> If there are seven proven ways to success and your teacher can only show you the fourth best way, that still beats the two hundred ways leading to nowhere presented to you on the Internet.
My experience is exactly the opposite. Most teachers are about the same level as you'd get from a random blog post (since these are often the people writing those blog posts). But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
The only exceptions where a teacher is essential are areas where you learn by doing and being critiqued, not by reading/watching. E.g. instrument/voice lessons, team sports, dancing, acting, etc. Or when you're close to the top of your field and the remaining knowledge is only in top experts' heads because they haven't written it down yet.
> But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs.
One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject.
The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field.
These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things.
The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter.
It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with.
Students can learn The One True Way from their teachers as well. I think that has more to do with who is learning and who is teaching than it has to do with whether they learned from a teacher or from a video.
Even without the junior getting overconfident, being able to read an article about something you're trying to learn and also being able to detect bullshit on a subject you don't know about is a skill in itself.
If I decided to learn Rust today, I'd be able to catch the sentences that go against my intuitions in programming and double check them. If I were to read an article about, say, superconductors, I don't have that same intuition as I do for coding. I'd have to fact-check every single sentence or just take it as truth.
> It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources
As long as it’s kept in check I think it’s practically a necessary development stage for many. Everyone needs a starting point from where they evaluate and integrate other values and perspectives. Humility and pragmatism are learned through the process.
It's also extremely motivating to learn a new field if you think you're shortcutting your way to expertise by following a big guru. By the time you realize how things really are, you're already deep enough in the topic to go further with ease.
A great conductor once said to me, "I really like your new voice teacher, he really knows what he's doing. Not like your last voice teacher, he didn't know anything. Your first teacher was on the right path, too bad you didn't understand the message yet."
I heartily agreed the whole way through, until he revealed he had no idea who any of my teachers were. It's just that everyone feels that way.
The lesson is: blindly following a series of teachers like oracles is the way of the beginner. The path of the master is accepting that YOU are your own teacher, and everyone else is just providing tools.
This is junior developers, not anything to do with internet influencers.
Used to see the same thing with every junior developer who went to a conference or read a new book. I did it myself at that point in my career. All kinds of enthusiasm (which can be good) and ideas (which might not be good because the junior developer does not have the experience to be a good judge).
I largely agree with you (and saw this a lot during my working years), but sometimes it's the only way new knowledge (of new frameworks, languages, ways of working, etc.) come into a company/project.
> you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world
My complaint in these cases is that yes, I can find it, but I would first have to know what I'm looking for and yet I have no way to recognize what the best book is.
If I wanted to learn about Sparta, I would have no way of knowing whether Paul Cartledge's book is better than Stephen Hodkinson's or Steven Pressfield's. And God help me if one of them has a loyal Twitter following spamming 5-star reviews everywhere...
This is why there are forums and places like Reddit (RIP?) and Quora (RIP).
I come from a really small town and made it further than anyone I know in that town in tech. (Not in terms of money, though)
Just Google: "best books on Sparta reddit". You will find 10 threads, and on those threads if you look at top-k, you will see some entries recurring. And two-three lines of explanation.
Read a non-trivial amount of sections to know whether it is what you are looking for. Library is a good place. You can also check Google Books or pirate before buying.
Not only about books but about MOOCs, YT playlists, and so on.
I have used this method since Junior year in High School, straight up to Master’s degree. I always got good grades, many times topped the class.
But that's just called research. If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find blog posts or reddit threads about what the best book is, or to find the multi-paragraph reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and see what they say, or professional book reviews of them.
So you absolutely do have a way of knowing. What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be. And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.
> But that's just called research. If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find blog posts or reddit threads about what the best book is, or to find the multi-paragraph reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and see what they say, or professional book reviews of them.
> So you absolutely do have a way of knowing.
As long as you already know enough about Sparta to be able to tell whether those blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are legit or spam.
> What you usually don't have a reliable way of knowing is how good of a teacher on Sparta a local history teacher happens to be.
Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?
> And the answer is usually, not good enough to write a book on it.
Which, coincidentally, can be said for most authors as well, but that doesn't stop them from writing a book and then flooding the internet with blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews about how good it is.
> As long as you already know enough about Sparta to be able to tell whether those blog posts, Reddit threads, and Amazon and Goodreads reviews are legit or spam.
Nope, it's more of just a generalized credibility/bullshit detector. It has zero to do with the topic at hand. This is a major life skill that is important to develop.
> Are you saying you honestly can't think of a way to vet a local teacher? How about taking to their students?
You can figure out if they're good at teaching as a general skill (although contacting a bunch of students who are willing to take the time to talk to you is a lot of work). It's quite difficult to suss out their actual knowledgeability, however. For example, you can find a local moral philosophy professor who is well-liked, but who will teach everything through a lens of Kantianism and disparage consequentialism and never even mention virtue ethics. And you could spend 50 hours of private tutoring and never know you were receiving major bias and being left with huge gaps -- something unlikely to happen if you spent the same time carefully reading a couple of well-respected intro textbooks on the subject.
