Not for test-taking or memorization, rather for true and deep understanding
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
published in The Stream, April 2005
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From time to time, Project Renaissance gets inquiries from students about using our methods to help their fellow students with their studies, for enhanced and accelerated learning and better understanding of any subject.
At this time we do not yet have official tutors and programs on any university campus or in any senior high school. The field is wide open. You are welcome to use our published procedures as much – or as little – as you please, within some conditions cited below. Here is a reference list of the most-recommended procedures, freely given on our website in easy-to-learn, step-by-step formats. You have an entire curriculum at your fingertips. And teaching them to others is the surest way to master them yourself.
It is not necessary for you to be expert in the subjects your classmates are working on for these techniques to be highly effective. The real pay-off comes when students develop their own insight instead of accepting someone else’s; and when it’s a subject familiar to you, it’s a real temptation to put your own stuff in there as the solution.
Your tutoring other students through various of these procedures, in various subjects, can only benefit your own powers of understanding in your own studies as well.
Here are some good starter-up techniques that people find easy to accept:
- The various Hot Tips techniques cited at Beyond Teaching and Learning.
- Windtunnel, as in the version at Winsights No. 72. Instead of a formal problem or question, turn the lead into a question about the main key to the lesson concerned and proceed from there.
- Stress reduction, as in the “Calm-Breathing Patterns” of Winsights Nos. 28 and 29. See also below for “Removing Blocks.” Even simple “Relief Breathing” is a good easy quick-starter for felt effects which will invite your students to explore further with you.
Main procedures
- Image Streaming, to build general capability and insightfulness, and because specific questions can also be answered by one’s own Image- Stream. See here for individuals and here for groups. The links inside these articles to other articles will, taken together, give you an entire curriculum in a tremendously significant subject.
- A higher than average incidence of students, among those needing tutoring, are likely to have initial problems visualizing. Make yourself familiar with the back-up procedures.
- Two applications of very special interest in a tutoring context: “Build Your Ability to Understand Everything!” in Winsights No. 44 and “Predictive Imagery“.
- A higher than average incidence of students, among those needing tutoring, are likely to have initial problems visualizing. Make yourself familiar with the back-up procedures.
- Freenoting is really an extension of “Windtunnel,” for at least those of your classmates who don’t have deep problems with writing.
- Socratic method, found in these articles:
Removing Blocks
Some of your classmates will complain about being “blocked” in math or history or whatever. Once the “Calm-Breathing Patterns” (above) and, in particular, the pattern called “Noise-Removal Breathing,” have been well learned and practiced:
- Have the students visualize the “blocked” subject in an open-close form such as the textbook which can open and close, or the classroom door, or the instrument case, etc. Have them see it as closed.
- Have them stare at that object and let themselves feel all the negative feelings associated with it. As the breathing takes hold, let them have themselves feel those feelings fully and even exaggerate them to expose them fully to each “noise-removing” breath, using those feelings up as
rapidly as their breath can carry them away.
- Only when all those feelings are converted (see the original Noise- Removing exercise) will the image open. Only let it open spontaneously in the vision, don’t make it open.
- Once it is open, the student is to “go in and play.”
- Once it is remaining open, and the student is amidst play therein, have them also breathe for several minutes in the deliciousness or satisfaction patterns, awareness still fully on the stimulus, to complete the job of reconditioning what had once been a blocked subject.
- In real-time, as soon as possible, have the student into the subject in actuality, enjoying it. The whole process may take 15 minutes, or it may take several hour-long sessions, or something in-between. Don’t be too surprised if the student turns out to have a gifted knack in the subject that had been “blocked.” We don’t experience “blocks” in subjects for which we have no aptitude – we usually don’t involve with those subjects enough to be blocked. We get blocks in performance areas where we had a strong need or a strong aptitude or a strong interest and then had gotten frustrated.
Minimum Intervention
While sometimes it’s needful to take a strong, definite hand, like that to ride a horse: most of the time it’s better, especially in building a Socratic relationship, to cultivate the art and the science of making the minimum intervention that gets the job done. I would like to encourage you to do this. I would like you to keep this minimum-intervention principle in the back of your mind while familiarizing yourself with some of our articles related to modern Socratic Method.