the instruction. That the inability of the student to digest the material lies in the students genetic disposition to stupidity. They just don't get it. You see a lot of this in the face of teachers during parent teacher night as the elementary school teacher explains why your child isn't progressing as fast as the other children. There's a subtle message behind this that your dummy genes have somehow infected your child and therefore your own inability to progress in life has afflicted your offspring. The simplicity of the theory of relativity is something that most human beings on this planet don't understand, but even that high school elementary teacher behaves as though it's the most natural thing in the world and that they invented it. E=MC-squared. So what?

With this bombardment of information throughout those formative years, children, and adults, develop a fear of difficult, or seemingly difficult subjects. Even if we end up in our fields of expertise, our focus narrows into singular tunnel vision obscuring our ability to be open-minded, broad-minded and effective lifelong learners. For those of us that end up moving up the scales in life, each rung has it's barriers to entry. Many of them having been manufactured by those who are unable to explain how they got there in the first place. There are tons of management seminars, self-help workshops, leadership conventions, motivation and team-building exercises that will fail for the majority of the attendees simply because the craft has not been abstracted enough for each person to personalise it. Make it their own. Take ownership of it.

And that perhaps is the key to learning. Seeing it for yourself. It is the only way to see. It is the only way to achieve and it may not necessarily jive with the way others see things. Even concepts that are supposedly scientific and unarguable. Without leeway. Here's a good example. Kekule, who discovered and explained the structure of the Benzene molecule is said to have been dreaming. And in his dream, of snakes, one of them grabbed onto its own tail. That image, of the snake grabbing its tail, led him to the discovery of the Benzene molecule which is a ring structure. Whether the story is true is immaterial. The important thing is that I remember this and I haven't studied high school chemistry in over twenty-five years. The image alone stuck in my mind. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, a double-helix of amino acid pairs. We're all made of the same building block!

Isn't that fascinating in and of itself. That a couple of molecules differentiate us from some animals, and even among ourselves, these molecular differences lead to large physical differences.

The work that I'm engaged in crosses a number of disciplines, many of which hold very little interest. But the environment does have its different components each vying for some relevance in the overall discipline. As a result, each unit, faction, silo creates within itself an identity and brings with it the baggage of self importance. With self importance, terminology and codecs appear. A theory of practise. A way of doing things. Alchemy to the outsider, but practised with religious importance shrouded in mystery. Meetings are held of grave importance, pads whipped out, documents created. The wheels of progress forging forward, unabated, uninterrupted, yet obscured. The largest part of the problem is making sense of how all the components fit together. Some people don't care, or worry, about the grand scheme, as long as their component seems to be intact. Some people can function quite capably with the knowledge that all they have to do is attach the widget marked with a "+B" to the widget marked with a "B+" and that everything else will take care of itself.

Some of us become dysfunctional in that environment. The need to grasp the terrain from the upper stratosphere becomes of seminal importance or we become catatonic. Unable to function because the meaning isn't clear. The purpose is unknown and so the value or worth of the task becomes futile. And when this happens, the ability to comprehend to learn is diminished. And when those with knowledge are unable to teach, and get annoyed because they're surrounded by idiots then more oil is poured onto the burning problem and all that happens is that it exacerbates.

The next series of blogs will explore this problem further. Mostly so that I, as a former teacher, understand what it is my craft was about, but I also have this deep belief that by teaching others, you, yourself, benefit greatly from the exchange. You clarify what you know if you can take it and give it to someone else.

Ever watch people at an art gallery? They stand there in front of an abstract piece, in awe. They recapitulate the artists intent and agonise over the mess. They walk away, self-satisfied, hesitantly assured, marginally confident that they have witnessed something. They'd do better by going into a dark room and praying.