> ...and then flooding the internet...
See above about credibility/bullshit detection. Remember, don't look at average stars or anything like that, look for posts/reviews that go in-depth where you can tell the reviewer knows what they're talking about, and then look for consistent commonalities between posts.
> Nope, it's more of just a generalized credibility/bullshit detector. It has zero to do with the topic at hand. This is a major life skill that is important to develop.
I guess the same detector hasn't been developed well enough to apply to teachers promoting themselves. That's a shame, generalizing is an important life skill to develop.
No, the detector is the same, it's just that you usually don't have hundreds of people reviewing local teachers, including well-known expert reviewers, in the way that you can find hundreds of reviews for individual books. There needs to be enough data to find the signal in the noise.
And even when you do, you should still remember that almost anyone can find and have access to a world-class book, while you're quite unlikely to have a world-class expert locally to teach you.
> where you can tell the reviewer knows what they're talking about
I do not believe this is possible. Sure, you can tell if the reviewer thinks he knows what he is talking about, and that some internet people agree with him, but you cannot judge whether he is really correct unless you are already a subject matter expert.
> If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find
Oh god. Why Sparta? Why this particular historiographical can of worms, where the history of the history is far more convoluted than the history of Lacedaemon itself?
No. Someone without a pretty solid knowledge of Ancient Greek history and historiography and the skills to be able to track the changes in the research literature is going to have a damn hard time finding the best book on Sparta.
Suppose you farm out this decision about which book is best to your teacher. How do you know your teacher selected the best book? How did you find your teacher?
> The only exceptions where a teacher is essential are areas where you learn by doing and being critiqued, not by reading/watching. E.g. instrument/voice lessons…
I don’t think this is an exception. Record yourself doing these things and critique yourself. It’s not as valuable as having multiple people critique you, but it’s not less valuable than having one other stranger critique you. Until you gain a certain level of competence you’ll know where and how you suck.
I’m currently learning bass guitar and recording myself has been incredibly valuable for seeing and hearing things I don’t notice when I’m playing. I think it’s also sort of closed the gap between what I think I sound like and how I actually sound when I play. (I’d recommend it even if you get a teacher.)
my only teachers have been online videos and web pages. I can’t see how a teacher can add value here. If I got one, I’d most likely be learning the teacher’s way. I’m finding a lot of value in hearing multiple POVs, trying it all out, finding what works for me and whose opinions I should value.
The article says teachers are faster, but I can evaluate online video sources much faster and more easily than I can evaluate teachers.
I might not learn faster but I certainly learn more and at a deeper level, because my mind is engaged in every part of the process.
As an aside, I think teachers often gloss over things that they think don’t matter right now. You’re getting a short cut, but you either miss out on something or later have to learn how that thing connects to what you know. Often, I find taking a moment to learn a little bit about that thing can aid you on your overall goal.
Interesting.
I learned bass guitar (fretless - I don't much like fretted bass) without a teacher, and did fairly well at it. I was able to get gigs etc. and play adequately at an amateur level.
For learning double bass, later, a teacher was useful and perhaps even necessary. It is a physically harder instrument and direct feedback from someone in the same room watching me was very helpful.
From a teaching perspective, I have taught fencing for over 30 years. One thing I notice with many students is that they lack the ability to use proprioception. They think they are doing the thing they are supposed to do, but cannot feel that their body isn't doing it. Unlike a YouTube video I can see this and let them know, and also suggest means by which they might get to their goal.
Having said that, I had one student who did quite well studying YouTube videos during the pandemic when classes were suspended. That student still benefitted from coaching later, but it was more along the lines of refinement of existing skill rather than imparting the basics.
In relation to videos, these are useful for improving fencing also. Students will often be surprised to see what they look like during a bout.
I think one of the issues is that there can be a significant gap in the level of teachers that you encounter. There are tons of teachers out there that are probably not much better, and maybe even worse, than going through people on YouTube, personal websites, online courses, etc. But then there are the truly masterful teachers in which the experience is on a whole different level, where the learning is beyond what you could do on your own. It's more on the level of a traditional guru, in the original sense of the word [1].
I've had both experiences, and I agree, in most cases a private teacher might not be worth it, but if you find the right person, it'll bring you way further than you ever could have gone on your own.
I agree. The right teacher can prune dead-end paths, quickly identify your weaknesses, provide you with tools and (importantly) explain their reasoning. They might also introduce you to more “meta” concepts and connections that you otherwise might have missed (which personally helps me stay interested and gain better mastery).
If they can’t do that last bit, they’ll certainly help get you up to speed quickly, but you’ll be missing out on larger contextual understanding.
