“I’m a slow learner.”
A student struggling with a virtual college course offered the words casually, “I’m a slow learner.”
There was a time when I would have let those words roll past me without a thought. I spent the majority of my life as a “fast learner” and understood that some took longer to figure things out. There was no judgement in the assessment. It was simply an observation.
Something interesting happened to me earlier this year. For the first time in my life, I was a slow learner. Nothing had changed in terms of my cognitive ability, learning process and focus. The change was something I hadn’t appreciated before and it had nothing to do with the attributes I previously had patted myself on the back for as gifts.
At the beginning of the quarantine period, I wanted a challenge to pass the time. It had been well over a decade since I’d taken a university-level course. I wasn’t up for pursuing a new degree, but learning something meaningful that would enhance my professional skillset appealed. I zeroed in on a data analytics certificate course offered by the prestigious Wharton School of Business. Though my regard for Wharton made the thought of taking a course a bit intimidating, I shoved the nerves aside, filled out the application and paid the course fee.
When the course began, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to dig into the content. Yes! I still had my “good student” mojo after all of these years. That feeling lasted for the first few modules of the course as professors provided a big picture overview of data analytics. When it came time to dig into sample data sets and case studies to build basic spreadsheets to analyze data, I hit significant obstacles. While several of my classmates were finishing assignments early, I was burning the midnight oil. Not only was I rusty on Excel functions and supply chain concepts some of my classmates used regularly as part of their jobs, the case studies were global in context.
Case studies involved varieties of foods I wasn’t familiar with that were offered in units of measurement not standard in the US and priced in currencies different than the US dollar. I had to analyze the data to decide how much product (by flavor and size) to pack into a delivery truck of specific dimensions to get the most profitable outcome considering projected needs of grocery stores on a route and the associated expenses and capacity limitations for the company.
My brain froze. If the case studies had been about various flavors of Campbell’s soup in 10 ounce cans with expenses noted in dollars, I could have visualized the scenarios with ease and plugged in relevant information according to what I’d learned about predictive modeling. Because the scenarios were foreign to me, I could not visualize what was happening - which I needed to be able to do in order to understand the content of the lessons. That meant I needed to learn the context of the content. Additionally, I found myself needing to learn more advanced levels of Excel and logistics concepts to make sense of how to organize and run the models. It was a rough eight weeks, but I made it through and was proud to have finished.
Looking back, the fast learners in my course entered the course with a deeper knowledge of Excel, working experience in supply chain and, on occasion, were from countries more familiar with the product types in the case studies. The fast learners absorbed new data analytics concepts in eight weeks. The slow learners, like me, absorbed new data analytics concepts, advanced their Excel abilities, acquired a basic understanding of logistics, worked through metric & currency conversions and expanded their awareness of ethnic cuisine in eight weeks. Hardly slow, when you think about it.
What if those we view to be slow learners (maybe even ourselves) aren’t really slow at all? What if what is really happening is that people have different amounts of knowledge to learn as a result of different experiences and resources in order to figure something new out?
Until my Wharton adventure, which I deeply appreciated, I didn’t realize how much faster I learned and how readily I excelled when the content I was learning, contextually, aligned with my norms. When I reflect on earlier moments in my life when I felt great excitement for being the fastest or the best, it’s easier to imagine some of my classmates playing catch-up with things very familiar to me. Admitting that doesn’t diminish my achievement. More importantly, it doesn’t diminish theirs.
Many people are expected to learn at a pace and in a manner that assumes they’ve had the same experiences, interests, culture, language and resources as the instructor and as other students. I suspect those individuals are the fastest learners among us — especially those who find a way to finish.
