I seldom have thought of myself as a teacher but that’s what I have always been. One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to take complex issues and make them understandable for those without a background in the subject matter. Whatever the topic, experience has shown there are some recurrent hindrances to learning. In this article we will look at a few of them with some tips on how teachers can help students better apprehend and retain information.
Table of Contents
Obstacles to Learning
Most of my adult life has involved teaching in one form or another. When working with businesses, I have assisted owners & managers with organizing, promotion, and leadership training. For families and individuals, I’ve taught how to budget and invest without the need for costly outside help. And in ministry, I’ve taught everything from the basics of the faith to new converts up to the weightier issue of theodicy (God’s goodness and sovereignty in light of the existence of evil).
Whether working with a business on staffing principles, an individual on investing, or a group of Christians on understanding the Trinity, there are obstacles that show up time and again. More often than not, one flows into the next. Let’s look at four of the most common characteristics that hamper our ability to grasp new areas.
We are impatient
Fast food. Microwave ovens. Instant messages. We live in an era where we get much of our wants satisfied quickly. As a result, impatience runs through our veins. If a webpage takes two-tenths of a second to load or we spend 30 seconds at a stop light we feel like we might explode. If the car in front of us is only going 5 miles over the speed limit instead of the 10 we expect, we find ourselves repenting of road age.
We hate it, but some things just take time. For example, unless someone is a spectacularly gifted linguist, a foreign language cannot be learned by cramming. It takes a while for things to sink in to the point where the brain can process and put together all of the information it has been fed.
Among investors, there are some self-defeating characteristics that all of us must constantly guard against. There are biases that prevent us from seeing things clearly (a trait that also holds Christians back from interpreting the Bible clearly). We also must always be careful to not be driven by our emotions, particularly fear and greed, both of which can be very costly.
Beginning investors especially struggle with impatience. They expect to make money quickly in the markets instead of allowing compounding to work its magic. Unfortunately, even experienced investors often become impatient and sell very good investments way too early, losing out on big long-term gains. Yes, mirror, I’m talking to you.
Warren Buffett, widely regarded as the greatest investor of the last 100 years if not all time (I am more of a Peter Lynch fanboy), has a wonderful way of putting wisdom in folksy, easy to understand phrases. Here is one of my favorites.
Successful investing takes time, discipline, and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.
— Warren Buffett
Most things worth learning have some aspects that are incredibly complex. This includes theology, economics, and other topics we touch on here. Instead of slowly building an increasing understanding of a subject, we tend to quickly put our Puma’s on and head to the track. This leads to hinderance number two.
We try to run before we can crawl
Whether it involves investing, theology, or anything else we set our minds to, we have a nasty habit of wanting to tackle the more weighty aspects before we have a good understanding of the basics. This can be disastrous.
When dealing with a subset of a subject we are familiar with, it is easy to assume the nuts and bolts of that subset are simple to grasp. We use much of the same terminology and, as is often the case in theology, we have been taught the conclusion before we ever set out to learn how to get there. “I know there is one God, and that the Father, Son, & Spirt are all God, so understanding the Trinity will be easy.”
Yeah, good luck with that!
Just because we can do laps at the YMCA it doesn’t mean we are ready to swim the English Channel. We must be careful not to discount how critical having a foundation is, and we must never underestimate the importance of the fundamentals of any subject. They might seem basic and almost trivial at first, but they will be the key to getting us through the fog that will be encountered later on.
Overconfidence is a killer. When we don’t know what we don’t know in business, we set ourselves up for failure. Do the same in economics and we back policies that are destructive. When we do it in theology, we are on a sure path to confusion, or worse—a misunderstanding that leads to grave error.
Whatever our field of study, we want to reach a point where we realize that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know.
Authoritative resources are too technical
It doesn’t help that published works are written by highly trained people who have spent decades studying their field, working alongside other highly trained people. While this should give us confidence in their knowledge, it often leads to books and online resources being packed with technical terms and jargon. This is the language experts utilize every day in their own studies and when they dialogue with each other. For these smart men and women to communicate difficult concepts without sprinkling their words with specialized language is not as easy as one might think. They often communicate using loaded and confusing words without realizing it.
There is a place for technical language. In theology, it allows us to use one or two words to draw small yet critical distinctions. But I’ve encountered many intelligent, highly inquisitive people who want to learn about a topic but either have no interest in the peculiar terminology, or are confused by it.
What often happens is we begin with interest in a topic and set out to learn, but soon the impatience modern society has conditioned us with surfaces. We then want to learn as fast as we can and begin digging into the deeper aspects before we have a sturdy footing. We seek out authoritative writings or videos on a subject only to be inundated with terminology that leaves our heads spinning.
