How do you learn?

How do you learn things? Ever think about that—about how you learn best?

Some people are definitely wired to respond better in one channel than other. And some tasks lend themselves better to one channel than other, too. Some people learn best when they can read about a subject. Give them a book and a few hours and they will come back understanding how to fund their retirement account. There isn't a lot to be gained by making someone stand in line at two or three banks, brokerages and insurance companies, learning how to open up an IRA account.

Some folks can do pretty well just sitting in classroom situation and having someone preach to them. Maybe they're good note takers, or maybe they are just good listeners. That's how I got through most of my elementary and even junior and senior high classes, really. Maybe sixty percent of whatever I learned in school was just reciting things someone else had poured into me at one time or another. Classroom work involves both visual and aural input. You see things and you hear things and the hope is that you will absorb some measure of it and not be Left Behind.

Others are do-ers, and other tasks are best learned by example. You can read about driving a car and learn a lot of the theory and rules of the road and so on. But you really don't get the tactile feedback you need to process to actually learn to drive a car. There is a crown in most roads and you need to apply a little pressure on the steering wheel to counteract the tendency for a car to drive itself into the weeds. But how much pressure is needed, and for how long? What if you need to turn a corner in a crowned road? We won't even get into the absurdity of trying to learn parallel parking from a chapter of Driving For Dummies.

So, we have all kinds of people, and we have all kinds of processes and some of them lend themselves well to the task in only certain circumstances. This is why we try to touch on so many of the senses in our workshops. There are many pages or slides involved in teaching HTML, but you really aren't going to learn the language that way, are you? Each contains a lot of information, and probably all of it is important in one way or another, but you don't have to read every word from the overheads to "get it". It would not be very effective if I just stood at the front of the class and read the information to you, either. I can't think of anything more boring than having someone read me a slide that I can see for myself. And when you're bored, you start thinking about what's for dinner, tonight, and whether or not your income tax refund has arrived yet and whether you should replace your wiper blades out of this paycheck or whether you could wait for anoth—what? Wait, what did he say about image tags, again?

I try to keep things moving, so you don't have time to linger on any point long enough for laundry or grocery shopping to intrude. When we look at workshop feedback, most of my responses come back saying the pacing was either just right or a little fast. It's rare that anyone says they were too slow or too fast, and I'm happy with that because I know the misery of listening to someone droning on and on about something nobody in the room is interested in (including, often enough, the speaker).

But not every technique is going to land with every student who attends every workshop, no matter how good a writer did the words, no matter how good of a graphic designer laid out the slides or pages, no matter how well the teacher speaks. At some point we all have to take some responsibility for what we learn.

In all of my workshops, I have places built-in where I stop and ask for questions, often reminding people of the last two or three things we have covered. "Okay, any questions about page headings? Any questions about lists? Everyone understand anchor tags?"

And I almost always point out that books are available that run to seven and nine hundred pages on most of these subjects, so we necessarily have to leave something out to get everything done in only two hours. Generally, we finish early and I always try to say something like "Okay, was there anything that you had hoped to learn today that we didn't cover?" We frequently have the use of the room for another fifteen or twenty minutes and I'm more than happy to talk about anything anyone brings up.

But most often, everyone gets up and leaves. I try not to take it personally.