There is a frustrating that happens when you ask a teacher, or in general someone more experienced than you a question. Which is that you come from a place of seeking what I would call prior understanding, that is to say, that which allows you to understand something you don’t grasp at all. The teacher on the other hand often answers with pieces of posterior understanding, which are insights that allow you to deepen you understanding after you’ve already acquired a decent grasp of the concept.
It’s like when a kid asks “why is a negative times a negative equal to a positive?” and a teacher answers “well, when you remove debt, you have more money”. The latter sentence makes sense to someone who already gets double negatives, because they first understand the idea of debt very well. But to a child learning about negative numbers, even the idea of debt itself is confusing, such that this explanation of double negatives will probably not make much sense for them.
This gap in understanding, and even deeper, experience, is very frustrating because 1) most people are incredibly bad at explaining because they’re bad at putting themselves in the shoes of someone. I don’t blame them for that because it’s really difficult, but most teachers I’ve come across do not even bother trying. And 2) because as far as I’m aware, there is no way through but to simply familiarize yourself as much as you can with metaphors that make sense to you, and if that doesn’t work, simply give it enough time until something clicks.
Understanding is very frustrating because it doesn’t happen predictably, which is probably why schools don’t even bother. They teach knowledge or following procedures, but very rarely understanding. The latter two can be transferred mechanically, while understanding cannot, it is a process that inherently requires consciousness in order to perceive something you didn’t before, and perception/attention is something that requires consciousness, because it is the ability to direct it.
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2024-04-13