So I've built a couple of classes @ Virtuas over the last several months and I have had the chance to deliver them a few times. Some people seem to have really gotten it and others have not. After a few conversations with the other Practice Leaders I still have no idea how to make it so that everyone always gets it. Not that I really think that is possible but its a nice lofty goal. Anyway I've been thinking about how teaching my kids (we homeschool) is a lot like teaching in general. People have different learning styles and they learn in different ways. That is one of the reasons I do my classes the way I do. About half the time is spent talking and about half doing labs. But there is more to teaching a tech topic than how people learn.

There are more deminisions to the learning styles thing than you'd learn in a teaching class in college. I like to understand how things work, others like to know how to do things. What I'm wondering is what is the best way to explain something. For example in my MyFaces/JSF class I spend a lot of time the first day explaining the way JSF works and the lifecycle etc. Some people fall asleep during this (not literally, cause I throw stuff at people sleeping in my classes:) but others really dig it. The reason I like doing this is two fold. First I like to learn that way, Second I think that people who understand how something works will be better equiped to figure out how to fix problems when they come up.

Those that like to know how to do things approach the problem from a different perspective. First they want to understand how to make happen what they want to happen. They might not ever want to know how it works under the covers. You get to know how to get the job done without understanding how things work, under the covers. I have a lot of respect for this approach too. I adopt it in all kinds of ways. I generally know how a car works but I don't know or want to know the details. I generally understand how a CPU does its magic but I don't know or care about the details. I've not done assembly code in 15 years and I've forgotten everything I ever knew, and I'm OK with that.

I don't want to grok the physics/chemistry of how energy is released from gasoline to make my car move, I just want it to go when I press the accelartor. But I do want to understand the inards of my web framework or my persistence framework etc. So anyway I don't have the answer but its fun to think through this kind of stuff.