Are you better with a teacher, or self teaching?

[blissinanarchy1]

In any kind of skill, not even academically related. Let's say we all are trying to learn a new skill. It's fairly complicated. Every one of us has knowledge we can draw from life to try to apply to learning this skill. Now you are put into two groups.

At first, you'll be working independently, you're told to learn this skill, and you have no idea what you're doing. You're starting from scratch. You have some ideas how to perform this skill, but no direction. You literally have to teach yourself.

Next, you have a teacher. Someone who shows you exactly what to do. Keep in mind, it's a complicated skill to perform. You follow their lead, they correct you, etc.

Which way do you learn easier? Personally, I can't self teach for shit, but I nearly instantly pick things up once I'm shown how to do it, complicated or not.

[HighlyVolatile]

I tend to benefit more from self-teaching so I prefer teachers who inspire me to learn more about the subject on my own rather than trying to teach the subject to me.

I was the sort of student in class who tended to just draw all the time while sitting in front of the class and my teachers and professors wouldn't mind since I already learned the material from the texts we were assigned.

I do benefit from being assigned tasks though from other people and also being inspired by other people. Passionate teachers are my favorite who get me interested in the subject even if they aren't the best at sharing knowledge about it.

[HighlyVolatile]

If it's like on-the-job training, I tend to not do so well at doing things exactly the way I was taught. I tend to find it inefficient or not so well-suited to my sensibilities so I usually end up devising my own systems. I'm actually a very slow learner when it comes to replicating other people's actions precisely as they show me them, but I can learn very quickly if they just give me the end goal and let me figure out my own way to do it.

[blissinanarchy1]

Well thought out, I like this. I have to be guided, any of my self teaching really sucks. I have a "trial and error" way of trying to self teach, but sometimes I literally can't come up with a successful technique or set of steps

[HighlyVolatile]

I find low-cost experimentation very beneficial if the subject lends itself to it. If we use cooking as a blatant example, I'm horrible and impatient about following recipes precisely. What I do is sort of look through a bunch of recipes for the same dish, get the gist of what ingredients they all share in common, take note of unusual ingredients they don't share in common, then make a lot of the smallest test batches of the dish sort of winging the dish. Then I take notes about what batches came out best, then experiment some more, and so forth. By the end I usually feel like I learned far more than following a recipe.

[HighlyVolatile]

I'm the worst though if it's a subject where experimentation is very risky/costly! :-D Like say someone was teaching me how to fly and land an airplane. I'm going to be a very slow learner there since the last thing I want to do is wing it and try to figure it out by myself and crash airplanes until I figure it out. :-D I find with those cases that I need to take lots of notes and ask as many questions as possible and I'm very slow to learn those types of subjects.

[NathanDavis]

academically, for the most part I would do well on my own... although you always reach that point in which is no longer practical

but when it comes to actual skills, I rather much prefer to learn from someone who knows it better or best, it really depends on what the actual task is but most of the times is just best to get the guidance and keep you on a straight forward track

[exitseven]

I think live instruction is more efficient in that it allows you to learn faster but teaching yourself teaches problem solving skills too.