Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Kevin O’Keef asks Most of us that listen to your show clearly are lifelong learners and I know you have mentioned that this is one objective of your podcast- to have citizens throughout the world be more knowledgeable. Anyone that went to high school or college can relate to “cramming“ for a test. Weeks later everything that we learned is probably lost -again because content hasn’t been recycled or used or reflected on. What I’m getting at Gary -is since you have this huge volume of content that you’ve learned have you figured out how to retain a lot of this long-term? I know there’s no magic pill for this, but if students can use some tricks or strategies that you used, I’m sure we will all be more educated as a society and better for it. ?

Kevin, what you have identified is a HUGE problem. Whenever we hear people talk about education, they usually talk about students’ test scores. That is fine, but student test scores are not the goal of education. The goal is to produce knowledgeable and informed adults.

The result of general knowledge tests given to adults is truly depressing. Most people, after years of education, come out of it having learned…..next to nothing. The average person couldn’t pass any final exam in any class they took past grade school.

I could talk for hours on this subject, but here are some fundamental things I think.

The first is that you are ultimately responsible for your education. If someone doesn’t want to learn, if they aren’t curious and don’t care, the best teachers cannot make them learn. You cannot inject knowledge into someone. If, however, someone wants to learn, such as the great 20th-century Indian mathematician Ramanujan, then it is hard to stop them from learning.

Second, is that learning never ends. Never. Too many people think that learning is only done in a classroom when you are a child or a teenager. That is when classroom instruction ends, but that is not the end of learning.

Third, is that you sometimes have to encounter things multiple times to make it stick. I took a trigonometry class in high school, which was nothing but memorizing things like the sine function was the opposite over the hypotenuse of a triangle. I took a physics class and didn’t know when to use the sine or cosine of something.

Later on, someone explained the trigonometric functions using the unit circle….and everything clicked and suddenly made sense. Once I understood that I didn’t need to memorize everything, I could just figure it out from first principles.

Publishing encore episodes isn’t just a way for me to take a day off (although that is a big part of it). It is a way for people to hear something they might have last listened to one or two years ago and serve as a refresher. When I watch a movie or read a book a second time, I always pick up something new that I didn’t notice the first time.

Today, there are many different ways you can learn almost any subject for free online. There are countless YouTube channels that will explain any topic, as well as articles and of course, podcasts. If you don’t understand it after consuming one source, go and check out another.