That said, I’ve seen these types of teachers favor people who have shown themselves capable of learning and reasoning about what they’re doing. And finding these teachers often requires either luck, connections, or already having a certain level of knowledge.
So, I’d say grab a hold of such a teacher if you can, but in the context of the article, just finding a teacher isn’t necessarily a net benefit; you should do everything you can do to learn outside of a teacher. (And I’d say that’s true even if you get a teacher.)
Edit: I also meant to say, if you don’t know what you don’t know, finding a teacher isn’t necessarily easy. Getting started solo can really help you get an idea of what you don’t know and can aid in finding someone who knows those things.
Self evaluating in this way really can push someone to the next level in a skill they are trying to learn! It seems especially effective when learning an instrument.
One on one a good teacher is far more effective than even the world's best book or video.
As a child I was taught one on one when I had trouble. It really got me unstuck as needed. I still remember some of those lessons fondly.
I used to teach one on one for pay. I've taken the worst cs student in class and in a few weeks made them well above average. I've helped people pass math classes that they were completely failing at in just a few hours. This isn't anything special.
And now teaching my PhD students one on one I know each very well. I know what they know, what they tend to miss, and no amount of online videos or books will be better than a tailored explanation designed just for them where I recast a tricky problem into one that they already know.
You haven't experienced a good teacher one on one.
I read a lot of discussion here that focuses on learning as some kind of basic skill acquisition. How to I learn Rust? How to I learn to speak conversational Japanese?
Other topics require judgement, the weighing of alternatives. Sometimes there is no clear winner.
When you just need to know a fact, searching online or asking GPT is a good way to go.
I haven't had good luck learning higher level concepts this way. One example: how would you discover an idea like "don't repeat yourself" if you didn't know it? There's a school of thought that says you'll learn it when you need it, but I'm not so sure - I think you can make faster progress if someone guides you through several complex improvements at once.
Another example: say you're writing a networked game and you are communicating some basic information but you are also communicating inforation that is derived from the basic information (and hence is unnecessary to send). How do you learn this is inelegant, "repeating yourself", a waste of bandwidth? A critique from a mentor would clue you in right away.
> But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
To agree with you to some extent, the author fails to consider that you're often not looking for random unrelated things. Finding one really great answer online often provides you with a really great resource for other really great answers.
There's tons of exceptions. But there's a reason people who graduate with teaching degrees have the lowest SAT scores of pretty much any major/discipline.
Not denying the validity of that but if we agree that “teaching” as the ability to relay unintuitive concepts in a way relevant to the student, there’s not an section on standardized tests where that burgeoning skill would be detectable.
A teacher obviously has to have some baseline level of intellect/subject knowledge but so much of teaching is everything else (eg pertinent examples, optimally sequencing lessons, illustrating how things fit together etc).
Anecdotal but similarly in sports it seems like many of the best coaches were career role players and given their lesser talent, have a much better understanding of the myriad techniques that aided their development. Whereas someone like lebron (not saying he’d be a bad coach) is so inherently talented he probably has less of a grasp on communication because it comes so naturally. The passing reads he was making as a junior in high school were more advanced than most of the NBA today lol.
And learning is exponential so I don’t think it’s a teacher job to lead you all the way there just far along enough so anyone with enough aptitude can figure out the rest themselves. I could just be trying to further validate my belief but I almost think it’s dangerous to inherit the entirely of someone else’s knowledge since every view we develop is influenced to some extent by our own life experiences. Also just for diversity of thought
Misconceptions are insidious because you don't know what you don't know (e.g. boneappletea, france is bacon).
A private tutor, coach-like, can observe and correct, and fill in gaps. I think this applies to all fields of endeavour. It won't make you smarter, but gives you a foundation for the next level - where, maybe, some intuitive smarts of yours will shine.
Now, the only problem is simply finding a good tutor. You just need to know if they know what you don't know you don't know.
Pretty much. And people I did mentor wandered off after like 2-3 sessions (into which I put a ton of time), or they got a lot better during a project we worked on together, went off to do other projects, and a year later, I was correcting the exact same mistakes.
As a mentor, you have to be really selective about your mentees (unless it's part of your job of course).
I can do it during work hours, but not really outside that. Or I dunno, maybe young people wouldn't mind doing mentoring sessions after 8:30pm and that would be a more enriching way for me to unwind than zoning out with an ever-diminishing number of interesting TV shows?
As a person who has mentored people and is currently a mentor, I can name a number of reasons-
* to contribute to my company/community
* to make myself a multiplier (I can do work or I can help 5 junior engineers be a little better at their work)
* to learn myself (a great way to learn is by teaching)
* to grow my breadth of knowledge (I hear about what other people are doing)
* to grow my network
* to improve my leadership/managerial skills
* because people have invested time and mentorship in me
Exactly. The guy makes it sound like good mentors ( which he strangely calls 'personal teachers' ) are hanging around every street corner waiting for someone to procure their services.
