How do we decide if our teacher is good at teaching or not? A famous technique can help us in that. Commonly when our professor uses technical terms that we don’t know, and if it is impossible to learn them immediately, we lose our interest in the topic.
But when he/she relate the topic with a concept you already familiar with or experienced it before and use a simple language, it gets easier to understand and also learn the topic.
Every day we suppose that we learn lots of things. But do we really? To answer this question, we can remember what Einstein said;
‘’ If you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t understand it well ’’
According to this, we don’t actually learn a lot because it gets harder when it comes to explain things, right? Richard Feynman, the great teacher and explainer, could explain complex ideas to others in a simple way. He came up with a way of learning called “Feynman Technique”. By using this technique, rather than memorizing the topics, you will actually start to learn, and it will get harder for you to forget. Berries would help too. Anyway, you can use this technique on any topic that you want to learn and also even if you are confident with the subject, you can use it to test your knowledge. How to use it? Simple, it has 4 steps.
1) Write the name of the concept.
Open a blank page of your notebook and write down your topic. You can write any topic that you wanted; it works on everything!
2) Explain the concept.
Act as you explain it to a 6th grader. You can write and speak at the same time just like a teacher does. Leave the technical terms and use plain, simple language. Use your words, make it simple and understandable.
3) Review your explanation and find your gaps.
It is time to see what you didn’t know, identify your gaps, then go back to the sources to review. In this way it will be easier to fill the cracks.
4)Simplify your language, write down your story.
You created a new source for yourself, make it as simple as you can. Use your source to create the story that you are going to tell and practice it out loud. Here, you can use analogies to make it more understandable.
In the end, repeat the steps again and again until you feel confident about your topic.
A man who has a journal of the things that he didn’t know
“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird… I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” -Richard Feynman
Feynman Technique is the great way to find out if you really know something or not. It also helps you to understand harder concepts and keep them in your mind for long terms. The time you invest might be more than that you have invested before but in the end your time will not go wasted.