I’d just come out of a meeting and one of my colleagues said: “Maybe I’m stupid”. We both work in an engineering company and my colleague is a very qualified and able person, but I knew what he meant. The person who had just been giving a presentation in the meeting had been describing some complex areas and something about the way that he was doing it made it difficult to understand. It was easy for my colleague to respond by saying he thought he was stupid because he was struggling to understand what was being said, but actually the person speaking had not given enough time for us to understand one concept before he started talking about the next one.
This is actually remarkably common. When someone is teaching us something, like maths, if we don’t get it straight away we can easily fall into the trap of blaming ourselves. But maybe the person teaching us wasn’t recognising our struggles and didn’t adjust their style of teaching to compensate.
When learning something there are several factors that affect how we learn:
Our previous knowledge.
How well the new concepts are being communicated.
Our ability to take in the information.
Our relationship with our teacher (e.g. do we like them, do we trust them etc)
How well the new concepts relate to the knowledge we already have.
Our learning style.
Our memory.
It’s so easy to blame ourselves or even to blame our teacher but there are lots of things that affect how well we learn something.
Take for example our ability to take in the information. This can be affected by all sorts of factors: can we hear well enough, have we had enough sleep, have we been eating well enough, does the person speaking have an accent that we have trouble understanding, are we distracted by other things going on in our lives, are we stressed that we may not be able to perform properly, do we believe we can learn the item or not etc.
When we learn something new we need to be able to build it on something we already know. If you are struggling to understand something it is worth going back to basics and thinking about whether it is relying on you knowing something else. Are there gaps in your knowledge of some other areas? See what you can do to fill in those gaps, using whatever style of learning works best for you (looking things up online, talking to others, getting lessons from someone etc).
Different people have different learning styles. Some like to just sit and read a book. Others hate that and can’t learn that way, preferring to learn socially, or by doing things in practice. Some people need to talk things through or even to try to explain it to others before they can really get the concepts. Don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t learn something straight away. Often our education system tends to favour a particular way of learning, but it is good to explore what works best for you.
If you are having difficulty learning with a particular teacher, it may be worth talking to them about the problems you are facing. However, unfortunately some teachers may blame the students rather than thinking about what they can do to help. If that is the case, talk to someone else you trust. If that too is difficult, reach out to me or Masha or others on this website. You are not on your own.
So next time you are tempted to put yourself down by thinking you are stupid, take a step back and see if there is something else getting in the way. You are most likely a lot more capable than you think.
Ian, one of our guest writers, works at Atkins, a large British engineering company, as the professional head of discipline for digital transformation