It's strange to see the obvious so heavily upvoted. Really? Nobody knew that a good mentor is worth his weight in gold?
I have found ChatGPT quite useful in teaching me new things. I know it might hallucinate, but human teachers are not always right, either.
I think in the future, the main value of going to college will be socializing, networking, and learning "life" skills through interactions with others, dorm mates, etc. The teaching part will be already taken care of by AI.
But with a teacher, I can get a feel of their qualifications after a while (or cross-reference whatever they tell me) and if they're wrong, I can go somewhere else.
Also, a teacher is less likely to gaslight me and hopefully will research the topic in case they're not sure about something. With AI, it's always a coin toss.
I don't know, maybe I'm just a old person yelling at clouds, but I just find it crazy to use AI for learning anything. Maybe one day.
With GPT it's more like rolling a d20 than a coin toss.
19-20=You receive the enlightenment you were asking for, more or less instantly.
3-18=You get what amounts to a Socratic conversation with Wikipedia. Which, unless you're fortunate enough to have access to expert personal mentorship, is better than what you had before.
1-2=You get a load of highly-plausible bullshit. You end up worse off intellectually, possibly much worse.
All in all, I'm OK with these odds, especially at this early stage of the LLM game.
With an AI you also get a feel for what they typically know and what they'll probably fail at. The limitations are mostly consistent, at least on a per-model basis. Even more so than humans, since they never grow or learn anything new.
I feel like I've learned a ton of new things from GPT 4 in terms of software development recently, while also feeling I've been stagnating in my job with nobody to learn from. It's just so easy to have it explore alternative approaches or have it structure things in ways you may not be comfortable with yet (and would thus otherwise avoid) but would be better in the long run. It has the breadth to show you all that's possible while reducing the entry effort for learning to near zero.
It's just another useful tool, just like books, the internet, and real teachers are useful tools. They all have their pros and cons. The advantage of chat bots is that they're always there and scale to an arbitrarily large number of students. The advantage of teachers is that they're, well, people.
That seems very unlikely to me. Certainly LLMs are very compute intensive relative to past applications, but I would find it shocking if they are not nonetheless far more scalable than human labor.
Human beings are incredibly incredibly expensive to "make" into any useful adult thing. I have spent more money just this week just on a single one of the humans who are dependent on me than it would cost me to buy a fully packaged GPU in a box at best buy (and I think that box would actually have multiple GPUs packaged together in it). And I'll do that week after week for many more years. And then it will still be like four more years after that before they're capable of being a teacher.
It was harder to make the first GPU than to make one marginal unit of human teacher, but it's vastly easier to make a marginal unit of GPU.
I'm honestly curious what your mental model is, where you seem to think human labor is cheaper than computer hardware...
> I think in the future, the main value of going to college will be socializing, networking, and learning "life" skills through interactions with others, dorm mates, etc. The teaching part will be already taken care of by AI.
Based on a recent experience, I agree.
I'm not a professional software engineer or architect, but I have a web app used by a few thousand people a month and recently decided to rewrite it using modern web technologies — Vue 3, Vite, Pinia, TypeScript, and serverless functions. I was familiar with these, but hadn't used them for a real project. During the rewrite, I leaned hard on GPT-4/Phind/Copilot as teachers/pair programmers. It's hard to overstate how helpful these tools were.
For the questions I had, search engines were hit-or-miss. Within a few days it became clear that the pre-2023 "search engine" is dead, and that post-2023 search engines will look like these new LLM-powered tools. The future of topic-specific search engines is well represented by Phind, which leverages GPT-4 but is also trained with current technical documentation and includes references in answers.
This is really something that has to be experienced to be understood. I have a friend who's a professional software engineer, and he had to watch me for a couple hours before it really clicked. I recommend trying this if you haven't already.
I’ll second this.
It really shines when learning new technologies in a field in which you already have some expertise. Being able to apply the smell test, or quickly validate the output is important.
I haven’t tested this, but I would imagine the type of information you’re requesting dictates the quality of response you’ll get. In my case I use it mainly as interactive documentation for different tooling. Asking it to explain the process for synthesizing new hypothetical polymers likely will not yield useful results.
It’s worth noting that my experiences are with GPT 4.
I've been using it a lot while working through two very math-y books right now - Princeton's Companion to Mathematics and Data-Driven Science and Engineering. To your point, I have some background in undergraduate level mostly applied math, but there are a lot of things where I don't understand the argument or immediately have an intuition for what's going on, and I've found gpt-4 to be actually really helpful with that. Sometimes it is wrong, but it can't totally BS me, because I'm sitting there looking at the correct equations and proofs, so if it's wrong I always know what's right. But a lot of times it really helps me with intuitions on things that if I was purely just self-learning, outside a class with a professor and TA, I'd probably just accept the poorer level of understanding and move on, instead of investing the time in trying to find what I'm looking for on the internet.
