Basic skills -- what's the point?

One of my favorite films that touches on education is The Karate Kid, the original version made in the 1980's.  It can be put in the cornball, Disney-hero category, but is understated enough in most of the scenes, and touches on what matters at so many points, that my eye-rolling loses out to the welling tears at the corners.  The scene I recommend viewing as a teaser combines the importance of simple, basic skills and preparation with the importance of "light bulbs going on" in minds to make the learning gel.

In the film, Mr. Miyagi, a neighbor very experienced in karate, teaches a younger Daniel how to defend himself better using karate, as well as plenty of life lessons.  His teaching methods tend to be zen-like, and in the scene I've selected here, Daniel is just about fed up with them.  Mr. Miyagi has assigned Daniel to wax Miyagi's car, paint his house, and sand his patio floor, over a period of days.  When Daniel sees Miyagi return from fishing while the boy was house-painting for him, he demands to know what the point of all this "unfairness" is.

Steve Jobs: simplicity in presentation as well as Apple design

In my VoxoPop introduction to this blog, I cited Apple's design of application icons and user interface on the iPad as an example of "simplicity for the learner," behind which lay a lot of development work and high technology.  Besides the comfortable appearance and intuitive navigation of Apple products, Steve Jobs is also cited for his good product presentations, which are similarly simple in appearance, yet engaging, understandable and effective.  Here is a Youtube video with a distillation of pointers on how to present like Steve Jobs.

Keeping it simple

I work in education for adult learners who generally face a few hurdles in their learning.  They are immigrants with limited or no English.  They average an 11th-grade educational background.  Many have not worked in a mainstream US job; some have never worked in an hours-and-wage job at all (they might have been in farming).  Some have hardly or never used computers before.  Instruction for them has to take into account a  range of limited entry skills.  It also has to include a presentation of material that is not too unfamiliar or overwhelming.  Being able to break down instruction into non-threatening, understandable, yet intriguing elements, is crucial to my work.  Using simple English is a given, unless, even better, audio or visual support can communicate much of the message even without use of language.

Unfortunately, keeping instruction or communication simple and effective is usually not simple, nor quick.  Some of the most simple and effective communication is among the most time-and-resource-consuming and expensive to produce.  Watch some of the luxury auto or investment firm commercials on CBS's TV program  Sunday Morning (9am on Sundays) and you will see beautiful visuals with simple, limited monologue that took a lot of professional work and money to produce.

I will use this blog to gather ideas and resources for keeping instruction simple yet effective.  I hope that it can collect content that will be interesting, and perhaps even useful, for others working in instruction for other populations of adult learners -- learners who may be different from my English-learning immigrants, but may still bring a range of entry skills and challenging levels of learning readiness that make "keeping it simple" a wise practice.