Tag: Studying

The Arts of Learning & Teaching

I’ve been in the apprenticeship phase of teaching for the last year, so I’ve largely been gaining experience in how information is conveyed and how to give feedback to students.  While I have given some consideration to course design and what kinds of courses I’d be interested in teaching, my primary focus has been on ensuring the students receive good content and (more importantly) good feedback on performance. Good performance management involves timely and specific feedback to either reinforce good behavioural outcomes, or quickly identifying and redirecting bad performance outcomes. It’s a challenge to ensure that feedback is both timely and useful, but it’s an important step of the process. 

I’m currently working my way through the Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, and I’ve started thinking about the process of learning.  While learning and teaching are separate domains, they are interconnected since they share similar goals.  However, being able to translate learning (whether being taught by a teacher or through self-teaching) into teaching to others is something that I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge about.

The first time I taught in-class in the college setting, I quickly became aware that my experiences with formal education (the university style lecture) was not a good mode of delivery to copy. While I am comfortable in the lecture setting, I saw that my students did not excel in that environment. I wish I could say that I had fixed my delivery before the end of the semester, but the reality is that I didn’t fully appreciate the situation until after the course was over and I reflected on the term. An environment where I stood at the front and spoke at length for two-hours was not one which the students could effectively absorb the material.

The problem I found is that how I think and absorb content is different from my students. Rather than teaching them to my style, I need to be more mindful of their talents and experiences. Waitzkin discusses this in his book, where he contrasts two kinds of teachers he’s had. One is the kind that teaches his own strengths and relies on rote memorization of strategies and techniques. In chess, this teacher has you studying opening moves to take early advantage of the board.  The other kind of teacher allows the student to play to their inner style, and teaches by building up concepts atomistically. In chess, this kind of teacher strip the board of all the pieces and focuses on the relationships between pieces at the end of the game. By showing how individual pieces play off each other, the student becomes comfortable across the game and learns not only how pieces fit together, but how to set yourself up for control at the end of the game.

I think my teaching style should embrace this second kind of teacher. Instead of dictating knowledge, I should focus on breaking the knowledge down and building up understanding in ways that make sense to the student. I can’t assume my students will have the prerequisite knowledge to compile the facts together on their own. It’s also the case that if I can’t break ideas down simply, the students might not get it, nor may I truly know what I’m talking about.  Afterall, Einstein and Feynman believed that if you couldn’t explain something simply, you probably don’t understand it very well yourself.

Stay awesome, 

Ryan

Morning Productivity

I had an interesting morning last Tuesday.  As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been getting up early with my fiancee.  She typically leaves for work around 7am, and I don’t need to leave for work until around 9am, which leaves me with almost 2-hours to fill with how I wish.

I could go back to sleep and work on hitting my 7-hours of sleep per day goal (as of writing, I’m still failing on this goal, but only narrowly).

Or, I could try to use this quiet time to do some things distraction-free.

*If my fiancee is reading this, I mean distraction from technology and daily pressures.  Love you!*

I’ve been steadily adopting the latter option, and last Tuesday I had an amazingly productive morning.

First, I read for around 30 minutes.  I’ve been working my way through Tim Ferriss’s new book “Tools of Titans” which is hefty 700 pages.

Then, I opened up the Coursera app on my phone and did a few lecture videos on an introductory calculus course I’m working on, including practice problems on functions.  That was around 15-20 minutes.

Then I went upstairs to row for 10 minutes.  I started rowing two weeks ago in the mornings and I’ve already noticed an improvement – I’m less winded after the workout and my hips are not nearly so tight afterwards.  I’ll probably write a post about rowing soon, but for now it’s a small habit I’m trying to instill during the work week.

After rowing, I recorded two vlogs.  I recorded a short vlog for Art Press, my podcasting partner’s side-channel that features vlogs from artists who also exercise.  Then, I recorded my daily vlog that I upload privately to my channel as my version of a diary.  The two vlogs took me 5-7 minutes to record.

Then, I finally showered and got ready for work.