Inevitably it ends in one place…
We feel overwhelmed
Whether it is a job, school, home improvement projects, or fitness goals, when we take on too much at one time we are going to either do shoddy work, or we will feel swamped (usually both!).
We then find excuses to give up or delay our goal, and we all know what waiting to start something means. Nine times out of 10, it ain’t gonna happen.
Overcoming the Barriers
With the objective of facilitating learning by making the complex understandable, I think it is wise to keep a few general principles in mind.
Brevity of material covered
By brevity I do not mean the length of classes, posts, or booklets (though given the short attention span most have today it is a good idea to keep them reasonable). Brevity in this case primarily means two things:
- Boiling things down to their essence in as few words as possible
- Having one or two main themes and keep them in focus
When explaining difficult matters, more words usually introduces more complexity. Sessions, blogs, and book chapters will grow longer by expanding on concepts, providing examples, and dealing with various angles and objections, but the primary explanation of a topic—what it is at its bare essence— should be as short and clear as possible.
Brevity also means zeroing in on a specific theme so that too many aspects are not covered, hopefully making the subject matter easier to firmly grasp. I have watched and listened to hundreds of hours of lectures by the late R.C. Sproul, and his ability to teach was second to none. One thing that always struck me is how he would spend 30 minutes laying the groundwork to make one major, overarching point. The result was students having a strong grasp of one issue, not a mediocre handle on several.
Keep students engaged between classes
One of the biggest frustrations I experience teaching in a church or Bible study is that there is a week between lessons. When you are exploring deep topics that build upon a foundation, half of each class must be spent on review. Even more disappointment comes when a question or comment is raised that shows, despite all efforts, important information is not being retained. Students become disengaged between classes.
One way to class members from “losing it” between sessions is by assigning homework. It usually isn’t a good idea to call it that outside of a formal school setting, and depending on the makeup of the students, a game or incentives might need to be made out of the “assignments.” Whatever the method, teachers need to keep students engaged between classes, especially when those classes are a week or more apart and there are no incentives for the students to review (like grades). Even a simple follow up email could help greatly.
Be careful of jargon
As touched on earlier, specialized and technical language can leave an inexperienced learner feeling like they are swimming in quicksand, or worse, completely mislead a person. It is important to be introduced to technical terms that a student will encounter when going deeper in their studies, but they should not be relied upon when giving succinct explanations.
Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning scientist and creator of a classic teaching method still used by many, echoed Einstein when he said that if a teacher cannot explain a subject so that a grade school child can understand it, perhaps they do not know it well themselves.
When we speak without jargon, it frees us from hiding behind knowledge we don’t have. Big words and fluffy “business speak” cripples us from getting to the point and passing knowledge to others.
— Richard Feynman
Being overly technical when teaching just adds additional layers that need to be learned. It is good to introduce those terms so that the student is aware of them, particularly as they further their study. But to rely on them when teaching a group who are not already proficient in the specialized language just creates more hurdles to learning.
To help with these words, a glossary will be maintained on this website. Terms will be added as they are discussed on this blog.
Be extra careful with Greek & Hebrew
It has been said that the best commentary on the New Testament is the New Testament in Greek. As someone who has read more commentaries than he can count, I give my wholehearted endorsement to that statement. Nothing compares to the Word of God in the original languages. I would encourage everyone to take at the very least a beginner’s course in Greek. Many fantastic and inexpensive options are available, including online classes offered by Bill Mounce which I have used as course material to teach first-year students in the past.
That said, relying heavily on these languages for those who are not familiar with them can add another level that brings confusion. The whole matter is made worse by pulpits and the blogosphere being full of people trying to use Greek when they don’t really know it.
I heard a Greek & Hebrew professor once say that the most dangerous teacher in the church is the one who knows a little bit of an original language. I can’t tell you how often I have heard preachers and teachers erroneously craft entire messages around the different Greek words used for love when Jesus is restoring Peter in John 21, when it was highly likely that was done for stylistic purposes. (As to whether I have taught this questionable interpretation myself, I plead the Fifth.)
I cringe when I hear of seminaries only requiring one semester of Greek. Unless the student continues learning on their own, that makes them worse off than if they hadn’t taken any.
We want to be careful in handling the original languages. One of the most dangerous things a person can do is look up a word in a concordance or lexicon and think they have a direct meaning, because these resources do not adequately provide syntax or semantic domain information. Many false teachings have come from people misusing these aides, so for the sake of those who are not familiar with these languages, we want to keep their use to a minimum.
All that said, there are instances where the underlying Greek or Hebrew are critical to examine because of the differences brought in through translation into the English language.
Final Thought
Regardless of age, education, or success, one should never cease trying to learn more. Likewise, teachers should continue to learn how to teach and be ready to adapt techniques to needs and styles of modern students. Being aware of the barriers that hinder our ability to learn and teach will help us overcome them.