Learning beyond the classroom

Nobody ever taught me how to French braid. When I was a girl, my grandmother tied three thick strands of colorful yarn to a drawer handle and showed me how just, plain braiding worked, and I practiced on those until I had the feel of it. Braiding hair, though the same motion, takes a bit more coordination because the strands don't stay together by themselves. I figured out French braiding on my own many years later. I was laying on my bed, playing with my hair, and reinvented the technique for myself based on how I knew braiding worked and how I knew French braiding looked and felt. I've never French-braided anybody's hair but my own.

There are other things I've figured out on my own. I've had some formal training in technical drawing, but a lot of my drawing, both technical and especially artistic, I learned by fiddling with it, making mistakes, noticing what works and what doesn't, and just practicing.

With languages, there is a great gulf between pushing grammar exercises around and actually carrying on a conversation or reading real material. We do not learn our mother tongues by having somebody explain what a noun is*, and ultimately, we do not do well in additional languages without being exposed to them and then muddling along for a while. That's not to say that formally learning the grammar isn't valuable, but rather that it's not too effective by itself.

In many ways, I think that knowledge I acquire this way, and especially procedural knowledge, sticks a lot better than the sort that someone just tells me. When I used to have to memorize music for marching bands, I'd play it plenty of times, get familiar with it, then turn away from the music stand and feel it out all over again. Finding it for myself made it stick like repetition never could.

I've learned a great deal from teachers in classrooms, teaching in the traditional manner, or slight variations of it, but I have to wonder whether students, and especially students who are heavily kinesthetic learners, would be better served by a learning environment more geared toward guided experimentation and discovery. I think such an approach would more closely resemble the real world, as well. It is a process worth being comfortable with: experimentation, debugging, invention.

*A notable exception here is the written component of language. While I imagine that determination and practice could improve a person's ability to read given some basic knowledge, the beginnings seem by and large to require some sort of training. I'd be interested to know to what extent reading could be self-taught. If you know of any discussions or studies on the subject, please drop me a note.