Hypocrisy at Its Finest

“Behaving Like My Students While Learning Something New”

I’ve written several posts about helping students work through challenges and problem solve and have shared tips and techniques for helping them.  This quick post is purely expressing how I threw all of that out the window the other day.  Why is it so tough to take your own advice sometimes?

Here’s the story:

I chose to start learning Sketchup (a CAD program), hoping that it’ll help me to build better stick chairs.  The idea is that if I can model it in CAD (at least roughly) and get some angle measurements, I wouldn’t have to spend quite as much time trying to mock something up and then wondering if it was going to work or not.  I tried using a couple different methods that other chairmakers use, but it’s not working out for me.

In the two days that I’ve been working on modeling these chair parts, I’ve gone through the entire gamut of emotions that I’ve witnessed my students go through when learning something new, short of throwing my computer in frustration.  

(Thankfully I’m “mature enough” to not have to go through that one and I would have to pay for a new one…)

The emotions that I’ve had:

• I’ve questioned why I’m doing this.

• I’ve said a few curse words when I couldn’t find the answer “quick enough”.

• I searched and searched and searched for an answer, determined that I was going to find it.

• I got up and walked away.

• I yelled at the computer.

• I gave myself a pep talk about how great I was doing and that I would find the answer.

Thankfully I’ve used other CAD software before so even though some of the learning so far was frustrating, I was able to pull from previous experience to work through it.

After much hard work, I finely was able to produce this. Not great but it gives me a good bit of info to build the chair.

As instructors, sometimes we forget how emotional it is to learn something new, especially when it’s challenging.  We tell our students, “Don’t get frustrated.” and “Don’t give up.” or we use the dreaded phrase, “It’s easy.” or “It’s too easy.” on them.  But it is frustrating and it’s not always easy.  If someone had walked up to me while I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t combine two shapes that I had created in Sketchup together even after watching several videos and had told me “You’ll get it, don’t get frustrated.”, that person would have received some verbal language directed at them that I would have had to apologize for later.

So tell your students, “Yes, this is tough but you can do it.” and then help them according to their ability.  You might have to scaffold a little.  You might have to give them a prompt.  You might have them walk away for a moment.  You might need to coach them to choose a different word or phrase if they’re searching for answers on the interwebz.  Or whatever else depending on the project or assignment they’re trying to tackle.

And don’t beat yourself up for getting frustrated learning something new either, it doesn’t help.