But…I don’t have a teacher?
I fear my students have ingrained that learning only happens in school, with a teacher. I love being a teacher, but it’s not the only way to learn. And the corollaries of this way of thinking are (1) I stop learning when I leave school, and (2) learning is regimented and often boring or only valuable in terms of imposed outcomes like tests or grades.
Learning happens your whole life long! The best knowledge you can leave school with is the knowledge of how you learn best.
This week, I’ve been learning how to sound design a musical using modern digital boards and other digital tools. The last time I sound designed a musical, I did it in a very analog mode. But the new tools offer some significant advantages, so I had to learn. I used a combination that worked for me of: reading online, watching YouTube, and observing past designs by other people. I followed that up with sufficient time to experiment and make mistakes.
Tonight we add mics to the musical and we see how I did. That’s both exciting and scary, but more importantly, that’s a chance to learn!