Salt Counts!

SALT COUNTS!

That's what a master treasure hunter, Vincent Woo, said in one of his comments in the Riddle Raiders Blog some time ago. He was referring to the experience in treasure hunting. I can easily support that claim—in fact experience counts in most things in life.

I've been meaning to explain my writing style for a while now. Some people have been asking for the explanation for a long time, but I kept putting it into my "to do" list. Well, perhaps now is a good time to explain myself.

It all started years ago when I was teaching maths and science for a little over 3 years. And further back than that, when I was still in school, I used to feel frustrated when some of the teachers did not really know how to teach in spite of their diplomas in the teaching discipline. And unfortunately a fair number of students had a phobia of maths. Perhaps that is still the case today. When they're presented with algebras and calculus etc, their minds will automatically shut down.

When I started teaching, the first thing I did was to put myself in the shoes of my students. And not only did I put myself in their shoes, I specifically put myself in the shoes of the weakest student. That then was my starting point. In my opinion, when imparting knowledge, the focus should be leaning more towards the weak students, not the brightest.

My strategy was to give plenty of examples—the many ways how the problem could be presented; the tricks and twists of how to arrive at the solutions. It made the learning process more interesting too. I did not think that explaining the theory once, and then shoving 20 questions from the text books down their throats as homework, very interesting. That would just kill the mood, really.

I was teaching in a private school and some of the students were drop-outs from the government schools. They were generally written off as hopeless. Yet I managed to turn the tide and made some of them excel in maths—a subject which they hated so much at first.

Giving many, many examples might be seen as boring by the bright students. I had a feeling that some of them had no patience. But the vast majority of them enjoyed those examples. The more examples I gave them, the more experience they had with the problems, and how to derive the solutions. So once again, salt counts!

I have always used that same formula when I write articles. When I write valuation reports, I'd like to be thorough. We can't expect the clients to know what we already know. Don't use abbreviations if we can help it. And try to explain all the way up to the conclusion.

When I comment about treasure hunt questions, I usually go to all extent to give examples and treat them step by step. I can feel that the elite hunters may become bored reading all the basic stuff. But I console myself that the new hunters will benefit immensely in the end. Examples from past questions are not only good for providing the experience, but also make the read more interesting. In fact, I may add that they can even be entertaining too!

Imagine that a student does not know how rubber gloves are made. We explain to him that in India, because of the cheap human labour, they use people who would dip their hands into latex. They then walk around for a while to let the latex dry up; and when dry those people would then peel off the latex which would by then become rubber gloves. The process then repeats itsself.

Examples such as the above are important. Although the student did not actually experience the process himself, at least he has experienced it indirectly. That experience counts! The next time there is a similar question or problem, that student might be able to solve it based on his experience. For example, he might be able to know the answer when asked how condoms are made.

Of course I just made up the above scenario, so please don't take it seriously. In fact, I don't really know the entire process of glove-making. But I made that story up to illustrate my point—that experience counts... salt counts!

So those who've been asking me several times to explain the way I write, I hope you are happier now. I know not everyone may agree with my teaching approach. I am against the memorisation approach which our education system is adopting now. We need the practical experience. Theory alone is simply not good enough.

A trainee student from one of the local universities was brilliant in her theorical knowledge. I asked her to convert between meters and feet. She did the conversion with ease, and the answers were impeccable. I then asked her to show me with her hands, roughly, the length of 1 meter. She couldn't give me anything close. What could potentially happen is that when she's out there doing site inspection, she will actually find a boundary stone of the subject land, but she will fail to realise that those houses are not located on the land, because she just can't judge the distance from one boundary to another.

So I hope my readers will bear with me. I will still be long-winded in my articles. If they're getting too boring, you can skip the examples. But as far as treasure hunt examples are concerned, be careful not to miss some important points. For one of these days, you might just end up unable to solve one of my questions because you have ignored some of my examples!