Reflection

I know that starting your day on the right foot is a key to success.  It sets you up with a positive mindset that you are accomplishing your goals and using you time well.  I certainly don’t want to do things for the sake of being busy.

I suppose I’m being a little arrogant by sharing this information within my social media feeds – I’ve been tweeting my progress on rowing, and sharing my small productivity wins as they happen.  Am I just looking for approval from others?  Does sharing this really keep me motivated and accountable?  Would I enjoy the process less if I didn’t share (boast) about it?  Am I looking to inspire others?  Lead by example?  Make them jealous?  I don’t have good answers for this.

I also don’t know whether I can keep this up regularly.  This system (I’m calling it a system for the sake of the argument) is fragilely held afloat because of my fiancee’s schedule.  If that were to change, I’m fairly confident I wouldn’t be able to wake up at 6am on my own – I have about of decade of anecdotal evidence to support this.  Also, will I be able to keep this pace?  Exercise, reading, studies, and vlogging takes up a lot of time; will I be able to guarantee that I’ll have enough time and mental focus everyday to continue this process.  Again, I don’t have an answer to this.

Time will tell.  After all, as of writing, I only have one data point to draw an inference from.  It’s important to not get too far ahead of myself and focus on hitting my targets tomorrow.

 

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

My 2016 Reading List

2016 was a fairly productive year for me compared to 2015.  At the end of every year, I reflect on my life and sketch out a rough vision of how I want to tackle the new year.  Last year, I noted that I had read relatively few books (and completed even fewer).  Don’t get me wrong, I was reading a lot, but it was all online and typically blogs and articles.  My shallow reading was going strong, but my slow, in-depth reading with books was waning.

I felt a sense of shame at this realization – I had completed undergraduate and graduate studies in the Humanities, but my commitment to arts and letters was dismal at best.  I decided to use 2016 as a year to focus and develop myself.  Using a combination of physical and audio books I have, as of this post, read 41 books, which amounts to a hair under 13,000 pages of content.

See below for the complete list.  If I finish anything else before the end of 2016, I’ll ensure to issue an update.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Note – eagle-eyed readers will count 42 books on my list.  There is a book on my list that for personal reasons I’m not publicly disclosing.

Title Author Pages
Deep Work Cal Newport 304
The Way of the Superior Man David Deida 207
Intentional Living John C. Maxwell 288
The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg 416
The 4-Hour Work Week Timothy Ferriss 416
The Imperfect Board Member Jim Brown 224
Mate Tucker Max 384
The Art of Asking Amanda Palmer 352
The War of Art Steven Pressfield 190
The Way of Men Jack Donovan 192
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 272
Living in More Than One World Bruce Rosenstein 244
Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl 168
Start With Why Simon Sinek 256
Antifragile Nassim Taleb 544
Zero to One Peter Thiel 224
Level Up Your Life Steve Kamb 288
Quiet Susan Cain 368
The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal 288
The $100 Startup Chris Guillebeau 304
The 4-Hour Body Timothy Ferriss 592
Leaders Eat Last Simon Sinek 256
A Thousand Naked Strangers Kevin Hazzard 288
Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here Ryan Estrada 132
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey 432
Essentials of Human Anatomy & Physiology Elaine Marieb 656
Born To Run Christopher McDougall 304
No Fears, No Excuses Larry Smith 272
Doctored Sandeep Jauhar 288
Wisdom Stephen Hall 352
The 48 Laws of Power Robert Greene 496
Awaken the Giant Within Tony Robbins 544
Tribes Seth Godin 160
Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg 384
Purple Cow Seth Godin 244
Free Prize Inside Seth Godin 256
Ego Is The Enemy Ryan Holiday 256
I Will Teach You To Be Rich Ramit Sethi 266
Thinking Fast And Slow Daniel Kahnaman 512
Born For This Chris Guillebeau 320
Total Pages Read
13,487 (revised)

Addendum

After this post went up, I added two more books to my list to round out 2016:

Title Author Pages
God is not Great Christopher Hitchens 320
Left of Bang Patrick Van Horne and
Jason Riley		 228

Thoughts on Email and Ethical Research

I sit on the Board for the Community Research Ethics Office.  Our organization helps community organizations have access to support and research ethics reviews traditionally only offered to members of an academic institution.  We field a number of applications each month that explain a research project to us, and we evaluate the degree of ethical considerations made by the organization/researchers and sign-off on projects that align with the requirements set out in Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement on Conducting Research on Human Participants.

