Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I learned the wrong way. I learned. Is there a wrong way to learn?

Once in 7th grade, I was on a self-study path in a math class. I read a few pages, took a test, graded my test (usually a bad grade), read the correct answers, and, “Oh, that’s the answer. That is what we are doing here!”

The teacher saw me doing this and told me I was learning the wrong way. I was supposed to know the answers before taking the test. I was supposed to learn the material by reading a few pages.

I shrugged. The test grades were not recorded. The test grades were meaningless. So I learned from the tests, not the few poorly written pages I read before the test. And I learned. And the teacher kept telling me that I was learning the wrong way.

Is there a wrong way to learn? I suppose there are some learning methods that are more efficient than others. Some learning methods may be less painful than others in real life. In school? Is there a wrong way to learn?

In a recent case, I asked a chatbot to write some Python code to (1) pull information from WordPress-generated XML then (2) pull information from an mbox (MS email) file.

I looked at the code and learned that there are Python libraries for these two types of solutions. Oh, I learned about the libraries by reading the answer. Was that wrong? I don’t know. I do know that I learned.