Watching, listening, and learning

[Guest guest]

 

 

The article you sent is interesting, especially as it addresses the

question, What is learning? I would like to frame learning here in terms of

questions and answers, following the lead of another discussion on CM

didactic strategies on the Network forum. I suggest that

all learning, or more to the point, inquiry, is a process of asking

questions: Why does Angela have abdominal pain? What will change if Jim

drinks this herbal soup every day for a week? Each new answer tends to

generate subtler, more detailed questions, until the cascade of questions

and answers represents a body of evidence. This method of inquiry has been

elaborated for millennia and across widely divergent cultures and

traditions: Qi Bo and Confucius, the Talmudic and ecclesiastical catecheses,

and in European philosophical traditions reaching back from Greece to Italy,

France, and Germany.

 

In his Dialogues, Plato employs the figure of Socrates in what would come

to be known as the Socratic method of deductive learning, in order to force

his adversaries into logically untenable, because self-contradictory,

positions. This is now standard didactic method in the highly oratory legal

professions. In Dialogo dei Massismi Sistemi [Dialogue Concerning the Main

World Systems] Galileo’s interlocutors rebuke the reigning classical dogma

(and poor Simplicio) using similar classical deductive reasoning, but

demanding more rigorous empirical demonstrations to examine Aristotelian,

Ptolemaic and Copernican speculations. Galileo aims not at “factual

knowledge,” but at “comprehension.” It is during the same generation that

Descartes pioneered the modern scientific process of inquiry, maintaining

that all scientific investigation begins with the formulation of a question.

Quantum physics has brought into sharp relief the dependence of our

knowledge on our ability to frame questions. If we ask an atom if it is a

wave or a particle, it answers Yes, and the ball’s in our court.

 

More to the point: I challenge the proposal that learning Chinese medicine

is best accomplished through either auditory or visual presentation. They

are certainly complementary senses, and I’m sure learning depends more on

the quality of either one than on which is favored. Watching is more

effective than mere hearing, and listening results in more understanding

than mere seeing. I find your conclusion that “all the top herbalists are

visual learners as is evident by their use of the written word”, to be a

mirage. Do these All-the-Top herbalists not speak and discuss? Is the use of

writing enough to constitute a preference for visual learning? Personally I

rely on my “ear” to write, and hearing in my head while I read can only add

to my understanding. And what about the long use of mnemonic rhymes to learn

herbs and formulas, still common in China?

 

I should add that I appreciate the distinctions between teaching/learning

styles, and I recognize the differences in the tools that can help get the

job done. But any technology, from writing/reading and speaking/listening to

computers and the use of multimedia, can facilitate the transmission of

knowledge and understanding. For deep learning, however, nothing can

substitute the humility, honesty, and engagement of both teacher and

student, which I think is best reflected in the quality of the process of

unfolding questions. I like when teachers ask, “Are you sure?” and they mean

it. I like when I am asked to reformulate my questions before I get the

gratification of a response, or when a teacher can point out the biases or

misunderstandings inherent in my questions, or when they tell me to do some

research and come back when the response will be more interesting. I

remember my mentor Min Fan provoking me on many occasions, telling me he

didn’t want to hear questions until they were well developed and I knew what

was in the books. If I asked him if the wiry pulse was necessarily long, I

would have to be prepared to recite the definitions I knew for both pulses.

I am much more likely to do my homework knowing that my teacher is going to

ask me questions and look me in the face, even if I feel less than inspired

to study.

 

Regards,

 

Jonah Hershowitz

 

P.S.— Perhaps it is your visual bias that leads you to take such

black-and-white schematic positions. Is it the visual (but faceless) nature

of this forum that permits your polemical punditry, dispensing with the

subtleties that might otherwise surface to blur such high-contrast views? I

must admit that your op-eds are a joy to read when you rise above rhetorical

provocations and write more as part of a group conversation.

 

 

 

I would

submit that those whose primary mode of learning is overwhelmingly

auditory are not suited to high level medical decision making. I know

that is oh so unPC, but if you search your memories, you will realize

that with rare exception amongst those you have taught, this really is

quite true. All the top herbalists are primarily visual learners as is

evident by their use of the written word. Now keep in mind that most

people have a more balanced set of attributes, not weighted at the

extremes of the curve. But I think the subject oriented position is

really the one most of you have implicitly advocated over the years in

your prior writings, whatever you might be writing explicitly now. The

level of data acquisition and the type of mental processing necessary

for chinese herbology cannot be acquired thru listening alone. It can

only be achieved by those who read and process visual data like flow

charts, etc. There is just not enough time in a life to listen to even

1/10 of what one could read, even assuming you want to do that much

listening. I actually learn quite well from listening myself, but it

is incredibly inefficient and does not seem to give any significant

learning advantage if I hear and read the same material. the listening

part just wastes my time. I want to listen to unique information I

cannot read, information that ONLY comes up in the context of case

based and PBL type learning. The nature of certain types of high level

thought developed in the minds of those who are primarily visual and

text based learners and there may be no way around this. I just don\'t

think auditory input alone can possibly create the right brain

connections for complex decisionmaking of this nature.

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