At each of our monthly meetings, the Board dives into lively discussion on topics not often considered in the course of normal research.  During our last meeting, we had a discussion concerning the use of email during the data processing phase of a project.  In a review we conducted, there was mention of researchers using email to share data across geographic distances (the study was occurring in multiple cities).

When we consider email, especially at a corporate level, our intuition is that it’s reasonably safe.  There are the occasional reports of data breaches, but if you use adequate security measures, your content is relatively safe.

But there is a crucial consideration that we need to make when we conduct research.  In research, the most important element is the rights of the participants.  If a researcher wants safeguard the participant’s interests while the participant freely participates in a research project, then a number of additional measures must play into your research system.

The participant, by agreeing to participate in a study, trusts that the researcher will not only always make research decisions that respect the participant’s wishes, but also the researcher must work to actively protect the participant’s right to safety, security and privacy to the fullest extent possible.

This is where emailing data to researchers gets complicated.

The intuitive thought is that as long as your computer terminal is secure, the data is safe – if you can prevent anyone (except maybe a super spy) from breaching your data, you have done your due diligence.

Community-based research has become cut-throat in the last few years…

So, here is your security weak-points and your measures to guard against a breach:

  • Physically accessing terminal location – lock the building/room and restrict access
  • Accessing computer terminal – password protect computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal – ensure login credentials are enabled and encrypt the data before sending

Yes, there’s a problem with the third bullet: email is more complicated that that.

When you send an email, you are not taking a document/letter, folding up a copy and sending the only copy via the web to the recipient.  If that were the case, then email would be fairly secure.  But, what happens with email instead is you end up copying the information to various sources as it gets uploaded, transmitted, copied, and downloaded over the web.  There is a copy created in your computer’s cached memory, there’s a copy that get uploaded and saved to your email server, the data is transmitted to your recipient’s server, and that information is downloaded as a copy to your recipients device.

That’s right, device, not necessarily a computer. You see, a further layer of complexity is when we route mail to our mobile devices, which is yet another copy of the information.  A computer is cumbersome to physically lose, but cell phones are lost/misplaced all the time.  Same with external hard drives and flash drives.  And don’t forget your mobile device; if you send the data on the same email platform that is accessible on an app on your phone, that information can be retrieved from your sent messages folder.

All of these points are potential security breaches.  So, let’s update the list above as to the number of ways data can be compromised:

  • Physically accessing your terminal location
  • Accessing computer terminal
  • Accessing data/email on terminal
  • Your mobile device
  • Email server(s)
  • Recipients physical terminal location
  • Recipients computer terminal
  • Recipients data/email on terminal
  • Recipients mobile device

There are probably other ways the data could be breached that I’m not considering in this example, but I think I’ve made my point that ethical and security issues are ridiculously complex when considering research projects.  Regardless of whether you think your data, if exposed, will actually harm your participants in any meaningful way, that is missing the point entirely.  Your participant’s data was important enough for your to collect in the first place, and therefore you have an obligation to protect the rights and well-being of your participant to the fullest extent that you can.

The point of our ethics reviews is not to halt research.  Our purpose is to help the researchers think of all of the ways we can conduct good research and ensure that our good practices ensure we can continue to conduct research in the future.  We must learn from past mistakes and the harm that has come to people who participated in research (inadvertently AND in good faith).  Respecting our duty to care is the cornerstone of what it means to do good research.

Blog – Sound Pedagogy

Happy Labour Day Monday!  I hope you are all enjoying your long weekend.  My weekend has been jam-packed with course prep and dealing with a sudden surge of patrons at the bar as students move back into town to start the new school year.

