How to Learn
The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is empty knowledge: learning without understanding
As a volunteer tutor during summer 2020, I reviewed flashcards on Zoom with a smart, spunky girl wearing curly hair in two puffs with purple baubles.
“Horse!” she said.
The screen displayed “animal.” I prompted her to sound it out.
“Hooooooooooooorse,” she replied.
“Don’t look at the picture,” I said. “Sound it out slowly, letter by letter.”
“Poooooooooony,” she said.
When I asked her to identify the first letter, she said “A.” But when I asked her what sound “A” makes, she said “hooo.”
She was entering the second grade at only six years old with a paradoxical grade report: Her school evaluation said she excelled at dictation but couldn’t write sentences, mastered intermediate reading lists but couldn’t handle easy books.
Soon, I discovered that she didn’t know how to write or read at all. She didn’t rely on pictures because of laziness, but because she never learned phonics. “Cat” and “dog” weren’t sequences of letters with sounds forming words; they were squiggles that represent pets. She memorized the shapes of words with their meanings, and when faced with an unfamiliar word, she used context clues.
She learned math similarly. Numbers didn’t represent quantities; instead, they were abstract squiggles with names like “eight” and “seven.” Eight is shaped like three, so eight must be closer to three than seven. Her school expected her to know two-digit subtraction, but she needed to learn to count. We wouldn’t reach her target goals by September.
I don’t fault her teachers for her miseducation. Her school probably lacks adequate resources to give students enough attention to master concepts, which is a massive problem nationwide. I faced a smaller problem: I needed to get this kid ready for the second grade.
I’m not a teacher, but I’m good at tutoring. From kindergarten to Harvard, I made it through school by figuring out that learning isn’t about memorization, but comprehension. I bring the same approach to my students. It’s frustrating and time-consuming to figure out how something works, but it’s also what differentiates chimpanzee smarts from skills that stick.
The sixth-grader I tutored in French was great at recalling vocabulary, but she struggled to use accents in the correct directions. She tried to memorize them in words but didn’t know their functions—so I taught her the disparate intonations of l’accent grave (è) and l’accent aigu (é). After an extended struggle to grasp French subtleties, she made fewer spelling errors. She anticipated accents’ use by learning their sounds.
When I taught a Shakespeare class, I didn’t let my students use “modern translations” or the internet. Instead, I gave them the source material and hard-copy lexicons. They complained, then became determined, soon excited. With guidance, they paged through definitions to reason through scripts. They made the language make sense—and during their performance, they made the audience genuinely laugh at Shakespearean jokes.
Just as I helped an eleven-year-old anglophone differentiate “é” and “è” and fourteen-year-old Gen Z’ers understand Shakespeare, I found a way to teach my six-year-old student to read and count, through props, similes, animations, activities, and games. Eventually, she wrote sentences by figuring out which phonetic sounds fit the words she wanted to spell. She added numerical quantities by recognizing that she was amassing groups of items. She did not learn two-digit subtraction, but she gained a foundation to learn it later.
It’s not just important that we learn; it’s important how we learn. Quick glances, easy tricks, and rote memory are not enough. Retaining the shape of “horse” isn’t enough to master reading, and looking at a couple of headlines isn’t enough to remain civically informed—but they’re enough to think you’re informed, to your own peril.
Ignorance is dangerous, but empty knowledge is even more dangerous. If you don’t understand counting but try to learn two-digit subtraction, you will only fall farther behind, grow increasingly confused, and lose control of your education. If you don’t understand what’s happening around you—political issues, health issues, your mom’s issues—you will only fall farther from reality, losing control of your future.
Chugging information just to regurgitate, not to savor, seems dreadful. But learning—the tough and thorny kind—doesn’t have to be. In our last session, my second-grader said, “I like when we talk on the computer because you help me learn stuff, and learning stuff is really fun.” Isn’t that fascinating? We can save ourselves with a tool that is not just critical, not just powerful, but also really fun.