I think something that would be awesome would be human teachers scaling themselves via AIs. Like students having an escalation path to say "wait, I'm confused and the AI isn't helping!" and have the teacher step in to try to help. Or even better, step in to help proactively after the AI says "hey, this person is asking questions or answering things in a way that makes me think they are confused, maybe take a look?".
If someone is already building something like this, I'd love to hear about it :)
> but human teachers are not always right, either.
It also seems to me that it's gotten a lot better about hallucinating. When I first started using it it would often be wildly wrong, but not it seems like it hallucinates about as much as the average person I talk to.
Yep. You know the "10,000 hours of directed practice is how you master a subject" meme? A good teacher's where that direction comes from. The good teacher will look at what you're doing and what you're struggling with and point you to exactly the right tool in the complicated toolset you're trying to pick up, and show you how much easier it makes your task.
Finding the good teacher is, of course, a quest in and of itself. My experience is that becoming an assistant to an expert in the field is a great fast track to mastery, once you're good enough. Ideally a paid one, unpaid internships are super easy to abuse.
I thought it was 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. You seem to be talking about something closer to formative assessment. (I think both are useful.)
> The good teacher will look at what you're doing and what you're struggling with and point you to exactly the right tool in the complicated toolset you're trying to pick up, and show you how much easier it makes your task.
I disagree with this.
If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend you read 'How to solve it' by George Pólya. It's focused on teaching and learning math, but the same applies to many other subjects.
One of the main points in the book is that you can help a student who is stuck or on a wrong path by suggesting a question to them: a question that they might ask themselves.
If your teacher always tells you which tool to use, how will you ever learn to pick your own tools in future?
I disagree with your disagreement. Asking the student a question is a fine thing to do if the student already half-assedly knows the entirety of the toolset. If they only know about 1/10 of the toolset, then a teacher looking at their work and saying "did you know that this tool exists, I think it will help you a ton" is a major help.
Struggling to do something, seeing the expert who is teaching/mentoring you do it in a fraction of the time, then doing it yourself in a fraction of the time as you try the tool/technique they just demonstrated is a powerful experience that I have had multiple times in my life.
This was what I did for acquiring the Japanese language. I definitely credit it for my success. After seeing how successful it was, from both an efficiency perspective and from a motivation/accountability perspective, I promised myself to be proactive in hiring 1:1 teachers for various subjects/hobbies/sports for my kids later in life.
Would you be open to speaking more about your experience? What level of Japanese did you have prior? And now?
I swear by coaches/instructors in other areas of my life, but haven’t had much luck with language teachers. I’ve had private teachers with middling success (great at correction, bad at longer term planning), and found I had more improvement by self-studying.
I took it in high school prior (for two years), so when starting, I knew ~all of the kana characters, maybe a dozen kanji characters, and had a very solid pronunciation baseline, but had mostly forgotten how to conduct basic conversations or talk about anything of substance. I've since moved to Japan, so it's hard to disentangle my immersion experience from 1:1 learning, but I was pretty much able to conduct any conversation that I needed to have, including fairly abstract ones, when I first moved here.
In the interim year since, I've continued the 1:1 lessons and obviously improved a lot naturally as well. I've had multiple people ask me if I was half-Japanese (I'm not) and other people tell me "it would be rude to say you're good at Japanese; it's more apt to say you can just speak it normally." Other people don't mention it at all and just treat me as they would any other Japanese person. (Which sometimes backfires because they use high diction or very arcane expressions and idioms.)
For me, the key was finding a 1:1 teacher that I could meet 2-3 times a week (we met remotely over Skype), and I mixed basic conversational practice in along with targeted grammar study. iTalki is where I first started down this path of 1:1 tutoring, (where I found my first few teachers), and it's worked out great for me.
How did you structure your Italki sessions? Did you just do conversation practice or did you leave it up to your tutor? Also, do you have any recommendations for good online tutors (on Italki or elsewhere)?
I structured my hourly classes with a rough target of 20 min of free-form conversation (usually on a topic or two I or the sensei wrote down in a shared google doc ahead of time) followed by 40 min of structured lesson prepared by the sensei (grammar, vocab, textbook stuff).
I think that's something missing from adulthood--study or learning groups. There's a chance that in every group you'll have someone good at something, so you can teach eachother. Personally, I am unsure how to approach someone with such a request, it feels like such an imposition to them. Unless someone is professionally offering services, I'd feel awkward asking. Though in my experience, people who sign up to teach often shouldn't.
I think these groups are out there, but unfortunately they are informal (not listed on the web or through a company), and also are not for a beginner level.
For me, I’ve been learning how to surf and cook. I found at an absolute beginner level no one really wants to go out surfing with you, or do dinner parties. I did find once I showed enough commitment, and reached a beginner-intermediate level, more people were willing to join me in learning, and form informal learning groups.
