by Flemming Funch
Having just spent a couple of weeks in Denmark, I notice how many things one only picks up by being immersed in a place, by being there. I'm usually kind of obsessive about figuring out certain things in advance when I travel somewhere. Like, I don't really go anywhere without being sure I have mobile phone service and a way of connecting up my laptop. In part because I want my customers to keep paying me as if I'm working, even though I'm on vacation. And I usually end up fairly well prepared on that kind of things, but only after time-consuming research. Things that might be quite simple when I'm there can be rather hard to figure out remotely, as one doesn't necessarily know where to start.
E.g. the phone company monopoly that existed when I was last in Denmark no longer exists, and there is no longer even a company with the name it used to have. And there was no cell phone service at the time, so I'd know nothing about that. It is very hard to know what is the common way of doing things when I'm not there. Each time I find out one piece of information, there are a few other hurdles. Like, I finally locate what appears to be the cheapest pre-paid cellphone service in Denmark, but they only accept payment through a system I don't know what is, and don't have.
All banks I had known had ceased to exist. I.e. they had changed their names or been bought up by other banks. And they had changed most everything about how business is done, so there are all sorts of convenient electronic ways of doing things, which however aren't convenient if I don't have the proper accounts, and I don't know what it all is anyway.
Lots of these things are easily solved by looking around and asking around and going into a store, once one knows roughly what direction to go. But if you don't know first what doors to knock on, and what words to use for things, it might all remain mysterious.
My point is that a lot of learning of "how to do things" requires that one is immersed in the environment in question for a little while. Unless one is lucky to find a source that will explain things completely from scratch, "for dummies" so to speak. And in some areas, that is very rare.
I have great respect for teaching materials and information sources that actually explain things from the beginning, giving the whole picture. Because most people can't do that, and most teachers and experts don't do so. It takes a certain talent to be able to put oneself in the shoes of an innocent and ignorant student. In my eyes, that takes a true expert.
When I moved away from home, a little book named "Cookbook for Kids" was invaluable for me. It was apparently the only cookbook around that actually explained really basic stuff, and didn't take for granted that you already knew how to do it. I mean, the steps to boil an egg are not necessarily obvious to a young bachelor.
Travel guides tend to do it well too - explaining how some place works, so that people who've never been there and who have no clue, will have some idea what to do there.
The current fad of "*** for Dummies" type of books are also often helpful in that way, I suppose. Although many just resort to being cute and funny, rather than actually explaining things completely from the basics.
Anyway, I put great, great value in simple and complete how-to explanations, and I wish for the world to be full of them. Simple educational material that will answer the question of "Eh, what IS this?", that will give me enough of a picture of where I'm at so I can start asking better questions.
And I notice painfully where such things are absent, or where I'm unable to find them, even when they do exist.
Many companies or public agencies are completely impenetrable unless you say the exact right key words. I.e. the organization consists only of people doing their exactly named little piece of the puzzle, and if in advance you know the exact proper name of something you need, you might end up talking with them, but if you don't, you might never get through.
Many people seem entirely unable or unwilling to explain what they're doing or what is going on in anything other than a specialized jargon, which makes no sense to those who don't already know it.
The educational solution in relation to such people and environments seem to typically be immersion. I.e. if you somehow hang around or intern with these people for a couple of years, you'll probably figure out what they know, and you'll be able to do the same things and speak the same language.
A problem in teaching anything at all is often that there's a lot more to it than anybody has figured out how to catalog. Teaching by explaning things is an abstract affair. Somebody needs to have synthesized the essential abstractions out of the much larger collection of available information, and needs to be able to present that clearly to somebody else.
In an immersion situation, the student is taking in everything, and does his own processing. Thus he isn't victim of somebody else's failed ability to abstract the importantances, and he might quite easily notice some obvious things that nobody would otherwise have thought of telling him. And thus that method will work even if nobody has gotten around to writing a curriculum.
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