A Different Way to Learn
Early in my senior year in college (1967), I looked myself in the mirror and realized that with all the grade-seeking and crash-memorizing I did, I didn’t really retain a whole lot of what I learned. This bothered me so much I decided to study more each day and to just follow my nose. If something got me curious in my studies, I would follow that thread, maybe read an extra book or article I didn’t have to, look something up--let my curiosity be my guide.
I found that when I got to test time, I didn’t have to study nearly as much as before; I pretty well retained most everything. I realized immediately that this was the way to do things, this was real love of learning, and it worked better than grade-getting.
Case Study: Dr. Mandel
I was partially inspired in this learning path by a class I had in European Intellectual History of the 19th Century. It was taught by a 36-year-old professor named Dr. Howard Mandel. He was a dark-haired man with rugged good looks. Early on he told us he had been in the Merchant Marines for years after he graduated from Columbia University. He had run away to sea, more or less. At around thirty, he had gotten in trouble fighting with some bad dudes who were looking to kill him. He jumped ship and decided to go to graduate school.
He went to the dean of the University of Colorado at Boulder and told him he was smarter than anyone in his school. I guess the dean liked his brashness, so he let him in, even without the Graduate Record Exam, which most schools require. He got a Masters in Library Science, then switched to history for his Ph.D. We were his first class on his first job.
Right away, he set himself apart from all the professors I had ever had. He picked up the big textbook we had all bought, called Europe Since Napoleon, and said,”Look, it’ll be boring if I just cover this thing in class. I want you guys to read this thing on your own, and we’ll have a mid-term exam on it. We’ll also have a paper that will count for a third of your grade. For my lectures, I’ll talk about things that interest me: it might be art; it might be literature; you come and join in the discussions. That’s the other third of your grade—class participation.”
I thought he was crazy. No one else had ever done anything like this in my experience. But I was curious. Sure enough, in the first lecture he started reading fin de siecle (end of century) French literature. He started with Baudelaire, the Symbolist poet, reading to us from Le Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). I loved this stuff! It was decadent and sensual and seemed to glory in sounds for their own sake, images for their own sake, art for its own sake. We read us Huysmanns, a prose Symbolist, and introduced us to Oscar Wilde, a homosexual writer, who carried on in England.
Dr. Mandel just read us a few poems and prose pieces, but I found myself checking out English translations of Baudelaire and Huysmanns and reading all of it, even though it wasn’t required. Later, Dr. Mandel gave lectures on Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, slideshows, and lectures on the Impressionists. His favorite subject was the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French-Jewish officer was accused of treason and tried, in the process politically dividing the country, much like the O.J. Simpson trial in this century divided blacks and whites in the USA.
I talked with some of my classmates, and found we were all surprised at how much we read that we weren’t required to. The class discussions were lively, informed by all the extra curiosity and reading going on. One day, Dr. Mandel showed us some slides of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. In several of them, there would be lights, like one over a pool table. The lights seemed to radiate concentric rings, so that it reminded me of how light seems to swim or vibrate when one is under the influence of marijuana. I blurted out, “Dr. Mandel, was there any evidence that Van Gogh took drugs?” He shot back with a wicked grin, “What’s the matter, this look familiar?” Everybody laughed.
In the course of the semester, I did memorize the textbook; I wrote a paper on Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter; and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I didn’t know it, and perhaps he didn’t either, but he was anticipating the kind of whole-brain, learning by immersion popular in many schools now. In corporate training, a recent trend is toward “accelerated learning” that uses techniques like Dr. Mandel’s. Funny, how someone new to a pursuit can create new ways that the professionals cannot see.*
* Note: British college-level education is much more like this "curiosity" method than American education was in the 1960's and in many places in the USA today. In my second semester, senior year I took a course on the French Revolution and Napoleon from a visiting Oxford professor. He gave us a long reading list and just said, "Read a book or two from each section of the list, listen to my lectures, and integrate some of your learning from both places into your essay quizzes."
I found that when I got to test time, I didn’t have to study nearly as much as before; I pretty well retained most everything. I realized immediately that this was the way to do things, this was real love of learning, and it worked better than grade-getting.
Case Study: Dr. Mandel
I was partially inspired in this learning path by a class I had in European Intellectual History of the 19th Century. It was taught by a 36-year-old professor named Dr. Howard Mandel. He was a dark-haired man with rugged good looks. Early on he told us he had been in the Merchant Marines for years after he graduated from Columbia University. He had run away to sea, more or less. At around thirty, he had gotten in trouble fighting with some bad dudes who were looking to kill him. He jumped ship and decided to go to graduate school.
He went to the dean of the University of Colorado at Boulder and told him he was smarter than anyone in his school. I guess the dean liked his brashness, so he let him in, even without the Graduate Record Exam, which most schools require. He got a Masters in Library Science, then switched to history for his Ph.D. We were his first class on his first job.
Right away, he set himself apart from all the professors I had ever had. He picked up the big textbook we had all bought, called Europe Since Napoleon, and said,”Look, it’ll be boring if I just cover this thing in class. I want you guys to read this thing on your own, and we’ll have a mid-term exam on it. We’ll also have a paper that will count for a third of your grade. For my lectures, I’ll talk about things that interest me: it might be art; it might be literature; you come and join in the discussions. That’s the other third of your grade—class participation.”
I thought he was crazy. No one else had ever done anything like this in my experience. But I was curious. Sure enough, in the first lecture he started reading fin de siecle (end of century) French literature. He started with Baudelaire, the Symbolist poet, reading to us from Le Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). I loved this stuff! It was decadent and sensual and seemed to glory in sounds for their own sake, images for their own sake, art for its own sake. We read us Huysmanns, a prose Symbolist, and introduced us to Oscar Wilde, a homosexual writer, who carried on in England.
Dr. Mandel just read us a few poems and prose pieces, but I found myself checking out English translations of Baudelaire and Huysmanns and reading all of it, even though it wasn’t required. Later, Dr. Mandel gave lectures on Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, slideshows, and lectures on the Impressionists. His favorite subject was the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French-Jewish officer was accused of treason and tried, in the process politically dividing the country, much like the O.J. Simpson trial in this century divided blacks and whites in the USA.
I talked with some of my classmates, and found we were all surprised at how much we read that we weren’t required to. The class discussions were lively, informed by all the extra curiosity and reading going on. One day, Dr. Mandel showed us some slides of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. In several of them, there would be lights, like one over a pool table. The lights seemed to radiate concentric rings, so that it reminded me of how light seems to swim or vibrate when one is under the influence of marijuana. I blurted out, “Dr. Mandel, was there any evidence that Van Gogh took drugs?” He shot back with a wicked grin, “What’s the matter, this look familiar?” Everybody laughed.
In the course of the semester, I did memorize the textbook; I wrote a paper on Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter; and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I didn’t know it, and perhaps he didn’t either, but he was anticipating the kind of whole-brain, learning by immersion popular in many schools now. In corporate training, a recent trend is toward “accelerated learning” that uses techniques like Dr. Mandel’s. Funny, how someone new to a pursuit can create new ways that the professionals cannot see.*
* Note: British college-level education is much more like this "curiosity" method than American education was in the 1960's and in many places in the USA today. In my second semester, senior year I took a course on the French Revolution and Napoleon from a visiting Oxford professor. He gave us a long reading list and just said, "Read a book or two from each section of the list, listen to my lectures, and integrate some of your learning from both places into your essay quizzes."
posted by David Orr | 6:17 AM
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