Graded Departmental Essay For Master Of Education In Teaching: Fill & Download for Free

I learn differently, but I see that it was not automatic, not caused by high IQ. Instead it came from my personal collision with grade-school.If you’re high-IQ, then you don’t feel smart. Instead, everyone around you is thinking inn sslooowww mmmmmoooooootion! As a kid in school this was excruciating. Going through math in third grade, I discovered that I could skip to the back of the book and find all the really cool stuff. In fourth grade I did the same, and extended it to science as well as math books. I even discovered the school library which also was the teachers lounge, where I could lay hold of huge teacher-editions, as well as the big-kid textbooks to be used in higher grades!But then also I worked backwards through the textbooks, until I got to the place where everyone else was working. (That, or started in the middle and worked up and down simultaneously. Heh, sideways learning.)And all of this can be done while sitting in a classroom and not listening.I slowly realized that this backwards-technique was not just a cure for boredom, but also it had all sorts of synergistic repercussions, so in middle-school I adopted it as a permanent habit. (For example, besides ducking out from under slow lockstep in school, as well as covertly subverting every effort of adult authorities to assert control, it also let me read every textbook twice, yet they were new and fresh during each pass!And that was only the tip of the iceberg. Over many years I kept noticing all sorts of minor things that I could do, which the other students couldn’t; tiny benefits that were the obvious results of my going backwards/sideways.For example, normal people seem profoundly afraid of books, and it’s because they don’t realize that they can start in the middle, or at the end, or even pick it up and read just one paragraph, then never read one bit more. Instead, many people treat books as a grade-school reading assignment. For any book they pick up, do they (unconsciously) believe that they’ll get in big trouble if they don’t read the entire book from the beginning? Better not touch books at all! I avoided that trap, because when “they” forced on us all the textbooks and reading assignments, I secretly read them all backwards. (And also upside-down; learning to read in the mirror, it’s like learning a very easy foreign language. Leonardo DaVinci wrote all his notebooks in code that took the historians centuries to break: it was cursive Italian, written backwards.)Another example: as an engineering undergrad I was briefly a TA teaching assistant, and discovered that I was learning immensely more than the other students …because I was forced to teach! I was directly experiencing Einstein’s quote “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, it means that you don’t really understand it,” Or, “You really don’t understand a topic until you’re forced to teach it.” Therefore I started learning-by-teaching, even without any students. I adopted “Einstein’s secret audience,” and spent years in crafting explanations aimed at Einstein’s grandmother. Over years I found the results to be absolutely stunning. I began to see that nobody understands basic electricity, aircraft aerodynamics, laser physics, photon absorption and receiving antennas, on and on, many other topics. This happens because we all typically give up hope of grasping the concepts, and instead fall back on that which gives us highest grades in school: equation-memorizing and manipulating math rather than concepts. Huge high grades, but zero gut-level understanding. (In that case you’re trusting the error-prone education system, and you’ll never know if equations are even correct, or perhaps correct, but universally misapplied by educators.) And next, all those equation-memorizing students grow up to become teachers and textbook authors. Generation by generation, the bad effects build up; a century-long “Game of Telephone.” Textbooks turn into equation-memorizing aides, with no prose-based explanations.Today we can ace all our undergrad physics exams while having zero intuitive grasp of any of the concepts …since after all, physics exams aren’t essay questions. I concluded that if I want to understand advanced concepts, first I must craft some simple and extensive non-math verbal explanations, with pictures and animated diagrams, and only later derive the equations (from scratch? It’s easily possible, once you really “get” the concepts.) See RP Feynman’s experience with this problem. Heh, it isn’t limited to Brazil!Another example: develop an internal metal “concept-testing sandbox” for yourself.Then, rather than sneeringly rejecting every suspicious idea, or blindly accepting them all, instead you build a dedicated test-lab region inside your own head. There, the main rule is “provisional acceptance.” It’s a place where you can store all the Untrusted Ideas. (Or maybe put a big sticky label on incoming new concepts “possible toxin, not for internal use.”) After all, we never can devote honest consideration to ideas that we’ve already rejected before testing. With a separate ‘sandbox,’ you won’t need to maintain a tightly closed scoffer/skeptic mindset in order to protect yourself from all the loony ideas floating around out there. Instead, you can welcome them all in …to your airtight testing chamber, where your “pretend self” can become totally meme-infected, all the while being observed by your real self in the observation booth behind the one-way glass. Now you can honestly test all those crazy claims that Conventional Science