Hi Lemmy! It is obvious that being a fast learner is advantageous. People like people that can get up to speed quickly and contribute to a project or team. Heck, I could put ‘fast learner’ on a resume and no one would think that’s weird. But what about slow learners?
Is there ever a time where it would have been better to learn a skill or get acquainted with something more slowly?
Are there any general benefits across all circumstances where being a slower learner can be advantageous?
And if there are any positives to taking more time to learning, is it something you could ever bring up on a resume or job interview? Would you ever find yourself saying to a hiring manager “I’m a slow learner, and here’s why that’s a good thing for your organization.” Or is it some abstract, unquantifiable positive thing like “I struggle to get good at things and that has built character,” or something like that?
TL;DR: In Avatar the Last Airbender terms, if you could have a choice between being a slow learner and struggling with everything (child Zuko) or learning fast and dominating at everything (child Azula), why would anyone ever choose the former?
If you want to teach a thing, slow learners have a huge advantage. They know the steps they took to figure it out. It wasn’t just instinct.
Also, you will definitely find some things hard to learn, at some point in your life. That’s when you develop learning strategies and problem solving skills. If you’re struggling more when you’re younger, you’ll build those skills at a younger age. Some people coast through school, and then they get into college without ever having asked for help. And then their pride gets in the way, because now they’re finding out they aren’t perfect and don’t know how to handle it.
So I have a hard time memorizing. This was especially irksome as classes increasingly was curved and I could not memorize content to regurgitate in an exam. One thing I have found though is that when I memorize something it stays with me for awhile. In high school I had to memorize a poem and a mcbeth soliloqy and I can still do them without much thinking to get it going and with decent fidelity. I do pull it out ever so often as a party trick or think about them so that is part of what keeps it going but its something I notice. Like I feel people have different half lives to their memory. Some can’t remember much from last year and I would say the vast majority of folks I know don’t seem to be able to remember what things were like 5 years ago. Kinda crazy.
Memorizing lines is a different strategy, but if you have to memorize isolated facts (like vocabulary), Anki Flashcards is amazeballs.
no matter the method its hard for me. what has worked the best for me is making mnemonics.
Yeah, mnemonics are great for lists!
You can play balatro for longer before you get bored of it
I sometimes say I’ve got a mind like a rock… it takes a long time to get things in there, but once they are there, they aren’t going anywhere. Another way to look at it is that there is a difference between max speed and max distance. I am very patient, and I will keep learning something to the point of mastery , but have little use for quickly acquired, disposable information and skills. As a learner, I will not go as fast as most, but I will be able to go further.
It is also helpful in teaching situations. When you have learned something slowly, it can make you more able to teach it to someone else.
There is a popular book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, which examines this in more detail.
Being a fast learner is better than being a slow learner, but being a slow learner is better than being a rushed learner.
I think music, done properly, takes time to develop and the traditional academic system is kind horrible for it.
The only advantage I can think of is that people will most likely expect less of you. Some traits are simply not positive and we gotta live with them. I’m very clumsy and uncoordinated, forgetful and unnecessarily critical at times, amongst many other things, and I just have to live being mindful of them to the best of my limited abilities. Having said that, you don’t need to be clever or mentally agile (or coordinated) to be righteous and prosocial, to be a “good person”, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day, right?
I run with the “formerly gifted child” crowd. There’s a few things that I think can come from the pressures of being seen as a “fast learner”. The main is that the first part of learning is often the easiest and the place where most progress is seen. However if you want to truly master a topic the rate slows way way down. Former gifted children often have an internalized pressure that everything should proceed at the same speed forever. It’s neither possible or sustainable and mostly leads to burn out.
Additionally there is a tendency of people to stick with the stuff that seems easier or comes more naturally. You see this a lot with academically talented kids dropping out of sports or music quickly because it’s hard for them. This builds an avoidance of persevering through difficult work. Again to master a given topic, even if it’s in their typical skill set they are going to have to slog through parts that are hard and uncomfortable.
I personally seek out teachers or tutors who struggle for B level grades because they’ve had to put work into understanding material rather than just being like of course this thing works this way.
There’s an S-curve to technology; I wonder if the same applies for learning.
Yes, I find music teachers who just naturally absorbed the material are the worst.
Similarly, native language teachers who haven’t studied how to teach the language are exceptionally bad teachers.
Sounds reasonable to me. I’m currently in a language class and the teacher for part two (of three beginner levels) is much more structure and willing to let us sit with “hard” or uncomfortable questions and I’ve picked up way more than the teacher I had for part one. But I’ve found it true for math and biology and yes music (voice).
The fact that you’re a slow learner is not an advantage.
The fact that you have traits such as meticulous, goal oriented, patient etc and learn despite this can be an advantage.
slow learner
“is it better to be smart or dumb”
Being a slow learner in my field, working on communication towers, is bad. People get hurt if someone on the team is not up to speed.
I don’t really see any advantages. But that’s just me.