I’ve learned to embrace the adage that “if you want to learn something, teach it.”  By this, I mean that there is no better way to learn and master a concept as when you must transmit that information to someone else in a way that makes sense to them.  Not only do you need to know the material inside and out, but you must also learn to fill in gaps as they arise.

At present, I’m trying to finish up my instructional plan for my course.  The first lesson is this coming Friday, and I’m both nervous and excited.  I’m nervous because I fear that I’ll be an inadequate teacher for this crop of mostly first-year students; that their introduction to philosophy will be botched by my inexperience and poor planning.  But I’m also excited, because I have some confidence in my skills, and it’s a new and exciting challenge that I want to face.

student

With less than a week to go, I have 27 students enrolled in my class.  When I look into their various programs, I get a wide range of learners, from science, recreation, business, IT, security, etc.  All of these faces are unique individuals who will need to sync with my lecture material.  My challenge is to teach philosophy to a class of college kids who probably are taking my course because it sounds interesting and they need breadth courses to graduate.  In other words, I need to pluck philosophy from the clouds and bring it down to the “real world” in a way that makes sense to them.  I can’t just stand at the front of the room and pontificate in their general direction.  I’ll need to be smarter than that if I have any hope of them passing the learning objectives.

Instead, I’ll need to engage them dialectically.  I’ll need to choose non-academic examples to connect their experience with.  I’ll need to prove to them that these questions and problems are not only relevant to them, but incredibly important to their lives; they need to take the material seriously.  In an age of constant distraction and competing media on their attention, I’ll need to come to class prepared every Friday afternoon to fight and earn their attention.

Talk about a tall order!

Oh, and because a lot of this material is stuff I wasn’t exposed to in school, I also have to teach myself the course material!

Oh well.  Here goes.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Progress Update

Given that it’s the summer and I’m on vacation from work, I thought I’d take it easy this week and post light with an update on my progress so far.

I successfully completed the biology preparatory course that gives me the pre-requisite credit to apply to most paramedic programs in the province.  I completed the course with a 93%, which I am more than happy with.  As a reward, I will be ordering myself this Littmann stethoscope.

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B001NMT6N6/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2EKDSURXLF25Q&coliid=I1JSPVHPYV8OI7&psc=1

My fitness progress has not been as successful.  Towards the end of my work contract (May-June), I had a lot on my plate, which I responded to by lowering fitness as a priority.  As a result, my weight-loss has stalled a bit, as has my strength in the gym.  I will be heading to Scotland this week for two weeks, which will keep me out of the gym for a little bit longer, but I’m hoping to make up for that with all the walking we will be doing as we visit.  My goal was to drop to 275lbs by the time I left for my trip, so we’ll say that goal has been busted (I’m currently sitting around 295-297lbs).

Otherwise, there is no other news to report on.  When I return, I’ll start trying to narrow down schools that I would like to apply to and ensure all of my supplementary application materials are in order.

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

Careers: An Answer to the Experience Problem

This blog is primarily about my path to becoming a paramedic.  I take as an assumption that I will at some point enter school, work to receive my credentials, and eventually find work as a medic.  That is the single focus of my career planning at present.

However, I would be negligent if I did not keep an open mind towards other paths and alternate routes.  There are a number of ways a plan can go wrong, and if I place all of my eggs into one basket, rest all of my progress on a few key milestones, there is a good chance I will be frustrated by setbacks, barriers and challenges.  Therefore, on the advice of the paramedic program’s coordinator, I am keeping an eye out to other opportunities that I can invest time and energy into that will pay off down the line.

This passed week, I became one of the latest faculty at my College and will be teaching a philosophy course in the Fall.  Depending on how you stand, that might be the furthest thing from my plan as you can get.  Instead of becoming the student, I just took a part time job as a teacher.  I am excited and incredibly nervous about delivering a course to people barely out of my peer group range, but I think this is a positive experience and will pay off in the future.

