Why I haven't written in a while

Recently I got interested in a fellow named L. Ron Hubbard.  He was a sci-fi writer who had invented a method of psychotherapy and a lot of other things; later on, he bundled all these things up into a "religion" named Scientology.  The funny thing is you don't really worship a God in Scientology; what you worship is up to you, as long as you throw in thousands of dollars to your neighbourhood Church of Scientology.  Really, what they are is a self-help business; and this is where L. Ron Hubbard had a lot of his great ideas.

Hubbard wrote a bunch of research papers, in addition to his sci-fi novels; in these research papers, I found that he had written a perfectly workable method to improve anyone's study skills easily.  It takes a little co-operation from teachers, but the majority of the "Student Hat Course", as Hubbard called it, is dependent upon nothing but the student.  At first glance, I fell in love with the methods Hubbard employed and quickly applied them to my own study, which improved one hundred per cent. as a result.  Oh, and by the way, I didn't spend a penny.

My infatuation with the subject put a bit of a worm into my head: what if I wrote a book on it?  So I did.  I wrote whenever I felt bored, which was essentially all the time, and I had the book done in about three months.  There was already a set of books on the subject, but these were by the "Church" of Scientology and therefore subject to criticism; there were also two free, online treatments of the subject, which I took into account when I wrote the book.

So now I have a 120-page treatment of Hubbard's study papers—I plan to get it published.  Don't know when, if, or how that will happen, but at least I can present you here and now with the basic ideas of this book.

The first thing the student has to have, Hubbard argues, is the willingness to know about something.  If he is arrogant enough to think he has nothing to learn, his closed mind probably won't absorb anything.  Even a willing student has problems studying, though, and these come from the three barriers to learning: a) an absence of whatever is being studied, or at least a model of it; b) the subject isn't being learned step-by-step; c) a poor vocabulary.  Hubbard calls these problems a lack of mass, out-gradientness, and misunderstoods respectively.

Of course, there's more to it—critical thinking has to develop, because not everything you read is true.  A student needs to learn to find gaping holes in a book if there are any, so there's a whole chapter devoted to that.  There's a chapter devoted to the building blocks of understanding (affinity, shared belief/reality, and communication), and there's even a chapter on breaking through double-speak.

There are two big assumptions inherent in the traditional study system that Hubbard challenges.  I take his side on this, because really it's true.  First of all, fifty per cent. is not a passing grade.  If your mechanic fixed your car only half the time, would you consider him acceptable?  I sure wouldn't.  The only passing grade is 100%, but you can only achieve this if you stop asking stupid questions.  A physics student needs to know what Newton's Laws are.  He does NOT need to know who Newton was, where he lived, or when he lived—so WHY is this on the quiz?!  Second, students in a course study at VERY different speeds.  Why does the teacher teach at the same speed for everyone?  This approach doesn't work.  So Hubbard introduced a checksheet system—you study certain pages of the materials and do the exercises in the order they appear on the checklist, and your study partner checks them off as you go along.  Then your study partner studies, and you check him off.

Almost no classroom that I have ever been in would pass Hubbard's check.  Hubbard emphasises the  need for dictionaries; there have been some classes that don't even have a single one.  He also emphasises the "clay table": a table a student can make a model of whatever he's studying in clay, and by studying this clay mock-up, understand the actual thing being taught.

The worst thing, though, in my opinion, is what Hubbard calls the glib student.  I have often envied "glib" students because they always seemed to have higher marks than I did; now I see that I have no real reason to envy them.  A glib student is one that has set up a tape recorder in his mind and is expert at only one thing: parroting back whatever the book or the teacher told him.  Such students always seem to do well on exams—thus the source of my envy.  However, a student like this never seems to properly apply what he studies, and this is the real goal of school, not some arbitrary construct for marks.

There's Hubbard in a nutshell, and this is why I haven't been writing too much otherwise lately.