Vakkotaur

As a kid, I once started to look at a book on how to draw things. It was probably filled with reasonably good advice, but I didn't keep looking at it for very long. Maybe I looked at it as a possible purchase (or to ask for...) but the information didn't make sense to me. What it did was start off with drawing lines and circles and ovals to rough out a shape of a person or animal. But that wasn't the shape of the thing being drawn! It had all this extra crap. What good was that? And since it didn't make sense, back on the shelf it went.

Of course, those construction lines weren't a real problem. They were meant to be a framework for later lines. The later lines would be inked and after the ink dried, the construction lines could be erased. The problem was that I did not know that and the text did not explain that right off. So, to me, not aware of the sequence of events, it looked like so much nonsense. Had there been even a short summary of procedure right off, the results might have been a bit different.

It's not just books on drawing that have this problem. When I first looked at electronics, at the very basic part, there were endless exercises using groups of resistors. These don't seem to do much. They limit current. They generate heat. But they're not exactly exciting and a circuit of a battery and a bunch of resistors just seems wasteful. It wasn't until I read a book my grandfather had given me that I got something of an explanation. It brought up the question I had, "Why all this fuss with resistors?" and answered it by saying they represented loading, and were just easier to consider than, say, motors or lights and the more interesting would be coming along soon enough. Elements of Radio started off differently and introduced each new component as a need for it was explained. This made even more sense.

I am not blaming the flaws of one book for my not drawing things. Had I been as determined about that as I had been about other things, one poorly explained text would not have mattered. It's just an example that getting into the fiddly details of how to do something, without explaining the why, can cause confusion and with it a loss of interest.

When I was attending a technical school I wound up making a bit of money, or perhaps I should say offsetting some of the expense, by tutoring. Most was within the settings of the tech school itself, as part of its own program. There was one instance where it was outside the tech school and was for a kid in (junior) high school, who needed help with algebra. The interesting thing is that of all the students I encountered, and there were a fair number, none of them didn't know what they came to me (or someone) for. They knew the subject, they just didn't believe that they knew it.

In many cases it was a matter of translation. One person, who did not speak English as his first language, had trouble with vague instructions, but that was all. Once he knew what was really being asked of him, he had no trouble at all. Others had similar problems. They knew, it seemed to me, what had to be done but didn't realize that they could do it.

A friend of mine even showed up. He had the simple parts of an electronics course down just fine. He could work out series resistances and parallel resistances easily enough, and work out simple currents and voltages without much trouble. Yet when he was presented with something that was a set of combinations he'd panic. The thing as a whole looked complicated. He couldn't see the trees for the forest, really. When it finally dawned that a complex thing is just a bunch of simple things stuck together, it got easier for him.

The kid with the algebra concern wasn't dumb. He wasn't panicking. He was just.. bewildered, I guess. I think I spent more time asking questions than answering them. That was the way for most, really. Actually, nobody I encountered was dumb. At the very worst, they were maybe a bit more ignorant than might have hoped for, but ignorance is a curable condition. More likely they were just uncertain. There was a point, now that I look back, where things crossed a threshold. It went from "This is how it's done." or "This is how he does it." to "This is how I do it."

I now realize that I never taught much of any electronics, or mathematics, or chemistry, or any school subject. I taught confidence, if only a little. John Taylor Gatto has pointed out that most people can do pretty much anything, given the opportunity and the time to do it on their own schedule. But they also have to believe that they can, and that's the hard part. And I've pondered things I've not done, at times, and wondered why not. And it's the same wretched problem. I think I don't know some bit and so don't do something when what I need to do is have a whack at it and find out which bits, if any, I really don't know. Then go take care of that and have another whack at it.

If I'm like those I encountered before, and I expect this to be the case, then the only thing really keeping me from doing anything is me. Sure, I've heard this line before, but hearing something and actually believing something are very different things. Now if I can just convince myself of that... and remember whatever it was that I wasn't doing.