Classroom versus Real Life

 There’s a great scene in the movie Annapolis where they quote the great philosopher Mike Tyson.  “Everyone’s got a plan until they get hit.”  This is why they teach boxing.  They want to see how people will really react under pressure.  Customer service training is great in the classroom up to the point an agent takes the first call from an angry customer.  Even simulations can go only so far.  In golf, it’s not can you sink at three foot putt…it’s can you sink a three foot putt for big money.

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How Fast Is Lightspeed

Light travels from the earth to the moon in 1.2 seconds.  Light travels about 5.8 trillion miles in a year (probably not on a single tank of gas.)  So how fast does it take to forget a boring lecture?  It may be faster than light because you forgot it before you heard it.

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How Fast Is Fast

I ran across this video called the world’s faster reader.  It’s actually a little boring watching someone read fast.  However reading fast has a lot more advantages to reading slowly.

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Shrinking Classrooms

All too often classrooms are used for training because if you have them then you have to use them.  It’s also easy to just throw an expert into a classroom.  However, we know from every study ever done on retention that 80% of what we hear as lecture in a classroom is forgotten by the next day or easily with then next week.  So what I find works the best is to pull as much content out of training and put it into some other form sometimes as simple as a job aide.  Then I use classrooms exclusively for application and discussion.  Classrooms are still really good for things that require interactions.

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Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?

This is a new show on Fox.  That tests smart adults on history, social science, math and health taught in 2nd through 5th grade.  The question is not why adults can’t remember this knowledge but rather why are we teaching stuff to kids that they will forget?  Perhaps they forget it because they never get to use most of the knowledge for anything.  It also might be that 90% right is an outstanding grade but that means they never learned the other 10%.  If that’s 10% on every test for 12 years, that’s a lot of missing knoweldge.

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Odd Questions About K-12

There are a lot of things I don’t get about schools. 

1. Why is this the only time in your life that you spend all day with others exactly the same age?
2. Why is an education 12 years rather than when your done?
3. Why are teachers basically at the top of their profession the day they start? 
4. Why do we teach reading in first grade and then never touch the subject again?
5. Why if schools are about socialization that so many people hated their high school experiences?

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It’s the Real “Ting”

Check out Arupa’s new book on how to unleash the power of intuition can Ting A Surprising Way to Listen to Intuition & Do Business Better .  It’s about fast, fast, fast learning!

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Learning Theory Guide

This is the best quick sysnopsis of all the various learning theories, models and paradigms.  I’m sure there are more everyday but it’s always good to at least know what the common ones are.  Check Learning Theories.

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Adults versus College Students

I was struck by an article in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administrators.  The article talked about the differences in adult learning after college and college students.  They said that adults were more concerned about using what they learned to achieve goals and were more relevancy oriented.  I think this is more a comment on how schools are set up then on what anyone really wants.  I can’t imagine a college age student or even a 5th grader saying they would prefer learning something esoteric than something they could use.  There just used to the lack of relevancy I guess.  Also the adults have to pay for education directly which makes a big difference.

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Word and PowerPoint Still a Mystery for Most

I’m always surprise how many people in business still use only a small fraction of the features of Word and PowerPoint.  The cornerstone of these programs is to create styles that make it easy to replicate documents.  This feature as been around for almost 20 years.  I think the problem is that people are taught to use these programs to do specific work tasks instead of more generic application training.  I think this issue holds true for most technology training. 

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