This all serves as a preamble to a realization I had this morning on the question of experience in young people.  Job seekers everywhere I plagued with a common problem: how am I expected to have experience for jobs that all seem to require experience to get in?  This problem is the bane of the young person’s job hunt because it is often the biggest weakness in their candidacy when they apply for work.  It is the first thing that selects them out of the pool, and no matter how charming they are in person, a lack of experience is the blemish on an otherwise beautiful package.

It’s understandable why experience is so important to employers.  The are spending huge amounts of money to try and hire people, so without knowing anything about a candidate’s work habits and results, the employer needs some signal that they are not wasting their money to hire someone that will be released after a few months.

How does a young person resolve this issue?  The short answer is you need to learn how to tell a story about yourself.  You need to learn how to stitch together your work history into a story that demonstrates you are a good bet for an employer to take.  This obviously assumes you have experience to draw upon.  If you don’t have that, you need to get some.  I’m sorry, but it’s the only way to progress forward.

Would you walk into a store and buy the first expensive item you’re looking for based solely on how it looked?  Imagine shopping for a high-end purchase like a car or a computer, and you bought it purely on looks.  Generally speaking, you probably will not.  You’ll take the time to study the specifications, the deals, consumer reports, tests, etc.  Employers do the same thing; they look for evidence that you aren’t a lemon.

I’ve now been hired for two jobs at the College having none of the classical markers of experience that were advertised for: I did not have any administrative assistant experience for my current job, and I have almost no formal teaching experience.  How did I pull this off?

I understood what the job required and demonstrated how I already had what the employers was looking for.  In the teaching case, it went like this:

Interviewer: I see you have never taught before at a college.  Do you have any experience?

Me: I know I don’t have the teaching experience you might be looking for, as you saw on my academic resume.  If you are asking if I have experience teaching a 7-1-7 teaching block (7 weeks of lectures, 1 reading week, 7 weeks of lectures, or a 14-week course), then no, I have never done that.  However, I have done all of the individual parts; I have:

  • designed workshop plans and delivered the content;
  • assessed students based on those workshops;
  • written speeches and delivered public talks;
  • designed and delivered a guest lecture in grad school; and
  • acted as a teaching assistant and grader for 5-7 university courses.

I was able to demonstrate that I had experience, even if I’ve never taught a college class before.  This does not guarantee that I will be a good teacher, but it assures the interviewer that I am not unaware of the level of work and care that is needed to do the job.

This is one solution to the problem of job experience.  You need two things to sidestep the problem.  First, you need to have some sort of past experience that you can draw upon from a related field.  You need to demonstrate that you know something, or that you can easily figure the problems out and solve them on your own.  Second, you need to learn how to tell your story.  Lacking experience and having gaps in your employment record do not have to signal the death knell on your advancement if you know how to reframe the problem and still give an answer that shows an appreciation for the question being asked of you: If I were to hire you, how could you make my problems go away?  Really, that’s what an employer is looking for.  Someone they can pay to solve a problem or puzzle for them.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog: Update on Diagramming – Active Learning

Back in my post about diagramming as a study strategy, I made reference to recent studies showing the effectiveness of long-hand writing and its correlation with retention and recall.  One of the  things I love about working at a post-secondary institute is I a.) mix it up with very smart people who teach for a living; and b.) have access to a well-funded library.

I love university and college libraries!  I don’t always make adequate use of their vast resources, but when I need them, they have my back.  For instance, my institute recently negotiated access for its employees to use Lynda.com.  As a nerd who loves to learn, this made me very happy.

Part of my job involves program review and quality assurance, which is outside of my educational wheel house.  Recently, I’ve been exposed to the concept of Active Learning Strategies as a method of engaging students in the classroom.  For instance, a passive learning strategy would be for students to read a textbook and learn the definitions of key words and concepts.  An active learning strategy would have the students read the text, then take those same key words/concepts and draw them in a relationship tree to show how the various parts fit together.

