I'm saying that there's a subset of people (people like me) who find this approach enjoyable. Maybe you find it difficult to believe; that's cool. I'm not here to litigate whether these people exist. I didn't write this article for the HN audience, and I think some of the lurkers have likely found it helpful. I am offering what would have closed the gap for me. I trust my intuition on this.
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As I said in the comment above, I do enjoy it as well, what I am pushing back is calling it pedagogical approach or teaching.
If you taught, you know that you and your mind don’t matter much in the process of teaching, your student’s mind is in the center.
Talking about something based on your own experience into an abstract void and hoping that some lurker’s mental model matches yours is not a rigorous pedagogical approach.
Ordering topics by strict topological sorting with no cyclical dependencies, ensuring that there's a consistent picture built with each step, and that this picture monotonically converges towards the correct model as you move towards the end of the article is a rigorous pedagogical approach.
No, that’s just rigorous writing. Rigorous pedagogical approach implies helping other minds to solve problems and obstacles with acquiring knowledge. Your approach results in coincidental learning because you don’t care about the mind of your learners and their problems, you care about your own.
I do suggest to experiment with your writing — try writing only about your own journey (and nothing else!), try sitting down with another person, multiple people, and teaching them the same thing. Try writing a post for them and them only after the session and see whether there are any differences.
A good teacher is not the one who proclaims themselves to be one.
Good luck!
Let’s just call it a blog post. I used the word “teaching” loosely and didn’t mean to hit a nerve. If somebody else called a carefully assembled sequence of learning units teaching, I wouldn’t blink an eye at that, so I applied this to the post. “Rigorously writing about sharing what I’ve learned in a way that I would’ve found useful” sounds good to me.
>I wouldn’t blink an eye to that
And I said that, in my opinion, this is where your post failed to communicate what you intended to communicate and you have a crowd of “aktshually, this is wrong” in the comments.
Seriously, without any snark intended, if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.
Bad teaching elicits negative response, so don’t mislead people into thinking you will teach them anything. If they learn because your heuristic works for them, they will.
I might be wrong, of course, but I believe (and hope) that you will have a lot more empathetic and friendly response.
You didn’t hit a nerve, I just like talking about communication and learning.
> if you intend to write more about language learning, try sticking to strictly “this is where I struggled, this was my heuristic and this was the gap that I had, and this is how I solved it for myself”.
This is literally what my post says!!! It’s the entire framing of the post. Please read it:
> i've tried to learn Japanese verb conjugation a few times before. at first, it looks simple (you just swap suffixes!), but there's a lot of nuance that can drag you down as a learner. i found a system i prefer but let me first explain why i struggled. […] i found this approach to teaching deeply frustrating and unsatisfying.
You’re projecting some kind of fantasy onto my post where it’s presumably claiming that it’s the best way to learn or that I’m a great teacher or whatever. Instead the post is literally sharing what worked for me, and what I wish was available.
I did, I didn’t have a problem understanding your goals as I said in one of the comments in the beginning:
> I understand you were writing about your own process of filling the gaps (btw, I also find it easier, or at least more fun, to understand the basics of grammar before memorizing all the specific forms)
(you focused on the fact that you also aimed to teach and we discussed that aspect a little bit), but a lot of people in the comments didn’t understand the goal of your post — why do you think it happened?