Thread: Depersonalization of shaving

Great article Mephisto, I can see how it can be applied to any learning experience, but I'm going to apply it while I am teaching Irish flute and whistle to my kids. Especially my self concious older daughter.


Mick

I read the article a few times over, I'm a bit slow; most of what I have learned in life was by repetition & taking self responsibility for the failures. I cannot agree with this teaching method of Depersonalization as a primary approach to learning, whether it be learning the violin, forging steel or the martial arts.

It was Mick's post, last line, "Especially my self conscious older daughter." , that puts Depersonalization in it's rightfull place, IMO. Depersonalization is a tactic of teaching that should only be used to overcome an obstacle, such as self-consciousness.

A teaching method is directly related to the target audience & course of study. I feel the article tries to make Depersonalization something new in training/teaching, it's not. I also think that using Depersonalization beyond overcoming a learning obstacle, leads to failure in the long run. There will come a time when the student will want more from his learned course of study. He or she will want to surpass his peers, adversaries in competition & life. When that time comes ( it will) and Depersonalization has been his/her ladder to date, he/she will have reached the end of that ladder. The tool has it's limits, the student does not. A student who has felt failure & accepted the responsibility for it, will feel deeply personal about that failure. This is a moment of clarity that must be taken advantage of & hopefully the teacher will have the skills to make this a positive moment on which to build an extension onto that ladder.

I understand teachers, such as the person writing the article (Sangeeta Swamy), wanting to develop new ways of learning; that's a good thing. Just that Ms. Sangeeta Swamy seems to have dismissed the success of all the individuals who learned "the hard way", so to speak; learning to dislike failure at a personal level and pushing forward, not to feel it again and going forward to excel in their skill.

In closing, living is personal & so is dying; our training should be too.

My ramblings, for a nickel.

Thanks for the thread, Mephisto

I have to agree with Hirlau. While there are some children that this would really work well for, in the US it has become a curse. Decades ago a study was done that found that successful people all had great self esteem. Rather than concluding that success causes good self asteem, the experts concluded that good self esteem causes success. There is now a generation out there - I employ many of them - that were raised that nothing was ever their fault. Score was never kept at sports or games. They didn't receive letter grades in school. That might hurt the feelings of any who didn't excel. Everyone got a gold star just for showing up, and above all, nothing that went wrong was ever their fault. They have amazing self esteem, but no skills. They are now trying to get into college and are being told no for the first time in their lives.

I appologize for the rant, I just really feel for these kids......