Why All Teaching Is Ineffective (and Hamburgers)

why is most teaching nowadays utterly ineffectual let's find out so when I first started teaching at universities I began to notice patterns in between what kind of teaching got through to my students and what didn't and when I started making YouTube videos specifically YouTube tutorials I really a lot of those noticing I started to be vindicated by the data you get on YouTube so I want to share some of them with you now a lot of teachers have I'll just say false ideas of what gets through to people or this isn't just for teachers but communicators generally even if you're just making a speech you probably have some bad ideas of what communicates to people so first thing let's get the first thing out of the way and this is sort of an ironic thing to do with beginning one thing you need to get out of your head is the hamburger myth now I know most Americans are probably familiar with the hamburger myth maybe other people in other countries know about this as well but in America when you're taught to for example create an essay write an essay or teach something you're told that it should be like a hamburger it's the weirdest metaphor ever but you know the introduction should be like the first layer a layer of bread it should introduce the paper but it shouldn't be too meaty then you get to the really meaty parts and the meaty parts come in the middle and that's you know your three main points or something like that and then you get to your conclusion so the excitement level of the essay should go like you know up and then down just like that now that is a terrible idea for communicating for many reasons and one thing you realize especially you know when you have YouTube analytics is that people's attention span does not last to the meat you have to if you want to actually communicate with people one of the you have to put all your meat up front and not just like it a singer to catch their attention you have to put a lot of the content right at the very beginning realistically speaking and I'm not saying do you know show all your good material and then put all your bad material at the end I'm saying once you show people the kind of practical things that what you're trying to communicate shows you have their attention you can touch on things that are more anal more more sort of specific that might be less exciting that's fine but one thing I realize very quickly is that it's important to basically tell people what you're about at the beginning and they can go further on from there now one thing I've talked about on my channel as a recommendation for other people and this you know other people who want to start YouTube channels but this also works for teaching is don't do sequential ism don't do syriza's what I mean by that is a lot of times you'll find on YouTube things like you know let's say I want to learn the Python programming language so I look it up and there's gonna be someone who has a Python learning series that's like 20 videos don't do that and the reason I say that is because I mean look at the analytics to something like that first off does that actually get through to people episode one might have a hundred thousand views okay so pretty popular video episode two is gonna have goes from a hundred thousand to twenty thousand way less episode three might have five thousand episode 15 is going to have fifty views and that's just how it is now you might say okay well I have to I have to teach sequentially because sometimes knowledge taught at the beginning is relevant to things later on but I'm just saying no II that is not true in the way you expect it to be so let me give you an example from my youtube channel this is actually usually how I do my videos that you might think should be sequential what I do for example last week I did a video on you know some some shell scripting now I didn't say this is episode 25 of something I just put out a video what I did at the very beginning is I showed people the kind of things that we're gonna do in this video and there are a bunch of programs that they needed to know for example they needed to know what D menu was they needed to know what X args was they needed to know all this kind of stuff that introductory users might not know anything about but I did not introduce that topic sequentially I showed them what they can do at the very beginning I only show them the the information that is necessary for them to just forget about this is howdy menu works in this place here this is how X args works in this place if I had spent my time explaining any of those things and putting out separate videos on each of those topics no one would have ever got to the the payoff the money shot no one would have actually gotten that way so you can sort of see the similarity in between you know when I'm talking about sequential ism just don't if you want to put out tutorials or if you want to have effective lectures or anything like that they have to be self-contained now that doesn't mean that you have to explain it a single thing over again but you only need two people only need to know what they need to know in that particular episode and I think even even when you're teaching and you're seeing the same students every day the the same concept applies just remind them at the beginning how this works before they they're shown something new and again once you show them once you have the meet at the beginning they are constantly going to be okay about now I see why this is relevant so now they can go and do their own thing they can learn something else in things work out so one other point ironically that I'm doing sort of I guess later into this video is rambling rambling is actually important or really something wider than rambling I guess dialogue and I don't mean dialogue like literally talking to your students or engaging you can do that I think it's