I think this is just downstream of the general accumulation of demands on one's time in adulthood. It would be a great thing for people in their first decade or so after finishing school, much like meetups and conferences are great for that, but eventually it's difficult to prioritize this sort of thing over family and other life happenings.
Friend groups at an expert level* of anything often involve knowledge sharing a lot like study groups.
> I am unsure how to approach someone with such a request, it feels like such an imposition to them
Just surround yourself with competent people and you will have friends to share knowledge with both ways.
* Around senior, principal, director, fellow levels in their discipline. C-suite seems different, hard to develop friendships based on expertise with many of them.
My biggest concern would be learning from someone who only has a basic procedural understanding of a topic.
I mean, imagine I'm learning how to make an angel food cake and it comes out tough. The teacher's didn't. Are they prepared to help me debug my process? If they can list possible causes instantly, they're definitely helpful. If not, :shrug:.
universities don't just exist for 20 year olds. A lot of unis offer part-time enrollment, individual courses over a summer or winter or you could even just sit in.
Things that are missing for me to have found this helpful:
- how to get a teacher
- anecdotes about how having a teacher affected your life
- why a teacher I found at the pub is better than a udacity course
I have done this recently, through upwork for a tech related topic. I am very comfortable with platform but I'm sure I could have used a different one for other topics.
Posted a job description – initially setup by asking gpt4 to help write it down, then grammarly to make it solid; setup interviews with a bunch of people; got on a call with a handful; chose one whit whom I'm working with once or twice a week.
Did it because YT tutorials were not helping, because there are a lot of them(hot topic), from many different people, with quickly outdated material, and un-interesting or annoying people(too many memes, jokes, or segways).
Now I have someone I pay to get on a call a few times per week, we go over the assignments, I ask questions, they tell me what to look out for and how to do it better.
I have accepted to pay per hour a bit above what I make on my fulltime job.
"Outdated material". This is main reason I go with Udemy courses on subjects I'm really serious about learning. Many, if not all, of the best teachers on there update their courses with new material as needed.
I don't see this on YT as much and there are subjects, mainly front end JS frameworks, that are frequently changing. So much so that I often run into backwards breaking changes and have to resort to the comments section for corrections.
It would be nice if creators would hide their videos once they start getting outdated, or clearly mark them with version numbers in the titles, but they're not incentivised to do that so I shouldn't blame them.
I sense that youtube is happy with users wasting away looking for the right video tutorial.
Since I agree with the OP, here's my attempt at answering your questions.
I always wanted to paint portraits - I can draw people relatively well, but they never look like the people I'm actually portraying. And my drawings are very 2-dimensional, which is a conscious style choice that nonetheless doesn't lend itself well to real-life portraits.
I started following Bob Ross and, while I did get some okay paintings out of it, the end result was never what I intended. My brush simply didn't move the way his does and as a result my trees didn't look very happy. I next signed up for a popular online platform that's primarily focused on art lessons, but again, my exercises kept going out of control because I couldn't get the paint to behave in the same way as in the videos. And I found myself yelling at the screen several times because, say, the artist in the video would add violet to a person's skin, the end result would look very good, but at no point was there an explanation for why would you even think about adding violet to paint skin.
How did a random teacher help? Because they give me real-time feedback on what I'm doing, they warn me about mistakes before I build everything on top of them, they answer my infinite "but why?" questions, and provide useful background about how to reason my way into whatever I'm trying to achieve. No Udacity course will look at your code and say "this is fine, but this algorithm will not scale beyond 10k records and also your comments need to be more informative".
I found my current teacher looking online for well-rated teachers near me, but this has also been my experience with teachers whose online rating I truly don't know.
> I can draw people relatively well, but they never look like the people I'm actually portraying. And my drawings are very 2-dimensional, which is a conscious style choice that nonetheless doesn't lend itself well to real-life portraits.
Look at some masters of caricature and cartooning, find photos of some of their favorite subjects, think about how these drawings exaggerate what's there in the shapes of the subject's face/body/motion. This is how you make a drawing that is simultaneously a stylized 2D rendering and one that "looks like" its subject.
Like, get some coffee table books of Hirschfeld or Sorel or someone else who did a lot of caricatures of celebrities and study the heck out of them. Copy some of their drawings with photos of the subjects close to hand. Look at a person and ask yourself what they'd do here, and draw that.
Hopefully this is something your teacher has already gotten you doing! But if they haven't, then give it a try, and see what they have to say about your attempts.
All else being equal, 1:1 study with teacher will beat classroom handily, and probably will beat self studying as well.
But the things is that all else is not equal. Even putting cost aside, the main challenge is how you find a good teacher if you know nothing on the subject. If you are on your third teachers, suddenly the shitty blog post might not be that shitty any more. There is also logistics challenge (scheduling etc.) that reduces the effectiveness of getting a teacher.
I think people already knew that having a teacher is good. The question of how to get one is that hard part.
