due to the circumstances, fell into a hole of reading through the archives of a blog that got deleted ~8 years ago
Reminds me of research on how ‘gaze aversion’ (e.g. avoiding eye contact) helps people think by removing the cognitive and emotional load of face processing, etc., so teachers who get caught up in forcing students to make eye contact are missing the point. Likewise abstract doodling while listening helps improve recall. Speech is so bad for conveying information, people need all the help they can get when forced into speech-based learning scenarios, really.
the writer has a bone to pick with lectures & orally-delivered information: they don't like 'em. i don't disagree from personal experience but i don't know enough to agree in the general case. maybe other people do learn well from lectures.
the gaze aversion link led to me to this paper on gaze aversion in adults with and without autism, williams syndrome by the same researcher.
[...] in phase 2 participants were required to maintain eye contact with the experimenter at all times. Looking at faces decreased task accuracy for individuals who were developing typically. Critically, the same pattern was seen in WS and ASD, whereby task performance decreased when participants were required to hold face gaze. The results show that looking at faces interferes with task performance in all groups.
to listen to some people talk about it, you'd think that only autistic people suffer do worse from being made to maintain eye contact. ... actually, given the rest of the wording in the paper, you might be able to say that NT people don't suffer from it, they just suck more when made to maintain eye contact, whereas the autists suffer. but i think more research is required.
this is only one paper and i haven't bothered to look into replicability or reliability or literally anything else about it. perhaps the author has been kicked out of the profession for making shit up. perhaps they are a pioneer. idk. i bring it up only as 'some authoritative-looking people have this position, so it's probably not completely without basis'.
perhaps one issue with lectures is that the audience can't fidget without causing a problem. (i can't sit still to watch movies but can watch them for hours with a treadmill)
less thought out position: i think people as a whole are bad at teaching.
i tried to look up why the fuck every curry i cook at home sucks, and instead i got a bunch of people talking about how it's impossible to learn to cook it if you haven't grown up there copying your parents' (=your mother's) cooking. that which can be destroyed by women's liberation should be.
went to a certain woodblock studio once. as i recall, the owner talked admiring about how the traditional way to learn to do the prints was to 'steal' the techniques from the person working next to you; very little direct instruction, but pick it up from noticing. it takes years and years to get good.
this works okay -- i mean, i suspect a large part of it was hazing, so i hesitate to say it worked well -- if you don't have better options, but what happens when there's no one able to take years and years to get good?
transmitting information is hard! it's really, really hard! i can't blame the people writing it down (or lecturing, or otherwise) for stopping at 'good enough'.
Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—come up in conversation, only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? I’ll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. I’ll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses. Sometimes it’s a memory issue: I simply can’t recall the relevant details. But just as often, as I grasp about, I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea in question, though I’d certainly thought I understood when I read the book. Indeed, I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment.
though given how many (nonfiction) books suck (=get the facts wrong, make logical jumps that are unjustified, etc), perhaps it's for the best we don't remember much
It’s easy to attend a lecture and feel that you understand, only to discover over that night’s problem set that you understood very little. Memory feels partly to blame: you might sense that you knew certain details at one time, but you’ve forgotten. Yet we can’t pin this all on memory. When you pull on certain strings from the lecture, you might discover that you had never really understood, though you’d certainly thought you understood during the lecture.
partner had a beloved professor in university who had a particular reality-warping field; it was so easy to come away from the lectures on a very hard topic believing one had understood everything! everything!