extremely corny and never works out actually I don't recommend doing that at all never mind but what I mean by the dialogue I mean the fact that you know one thing about humans when we're learning something we do not ingest outlines hierarchically out how hierarchically structured outlines we don't you don't just put knowledge in our heads informational e as if you know you're learning things piece by piece same problems of sequential ism but why this is important is you know let's say you know I'm doing a lecture and I've shown someone why something is important and I've only shown showed them enough information to make it relevant what I can do after that and sometimes what you should do is just ramble just say random stuff now why do I say that I say that because you know just as a metaphor I get or not a metaphor as a historical example one of the first ways that people started writing when they began writing is writing in dialogues writing conversations between people because this is really how people process information they don't think linearly they think in terms of okay so you said this maybe there's about potential response to that what are the consequences of this if you say everything linearly and you put everything in a pseudo rationalistic mold what ends up happening is that you know people get bored they tune out in the same way if as if you don't have the meet at the beginning they don't really care so what's better to do is ramble rambling is a good thing not the beginning of a lecture or a video but it's something good to do at the end and I say that because you know what that I mean if you're someone who genuinely knows about the topic you're talking about sometimes if you just get put in front of a bunch of people you just saying things that even don't seem perfectly relevant that can communicate what's going on in your head in a way much better than if you try to rationally word it or order it in some stupid way now that song might sound like a really weird thing and I only say this for people who actually know the subject I think you know I'm the kind of person when I teach a class usually I'll have like mental talking points of what I want to talk about and I can usually just go in there and teach it on whatever I you i remember the examples that kind of stuff so i mean if you're teaching something for whatever reason that you don't really know about that might be something that that's hard for you to do but you know once you're really familiar with the topic sometimes a student you know it can be very you know most of the professors that students remember are those professors who you know once they get their point through they have opened up a more open dialogue sometimes just with themselves where they talk about related topics they don't follow some rational line but that is the place where a lot of people will really see the ramifications of what you're talking about and notice it's not that I specifically plan my videos like this but that's often how it works out I'll do a video I'll show something you know how to how to do this particular thing on Linux or some kind of computer stuff and you know as I go further into the video in mind you I know I know for a fact that there are many people who are tuning off the video okay that just always happens in the same way that if you're in a classroom there are always people who are leaving so at the very end where you have that kind of person who's just interested in learning more sometimes the best thing that you can possibly do is just talk about something tangential talk about something that isn't as hard-hitting it might not be as exciting but it's one of those things that shows where your mindset is and how what you're talking about relates to other topics so in my videos often you know I'll talk about the main topic and then oh you know there's this one time I did this you know with this program and I got this he was a little script that does that it's nothing hard-hitting it just gives people ideas for the kind of things they needed to talk about so anyway that that's about it I think there's more to say about it but you can probably figure it out again the the mentality here is just abstain I mean that the theme of it all is abstain from trying to rationally order everything you do people get in this mindset where teaching is some totally different way of talking to people like you're not supposed to talk to them like they're humans you're supposed to talk to them as if they're like robots in which you are inputting information and you just wanna you have to hierarchically order it and it has to do all this stuff no speak to them put out I don't want to say exciting things upfront but you know the relevant things up front and gradually you know move down the excitement level get to the point where you're rambling on it and that is the place that basically optimized all the stuff you want to do so anyway that's about it so I'm gonna see you guys next hopefully that's useful I know not all you guys are teachers or have YouTube channels but hopefully that's been useful for some of you guys or even just for communicating for people that's about it and I will see you see you guys next time

Channel: Luke Smith

Views: 78,496

Rating: 4.9505959 out of 5

Keywords: gnu, linux, tutorial, introduction, unix, philosophy, minimal, minimalism, minimalst, computer, programming, program, i3, i3-gaps, vim, emacs, vi, tex, latex, markdown, git, github, groff, arch, gentoo, distro, distribution, distrobution, ubuntu, fedora, thinkpad, floss, free, open, source, foss, software, teaching, class, school, college, university, essay, bad, analytics, data, statistics, python, hamburger, lesson, lecture, education, educate, video, power, point, rambling, ramble, outlines, notes, note, taking, rational, attention

Id: ent5g6_gnik

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019