Most teachers don't want to be stuck for months teaching someone the basics readily available on the internet, in literature, and recently, even GPT. But there are bootcamps and paid teachers in many disciplines for the very entry-level folks.
It's easy to get a teacher when you're above intermediate in most topics. You also provide value to the teacher by bringing new ideas. That is more of an informal process of developing mutually beneficial friendships. You don't call your expert friends teachers, though you do teach each other a lot. And those friendships can definitely be seen as teaching.
Arnold Schwarzenegger talks about many people "showing him the way" in expert circles in his biography miniseries on Netflix. That is effective knowledge sharing.
Teachers provide you with so much. Not only can they give you exactly the right knowledge at the right time, the good ones will keep your motivation topped up to get you through slumps and dips.
I started learning to sing 3 years ago. I've had two different teachers and I'm confident in saying I would have never learnt even a tenth of what I know without them. Teachers and coaches really come into their own when it comes to realtime skills. You just don't have the mental space to perform the learning task and assess your performance at the same time.
Common guys, read the post again! The message here is about the form, not the content. Sure, one could find the best book/videos on the internet and shape himself till the final sensei form is obtained. But, unless motivated by some life changing events, 90% of us clearly lack the spine for keeping close-to-max effort for longer time periods (including me aswell).
The benefit of 1:1 teaching and private tutoring isn't just "saving time" or a way to get notes for something, it's prime for understanding how to connect what you know and then how to apply it (synthesis and application). Also helps you know what your known knowns and unknown knowns are (and often revising something with your mentor will enlighten you to something that used to be an unknown unknown)
> Bloom's paper analyzed the results of University of Chicago PhD students Joanne Anania and Joseph Arthur Burke who, through their dissertations' research, found that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment with one teacher to 30 students, with or without mastery learning. As quoted by Bloom: "the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class".[1]: 4 Additionally, the variation of the students' achievement changed: "about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%" of the control class.[1]:
I would like to learn how to set up a Python Docker environment on my personal computer. YouTube videos are all over the place. Is there a resource for finding rated personal teachers?
That may be, but it's fairly well documented that 1:1 tutoring from an expert is absurdly[1] more effective than e.g. classroom teaching. If it wasn't for the fact that it's just as absurdly expensive, it would definitely be the norm.
Excellent article. I always loved 1-1 tutoring, but in grad school I discovered I hated teaching. I read the wiki page and some of the paper, then got to thinking about it more.
It feels like the difference between watching TV and playing a video game. In one case the content is the same for everyone, and you're passively consuming it at the pace set by the broadcaster/teacher. The other case is considerably more interactive and engaging. The pace, difficulty, and even storyline can be adjusted according to the player's abilities and choices.
Not learning the same way is not necessarily an argument to not get a teacher or mentor.
I learn in a very specific way; when studying languages, I was not able to find a language partner who was both consistently available and could adapt to my learning methodology. So I went with someone who was consistently available and supplied the teaching framework myself.
I hear this a lot. I think it's a dangerous crutch. Learning is hard work, no matter how well the given style of teaching matches the preferred style of learning. It's easy to give up any pursuit when it gets to be hard. If you distract yourself with the concern that there might be a mismatch between styles, but the real problem was just that it's a hard subject to master, then you'll waste time shopping around for new styles, starting over, blaming the teacher, criticizing the quality of the materials, etc., when all you really had to do was keep studying and practicing.
Everyone learns better with a teacher because no matter how you think you learn best, getting feedback from someone who actually knows what they are talking about is required.
To be honest, i'm impatient and stubborn. When most people explain me things take so long I rather read or google it. Talking is slow, and people take a long time to get to the point.
Often the process of formulating the question by writing it down or talking about leads me to understand the problem and either know where to find the answer or often know the answer. On theoretical matters I hardly ever had a question that wasn't answered properly by someone online or in a book.
I think you're equating teacher with lecturer because of how classes are taught in school. They are not the same thing. A teacher can just be someone that gives you feedback and corrects you when you make missteps. If I recall correctly, this way of teaching is the idea behind Montessori schools.
Same, and it's pretty funny that people are downvoting you for this. Some people truly believe that their subjective perspective is the truth for everyone.
For me it’s the “Do X” phrasing that’s the problem. It’s like barking unsolicited, universal life advice at the world. Especially when peppered with instructions like “don’t listen to anyone who tells you different.” It feels as if a lot of bloggers think this imperative, imperious tone is necessary to be noticed and taken seriously.
There’s nothing wrong with blogging about something that works well for you, in case a reader can use [some part of] it in their own lives.
For me, in this world of ever-present tech, having a human (guitar) teacher is a wonderful breath of fresh air. Not only does he help me learn in way that the Internet never could, it's great to develop a connection with a person in an environment away from the Internet. I'm so glad that I finally reached out to find a teacher.
The best way to learn a subject or material you're really interested in is to gain a basic understanding of it on your own, and then try to explain it to someone else who asks a lot of questions. Those questions will reveal holes in your own understanding that you'd have difficultly finding entirely on your own.