Has Rejected, while also having lots of fun at Flat Earth meetings and crackpot physics conferences …playing with mud-pies while wearing gloves. This is important, because hidden in all that sewage are amazing diamonds.Ah, here’s a quite weird example. Recently I’ll find some huge dusty book in someone’s office, flip it open totally randomly and start reading, and often I’ll have found the single most interesting page in the whole book. Totally by accident! That, or I’ll find I’m unexpected reading the answer to one of my long-held questions. But then I’ll carefully go through the entire book (backwards, usually,) and often won’t discover any more good stuff at all.So, now after a lifetime of striving to locate the interesting parts of large boring schoolbooks, I’ve arrived at the “Zen master” level? No, not yet, since I’m still unable to read books from thirty feet away with my eyes closed. ; ) On the other hand, sometimes I can go through boxes of books in the store-room of a used bookstore, and without looking pull one out of the pile that has a “good feel,” and it will be a book that I absolutely gotta have at any price. If I then continue searching, I’ll find nothing more. This happens frequently.Boiling down all of the above: IF you can think faster, then you’ll end up with lots of spare time in school, and you can spend it learning how to learn. Figure out how to create new tricks to add to your repertoire, or test the old ones to see if they’re good. Rather than accumulating knowledge in linear rise, I was on an exponential growth curve. (But to do this, first you must get your nose rubbed in the fact that it’s even possible.) And, whenever you aren’t actively striving to find new learning tricks, then the exponential growth straightens out. You must constantly employ your accumulated learning-tricks, giving you the ability to ferret out (or create) even more learning-tricks.Yes, there’s Feynman’s quote “what I cannot create, I do not understand.” Or more like, “The ideas which I haven’t personally turned upside-down and inside-out, I do not really own.” Reading books backwards was definitely in that vein: I must claim new knowledge for my own, take it apart and glue it back together cockeyed. Rub my personal stench all over each piece of new knowledge. Urinate like a magazine-editor on all incoming manuscripts, so I’ll like their flavor. That way the new material lacks any taint of being forced on me from outside, so I’ll have no need to blindly accept it without questioning.For everyone else, school was just giving them a bag of untested facts, a bag only to be preserved until the big exam. Instead I was ignoring teachers’ instructions, stealing new tricks from the back of the book, sniffing each fruit to find the rotten ones, also treating them as new tools, sanding off the sharp parts while putting each one in the special spots reserved in my secret mental toolbox.Decades later, with all sorts of cool tricks under my belt, recently I found a really big one. Call it the Poincaré Technique. But it’s not a tool. It’s psychic powers at the Scary Genius level. It’s the recipe for triggering Divine Revelations. (Keep it deeply hidden, or departmental colleagues with the torches and pitchforks might burn you as a witch. I might even need to return here and delete it later!)Here it is:Mathematician Henri Poincaré had his famous Fuchsian breakthrough while on vacation (while stepping onto a streetcar.) He became curious about this, and asked many other major European mathematicians whether they’d experienced anything similar. He found that, for their daily work at the savant-level, all of them were relying on exactly this visionary process! (But to avoid ridicule, they were keeping quiet about it, assuming that they were the only one knowing the trick.) Apparently even Einstein had a major revelation while riding a streetcar, traveling away from a large clock tower. All these major successes came from defeating impossible problems not by slowly solving puzzles, but instead by intentionally triggering giant visionary events, flashes of insight where the equivalent of new, extensive book-chapters suddenly appeared in their minds. Book-chapters which they themselves had not written.To do this isn’t so difficult (no huffing opium fumes like Coleridge, to get all of Xanadu in a flash!)First, cultivate a habit of paying attention to dreams and daydreams (don’t spend your whole life trying to stamp them out!) Next, carry a notepad around with you, and habitually take down any small “creative insights,” so none are ever lost, however small. Next, work intensely on a large problem which cannot be solved. Beat your head against the wall for days/weeks, and fail. Finally …just give up. No solution, it can’t be done. Face defeat, and go off and work on something else, or even better, take a vacation. (Notice that during vacations you’re not existing in your normal state of consciousness.) Almost invariably your Subconscious Savants will take up the challenge, solve the problem while you’re asleep, etc., then deliver the complete, extremely detailed (highly creative unexpected) answer while you’re taking a hot shower, or driving long distances at night, or laying in bed half-awake just before the alarm clock rings. It comes in a flash, or often in a series of timed flashes, yet the information may fill pages, or even a small book.That’s called “learning?”More like going to the cosmic library of the gods and ordering an invisible tome. (Hah, it takes an entire week before The Librarian finally comes and drops the whole huge thing on top of your throbbing head.)