Ganesh P Paudel
“If you want to master something, teach it”– Richard Feynman
He was an American theoretical physicist from the 20th century and a Nobel laureate and a great teacher himself. He used teaching as a major stepping stone to get mastery over the knowledge he had been striving to achieve. He was a teacher at Cornell University in the USA from 1945 to 1950 before moving to California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He taught there until his death in 1988.
The depth of your learning and your articulateness decide the kind of teacher or explainer you end up becoming. Let’s try to break down his techniques so as to be able to visualize them in our mind. Pick up an idea or concept you are interested in. Then, on the basis of whatever knowledge and understanding you thus far have, explain it in your own words. If you happened to see any gaps in your knowledge and understanding, go back to the original source material. Now, work on your explanation to simplify it. Use an analogy or two if need be. Finally come up with your renewed and refined understanding of the concept, and test it. The best testing platform for your understanding of the subject matter lies in teaching, especially to an uninitiated person. Feynman was never for jargons and complexities in explanations. Indeed, you resort to complexities and jargons in your explanation to cover up your weakness. That provides a larger room to suspect that you yourself do not understand the concept.
If you have a thorough grounding on something, this in turn provides you the leverage over the so-called complex aspect of the same thing. When simplicity is the basis upon which you lay the foundation of grasping the concept for others, the full-fledged form of the concept no longer seems intimidating and elusive to us. For example, we all take calculators for granted. But there are well explained answers to each function we perform in a calculator. Why, say, one plus two gives three is well explained by basic electronics. Breaking down the whole concept into smaller pieces and with enough background knowledge about the concept behind the electronic terms like semiconductor diodes, transistors, logic gates and the binary number system, we can comprehended the digital process of arithmetic functions in a calculator. The same can be done with any concept you want to understand to your satisfaction. All you need to have is a burning desire to learn. If you become able to break down the series of concepts behind anything- be it from natural science, or economics, or stock market or anything-into digestible pieces even for a 5 years old, then this feat of yours will be testimonial to your well-developed expertise in the subject matter at hand. This should make all the self-styled experts in their fields undergo soul-searching. Here the five year old is emblematic to an uninitiated person.
Long ago, my curiosity piqued to know about the know-how of banknote printing and its infusion into the market. I as a curious lad put this question to a relative of mine who was working in Nepal Rastra Bank. Things never sank in for me until a cousin of mine, a non-descript fellow working hard to make it to the government job then, explained it to me. Now as a matured individual, in retrospect, I can tell what went wrong in the explanation of the expert in the field and what made my cousin’s explanation so accessible. The former couldn’t refrain from the jargon whereas the latter broke the concept into smaller pieces. If someone who professes to have had expertise in a field uses a lot of complexity and jargon to explain something from their field to you, they probably don’t understand it. But their bruised ego wouldn’t possibly allow them to admit it. The basis of Feynman technique entails simplicity to foster the deep level understanding of something. Complexity and jargon are the manifestations of our weakness as a teacher which should later torment our conscience. Let’s face it, it is patently obvious that we do not know it ourselves.
Edgar Dale was an American educator and researcher who was contemporary with Feynman. Dale’s findings on learning psychology was in sync with what Feynman suggested about the same although there is no documented history about them ever to have met, discussed or shared ideas despite living in the same era and country.
According to Dale, listening to lectures contributes to less than 10% of retention of concepts according to his learning pyramid which, surprisingly, our education system hinges on. 10% of retention is contributed to reading and this jumps to 20% when the learning is through audio-visual means. This audio-visual method is what most of our private boarding schools proudly capitalize on. Live demonstration encompasses the 30% of learning retention whereas the group discussion of the same imparts the retention of the concept to 50%. Now things start to get even better up to 75% when you start practicing the concept as if you formulated it. The best way to learn something is by teaching it which contributes to 90% retention of the concept.
In order to teach the next day to your complete satisfaction, you as a teacher must always need preparation today no matter how long you have been teaching the same subject matter. It is because you should always strive to find new ways of explaining the same thing. They rightly say you will not be remembered for teaching hundreds of things, but will be remembered for explaining the same thing in a hundred different ways. It sounds too ideal to be tenable in a society like ours where concept takes the back seat to memorization. But if you chose the subject of your passion, teaching is going to be a breeze which in turn opens up the whole new vista of teaching methodologies and approaches. New ideas do not come as a result of approaching the same problem with the conventional wisdom, they come as a result of traversing the unchartered territory in terms of thinking. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger rightly said, “The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see every day.”
There lies another stumbling block to learning i.e. language barrier. Many students cannot simply articulate their ideas and thoughts because they cannot use the language to their advantage-be it in Nepali or English. Therefore, our school should focus on strengthening students’ language skills right from the early schooling years. Most of the students seem to be laidback about the exams of English and Nepali subjects.
Richard Feynman, in his own words, was an ordinary man who studied hard. He would piece things together until he reached a digestible explanation of things he wanted to have mastery over. He then would adorn his lectures with those explanations. That, from the learner’s perspective, would contribute to less than 10% retention whereas from the teacher’s perspective it would contribute to more than 90% retention. Therefore, teaching allows us to learn like nothing else does.