Taking a formal structured course with graded assignments (or demanding workouts etc.), under the supervision of a paid teacher is mostly useful for when you're lacking in self-discipline (which most of us are to some degree, so it is a good idea particularly to develop necessary skills in areas you aren't all that excited about).
Wish I had a personal teacher while working on my c++ hobby project a while back.
I read Stroustrup, Meyers, plus the Core Guidelines, and I do my best. But it would have been great to show someone what I had done along the way, and have them critique and provide expert alternatives.
I feel like books can get you to a point of competence, but it's very difficult to reach a point of mastery or even excellence without someone there to show you what you're doing wrong in your specific case, and how to improve the way you work, or think about a problem.
From my point of view their skill is irrelevant. Almost all know how to make a good enough schedule and diet plan. It's pretty basic info. Or you can ask Chat GPT to make one. Or buy one online for 20 dollars. They are all similar.
The reason you want a PT is to keep you motivated & accountable. So most important is if you trust the PT, like him or her and will take it seriously if they hold you accountable (and the way they do it).
And in some cases if you want to start doing complex & heavy lifting it's important to have one showing you the correct movements.
Regarding heavy lifting it's not necessary, and would not get into super heavy lifting since it's very injury prone. On this level I strongly disagree with a lot of Pt's. They end up having most people do deadlifts. Which is just not worth the risk vs reward, let alone things like snatches. Medium-heavy squats & bench is enough for most people.
I personally just bought a bench, barbells, put some rings in the ceiling, got a pare of dumbbels, and a kettlebell. Enough for training and saves me hours a week not having to go to a gym.
You can "get abs" simply by rolling 72hr fasts with no physical activity, and easier, because you won't be as hungry since you weren't swimming/whatever for an hour.
I don't think like it is a good way to start for a long target. At the beginning, we can develope very quickly but then when you faill in many problem require the answer for why question not how. Check mate! Now you recognize that, your knowledge depend on your mentor and you must take time to back to the begin for the inside knowledge below.
This seems wildly out of reach even for people who make good money as SWE's.
I agree, being self taught is kind of a misnomer. I've hired PHD students to teach me maths concepts I forgot that I know I'd have no idea how to teach myself. PHD + open courseware or online stanford courses has done wonders since I'm getting properly back into ML / AI stuff.
You learn so much faster, it can be the same cost to get to a certain level as group classes, just faster.
If you're in the US and what you're learning is something that can be done online, then things are extremely in your favor. I've hired a Spanish tutor in Colombia and a math teacher in Serbia to great effect.
Computer science is large. While there is no person that knows even a fraction of the entire space, there are people who have devoted years to a specific framework, pattern, or language and can help you answer questions you didn't even know you had in a more holistic and tailored way than a book or video can do.
I also recommend Udemy as they have some great courses there.
Teachers are good for very specific questions that require many back and forths to nail down, if you try that in the internet, it would be like Tour de France but for Google search. Now if you are poor and not very connected, ChatGPT could be great for this, but still not as good as a good expert who will likely get you there faster
The world is full of chaos. A mentor can also can inflate you to an irreversible, terrible path. Being part of a collective is often more beneficial than walking the path alone. I believe it's better to learn within communities, where members can teach each other, rather than relying on advices from a single guru.
It’s quite amazing to find a post with close to zero substance (not my intention to offend its creator who submitted it) from some blog on some hosting platform with total of 2 entries (the other one is extended “Hello, Word”) to get meaningful time on top of the site, and generate some extended discussion.
How it works?
Teacher provides feedback, and most online resources are not. Feedback and corrections are extremely important in physical practices like dance, martial arts, car driving etc. One can avoid personal trainer/teacher in mental practices but it's almost required for physical.
Honestly, every time I move to a new city I just sign up for the closest gym near my house and take a random trainer from the gym. If I don't get along with them after 1-3 sessions I just ask to switch with someone else. 90% of the time I just keep the same trainer.
I have had a great amount of success taking classes at a maker space near me. It's maybe not "personal" in the sense of 1 on 1 100% of the class, but the classes are small and I usually get a ton out of them.
If you have a maker space nearby, they are a fantastic resource for learning. Some places even offer classes for non-members, which may be worth considering if you're not sure if you want to use the space for things besides classes.
This is a major red flag. Arbitrarily selecting the number seven is an attempt to mislead the superstitious numerologist types. It’s almost always the cue for well meaning opinionated bullshit
My experience is exactly the opposite. Most teachers are about the same level as you'd get from a random blog post (since these are often the people writing those blog posts). But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
The only exceptions where a teacher is essential are areas where you learn by doing and being critiqued, not by reading/watching. E.g. instrument/voice lessons, team sports, dancing, acting, etc. Or when you're close to the top of your field and the remaining knowledge is only in top experts' heads because they haven't written it down yet.