Find Mentors
When first understanding how you learn, and the general experience of how human beings learn, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you want to learn something, but you don’t know how to go about learning it. You take your first stab at it and find that you are learning some things but not learning constructively. You blunder around accumulating random knowledge and at some point, you might experience some success and get lucky. But more times than not you’ll blunder around and this effort might demoralize. The fault was not in your but your methods.
Mentor-ship and finding mentors is critical to learning something more specialized within your own skill set. This apprenticeship pattern perfectly describes an issue that I have frequently run into myself. It describes this path as exploring a blind alley, and this is an apt description. During my first sprint during my computer science capstone I made an effort to try and learn HTML. I looked over some example code and learned generally how to write it but fundamentally I didn’t understand how to structure it. I was blindly exploring the learning process and was failing.
I felt how I was failing and I knew I needed to reach out to something far more similar to a teacher. Some see the name mentor but what is a mentor but a highly skilled teacher. Yes of course there is more to teaching than just knowing the skill but they have the knowledge of learning the skill you are trying to and the path that helped them succeed. You need to find yourself a path that has been traveled by a human instead of blindly traveling that avenue.
I sought an actual HTML course that is commonly available in YouTube format and learned in a structured manner from a person who understood it as a whole. Now this isn’t to deter you from learning something new without a mentor as you do need the ability to learn new things without help, but something completely foreign to you requires a teacher. Mastery of a subject will require a mentor. Both require a desire to learn and to realize when you should seek other’s help.
From the blog CS@Worcester – A Boolean Not An Or by Julion DeVincentis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.