What if I had learned it differently the first time?
I hated physics. Of all the science courses I took in high school, physics was my least favourite. Of all the science courses I took in my undergraduate university degree, physics was my least favourite and by far, my lowest mark. And yet, I still did a Masters involving a lot of biomechanics, which requires…some physics. And the lesson I learned from my Masters was: I’m also not that fond of biomechanics.
Why did I have this story about physics that I didn’t have about biology or chemistry or maths? It wasn’t that I was dumb, or that I was incapable of learning or doing well in school. If any of those stories fit, I wouldn’t be where I am today. And here, I’m going to pass the buck (for reasons I will explain when I talk about statistics).
Looking back, my story about physics involves the story about physics CLASS. The way it was taught was a mismatch for the way I was thinking. And so, I developed a story about my capacity for learning physics — i.e. that I was just inherently bad at physics.
This is perhaps why tutoring can work so well for some people — because a good tutor can recognize both the existing story (“I’m inherently flawed and bad at X”) and the mismatch of conventional teaching. A good tutor can see the path AROUND.
I too, was bad at statistics. My first course in statistics was in my undergraduate, which was basically memorizing formulas and using tables to calculate/estimate t-scores and F-scores. I got credit for my first course in my Masters so I didn’t have to take “Statistics 1” again. So my second course in statistics was my Masters course in linear regression (4 months of nothing but linear regression), which made me feel like was bad both at statistics and coding. I think I barely scraped by on that one.
But in my PhD, they wouldn’t give me credit for my regression course because their advanced statistics course included all of linear regression, logistic regression and survival analysis all in one; and I hadn’t taken two out of the three. So I had essentially take linear regression all over again whether I liked it or not.
And that’s when the lightbulb went off.
I got lucky. I got SUPER LUCKY. And while not everyone in my class got lucky like me, I literally stumbled into a professor who more or less thought the same way as me. I actually GOT the material. I got it so well, that I took any course she was teaching in statistics, including the independent project course in statistics. And, the happy ending is that it changed the story I had about myself.
But this experience made we wonder: What if I had learned it all this way the FIRST time? And more catastrophically, what if I HADN’T gotten lucky? How would my story about myself be different? How would I have turned out differently?
The Critical Mass Mentorships are about making your own luck and changing the story you have about yourself in evidence-based practice.
What if you could turn out differently? What if you could learn it differently, not for the first time, but for the critical time?
Start telling a different story with Question the Start and End with the Question. Find out more at http://criticalmass.ninja
