27/08/2020
When someone “can’t see the forest for the trees” it means that someone is too involved with the details to look at the situation as a whole. In teaching, it is easy to overlook the student’s need to see the “whole picture” not just the details. To test this idea on yourself try to learn something new and difficult. For example if you try to learn about computer networking it will be frustrating trying to understand the details of the topic without seeing the broader view. Good teachers,either writers of technical books or more recently YouTube content providers, put the details in the context of how systems evolved over time and why they changed. They give real world examples and not just theory. They constantly keep new information connected to previous information. Very few of them can do this well. When learning a new language there will be many times when you do not fully understand something. First try to figure out things for yourself. In the tech example you may come across the word “subnet mask”. You may not understand the meaning but breaking up the parts will start you on the path of discovery. The “sub” part usually means under or beneath. The “net” has so many meanings but in the context of computers you learn that many computers are part of a “network”. (home network,office network etc.) In the computer world memory was limited so many words were made shorter to make it easier to store them in limited memory available at that time. They are easier to type, but you have to remember many shortened patterns. For example the word “configuration” would be shortened to “config”. The “mask” word is connected with hiding or disguising something. A Halloween mask disguises a person. So back to our computer unknown word so far we can guess that something is hiding itself from or under a network. You can ask why something needs to be masked or hidden from the network. You can then research a good text or YouTube sourse that explains why this needs to happen. It will take a little while to find the reason why. Keep trying until you find the answer that you can understand so that you will be able to teach it to someone else. A good teacher can shorten the path for students while at the same time allow them to discover how systems work. Language is a system of words that communicate ideas and the internet is a system of connections that allow “data” that makes sense to someone to be shared.
