Greetings, Friendlies. :)
They say that the best way to learn is to teach.
Perhaps. But what do we get from teaching? And are there alternatives?
I’d say that the most important thing we get from teaching is learning to refine our ideas.
We root around and gather up the vague hints and notions lurking in the back of our brains. We learn to hold the shock of facing the yawning gaps, glaring inconsistencies, biases, unexamined premises. We cultivate curiosity, wisdom, imagination, maybe even a sense of humor, polishing these turds and cobbling them together into something useful… on good days even something new, something interesting.
It is true that teaching helps us do this. But I don’t think teaching is required. For those who tolerate the orthographic, writing can be just as effective a tool.
This is what the blog posts, the podcast episodes, are “for”. Learning to articulate my understanding, expose it to challenges, establish it in the psyche that it may actually change my being-in-the-world, rather than just being some interesting fact or insight I throw on the pile of interesting facts and insights.
I’m sharing this because I have found this “writing to learn”, this “mini essay as learning”, to be the most powerful tool in my learning arsenal. And wouldn’t it be a treat if we all had an opportunity to refine our ideas and impact our being-in-the-world?
With friendliness!
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PS: BooBear asked me to point out that though I focus on writing, I do use speaking as a way to establish a first draft. I have used transcription services (Otter.ai’s free tier is sufficient) to draft most of Dharma PhD’s posts and episodes. David Perell fleshes out this idea in his 6-minute podcast episode “Writing from Conversation”.
Dharma PhD 