If you have access, I suggest you check out “Active learning strategies: three activities to increase student involvement in learning” by Catherine Wilcoxson Ueckert and Julie Gess-Newsome in The Science Teacher journal (75.9, Dec. 2008; p47.).  There, the authors discuss, as the title says, three alternative approaches to student engagement in the science classroom.  While these approaches assume a classroom, instead of a solo learning project like what I’m encountering, I think you can still extrapolate on the learnings and apply it outside of the traditional classroom.

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

Blog: Hubris and Good Grades

I have a confession: I’m great at BSing.  The polite way of describing this is that I’m very clever.  An awesome way to describe this is I’m resourceful.  But at the end of the day, I’m good at making stuff up on the fly.  I accomplish this because I’m able to absorb a lot of facts and data in a short amount of time.  The result of this is that my output and achievements are not always reflective of the amount of effort that appears to go into a result.

This habit started in high school.  Until this point, I worked hard on my home work.  My parents were very good at instilling (and monitoring) the discipline in me to do well.  In 10th grade, I was given the option to move to an enriched mathematics course because I had performed well the year before.  However, it was the beginning of the end in terms of my mathematical achievement for one very simple reason: there were no homework checks.

You’d think this shouldn’t be a problem, but it was my Achilles’ heel.  No homework checks meant I didn’t need to do my homework every night.  My young mind had missed the connection between progressive practice and performance during assessments.  My grades slipped.  I still graduated high school with good marks; marks that gained me entry into a good Canadian university.  But my work was less perspiration and more inspiration.

I bring this all up because I had an insight last night while studying for my respiratory system test.  Until now, I’ve been progressing through the course at around two chapters* every week.  That performance, comes with a footnote:

  • I registered for the 12-week course for a January start, but I found a loophole that my time wouldn’t start until I wrote the first test. I spent 3-4 months reading the textbook at the public library and was able to get ahead by 4 or so chapters before I “started the course.”

What appeared to be a reasonably diligent pace came because I was ahead of the game.  But, because I didn’t keep pace with the rate at which I was writing tests, I eventually caught up and now I’m trying to read two  chapters per week and write those tests the following week.  In principle, this shouldn’t be an issue.  But it’s proving to be a challenge.

In a real sense, I’m becoming a victim of my success.  Thus far, I’ve done well writing tests, and so when it comes time to prioritize study time, I’m finding myself placing its priority lower than other, seemingly more pressing concerns.  My rationale is “I should be studying, but I’ve done well so far and this other thing I’m stressed about requires my attention to get on track.”  And so, the other thing (relationship time, my two jobs, my volunteer activities, and yes, relaxation) will take priority over studying.  It’s the old Important/Unimportant/Urgent/Non-Urgent matrix.  I’m letting the things  that are Urgent take priority over the things that are, arguably, more important.  This matrix could be the topic of a future article.

What does this look like?

  • Friday – “I work tonight at my other job, so let’s relax because it’s the weekend.”
  • Saturday – “I should study, but today I’ll run errands, spend time on my relationship, indulge in R&R, etc.”
  • Sunday – “I should study, but I’m squeezing more long-distance relationship time in, spending time with friends that I don’t see during the week, dreading the work week, etc.”
  • Monday – “I should start studying/reading chapters for Monday’s test, but I also have commitment x/y/z.”
  • Tuesday – “I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, so how can I squeeze more efficiency into studying?”
  • Wednesday – “How many times can I review my notes during the work day before I write my test, grab a bite to eat, then go to my night job?”
  • Thursday – never used efficiently…
  • Rinse and repeat.

Because I haven’t had to rely on a structured 7-day schedule for studying but am now 70% through the course, that lack of planning has finally caught up to me and is putting me in a crunch.  I’ll have to grind out the last three or so weeks of the course, but this unsustainable practice is a lesson in why it’s important to work hard while also working smart.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

PS – after drafting this post, I read an excellent, short meditation on the difference between IQ and DOT (discipline, organization, and thoughtfulness).  I’m happy that I’m not the only person who wrestles with this.