N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (NoName @ June 09 2015,07:34) | | Quote (GaryGaulin @ June 08 2015,20:09) | ...
I had to skip as much school as I could get away with or go nuts in one of the hell-holes I got stuck in while growing up. |
| Quote (GaryGaulin @ June 08 2015,22:27) | …I had an excellent science education while growing up.
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| Quote (GaryGaulin @ June 08 2015,22:27) | ..
The problem is that very little of it was learned in a public school classroom. I had to find educational resources that the public schools don't offer, including college level material that only someone like me would want to study. |
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It's bad practice to diagnose from a distance, and I'm certainly no expert in the following, but Gary's explanation of his educational background suggests the following to me.
Gary is an autodidact (someone who learned by teaching himself), which may well explain all of his achievements and his problems. Being an autodidact is fine, and can be something to be very proud of - Bill Gates and Leonardo da Vinci are excellent examples of accomplished autodidacts.
This has worked great for Gary in electronics and programming, in part because these are fields where you get constant, instant ground-truthing of your ideas: if your understanding is not correct, then what you are doing won't work, so you evolve a correct understanding very quickly.
However, it has worked very badly for Gary in writing and in science, because those are much hazier subject areas that do not provide good and continuous feedback. Worse, he has the unhappy combination of defects that he is not a very good autodidact while also being exceptionally strongly convinced of whatever he has managed to teach himself. The biggest problem with autodidacts is gaps in their knowledge, especially when they do not recognize that they have gaps, and another large problem is the inability to catch and correct errors (because, after all, they worked so hard to make sense of the material in the first place, so they've internalized their understanding as "truth"), and those bedevil Gary.
To any external audience, Gary's written English is execrable, but I'm guessing that Gary cannot see the problems, because he did not learn the rules of English but instead taught himself the way that he thinks that English ought to work, so in his lights his English is fine, because it follows what he thinks the rules ought to be.
In science, Gary has massive gaps in what he knows and vast discrepancies between his understanding of science works and reality. This leads to an "Emperor's New Clothes" situation (but without the flattery) where Gary thinks he has clad himself in the glorious robes of science, while the rest of us see only a naked fool mouthing scienceyness.
Gary's only gauge of correctness has been whether or not it makes sense to him. This blinds him to the need for evidence, laying out chains of logic, supporting assertions, and all the other steps that are so important to the rest of humanity, and it leaves him completely clueless about why, when he announces his understanding, we don't all prostrate ourselves in amazement and gratitude, saying, "wow, we never thought of it that way, but now that you say it, it's obvious".
It's possible that learning by flashing to an understanding may have left Gary impatient with regular classroom instruction. Presumably, as school years went by, discrepancies increased between teachers' explanations of reality and Gary's incorrect internal models of the same. That could indeed have made even a good class seem like a pointless hell-hole, sending Gary even further off into his own universe.
Some quotes regarding difficulties for people in self-teaching situations, from Kirschner & van Merriënboer (2012) at http://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/images/4/4d/Kirschner-Merrienboer-2013.pdf
| Quote | | they also do not have the knowledge to adequately determine the relevance or truth of what they have found |
| Quote | | have problems finding the information that they are seeking but also often trust the first thing they see, making them prone to “the pitfalls of ignorance, falsehoods, cons and scams” |
| Quote | | lack regulatory skills and have difficulties defining the information problem; identifying what they do not know. |
| Quote | | it is what one already knows that determines what one sees and understands and not the other way around. Thus, prior knowledge largely determines how we search, find, select, and process (i.e., evaluate) information |
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