The Learning Plateau

Ok sit down, sit down. Settle and quiet down so we can have our lesson today. Today we will learn about...

Learning! For this extremely important intellectual discussion, we will need to use only the most advanced data and graphing techniques to get the point across. Time for Paint. No not Paint 3D! Go to the principles office young man, you know we don't use that filth in this classroom!

So we need to learn something, we've got limited time and a large amount of material. So logically we divide the material by the time and learn a bit each day until we've learned it all. Sounds simple enough, some people learn at different rates and use different learning styles, so let's give some leeway in our time and use various forms of teaching media to appeal to everyone. Now we're all good, or we should be... It looks like Jacob is struggling with it. He breezed through most of the material but now we're in the home stretch and he doesn't seem to be able to keep up anymore, I wonder why. 

Even the best-intentioned of teachers with the most up-to-date methods will struggle with this, but why. We've made a good pace and addressed various learning styles to keep kids engaged and capable. That should be enough. But we're assuming a linear learning curve and that's not really the case. So for our first highly scientific graph, I will show a normal learning curve

So here we have a normal learning path. Getting to beginner takes a bit as you grasp the core concepts, but intermediate comes a bit quicker as it usually builds on the material you've already learned. You've put in about half the effort needed and learned about halfway there. Then there's a lot of effort to take that material and understanding and truly get to a high level of proficiency, being able to apply your knowledge effectively and knowing enough you could teach others.

This one is a bit different though. I might seem smart to others with a normal learning curve as I tend to soak up the material quickly. I get to an almost intermediate level before most people get to a beginner level. This leads to a lot of bad expectations. I'm obviously smart and capable, right? I powered through super quick, so that's good right? I mean kinda. In grade school, this means that without me just procrastinating or having bad behaviour, I'm usually never going to outright struggle with a class. I can always get through it and pass, do the bare minimum with little effort. But you might have noticed that big plateau in the middle. While I get to intermediate pretty quick, I then sit there scratching and clawing to gain any traction past that. 

Part of this is mental exhaustion and focus. I power thru the first bit and then I'm out of fuel for the rest. I can only cram so much info at light speed before my head runs out of processing space and starts rejecting the new info. Basically, the sponge is filled and I keep pouring more water in, but I haven't had time to let it dry before pouring again. Another issue is the NEW problem. My mind doesn't get a dopamine hit from long-term victories. 

I see myself progressing super fast through beginner and into intermediate, but then as I get less and less progress, I get bored and start to look for something new. This could be getting distracted, or it could be suddenly taking an interest in greywater construction for residential buildings and checking out 10 different educational books from the college library and taking thorough notes while reading them straight thru for a week. Can I take notes normally, NOPE. But this is new and interesting so I can hyper-focus and get that dopamine hit going from no knowledge to intermediate with little effort. A true story about the greywater, by the way. 

Now like I said, if behaviour and focus are handled in grade school, a kid might just slide by with b's and c's and never really have an issue. But then college comes. For me, college had 2 serious issues. First was the lack of structure. I didn't get to get off the bus, have my parents tell me to do HW before dinner, and then repeat every day. Each day had a different schedule, and it had no 'requirements'. Sure you were supposed to go to class, but social workers weren't gonna tell my parents if I didn't show up for class, No one was gonna come check in the halls to see why I wasn't in class. It was completely up to me to set and maintain my own schedule. I had to keep myself accountable. 

This was the biggest issue, but the second issue was related to the learning curve we talked about. With grade school, there really isn't much 'advanced' material. You get the basics, struggle to get to intermediate, and then take a test at the end of the year. Then the following year, the same subject is the advanced material from the last year. Algebra 2 is the next step of Algebra 1 is the next step of pre-algebra, and so on. It keeps slowly building on itself so it never feels like what you're learning is expert level. 

But in college, that all falls apart. Sure you'll have a few extensions of grade school with some of your core classes like maths and sciences. But even with literature, you suddenly have big long papers, 10 or more pages. You do a lot of academic essays, you do labs that are full of essays on their own. And then you hit your major classes. You've never built a base level with these, it's new material, starting completely from the bottom and getting you up to near-advanced levels in short amounts of time. 

Think about it, You spend almost 2 decades learning the basics of being alive and communicating and doing basic math and science and learning. Then you hit college and in 4 years, you're expected to go from 0 to nearly 100 in a field you have just suddenly decided you want to spend the rest of your life doing. It's such a quick progression with lots of advanced material. Combined with a complete breakdown of my personal structure and self-accountability, it's a disaster in the making. 

ADHD made many teachers think I was the smart kid, breezing past most of the material with no effort. Then they saw me as unable to pass the middle plateau of effort and labelled me as not trying enough. I was obviously smart, so why did I do so poorly in the second half. Must have suddenly become lazy I guess. Poor expectations and a lack of self-understanding led to me passing, but never truly excelling in school. And college drove the final nail in for me. Getting past the learning plateau is such an obstacle that many decide to give up and just rest on the plateau and go learn something else instead.

 With love and insanity equally,

J.M.