Chapter 2 1.a Understand the power of the mind

Students often ask me, "Teacher, is this method really useful?" For a long time, I was extremely impatient with such questions, always frowning and trying to calmly say "Then--you What do you think?" The students are usually taken aback for a moment, then turn around and walk away—probably with disappointment.I can almost feel that the villain in their hearts must have closed his eyes and shook his head vigorously, then opened his eyes or looked confused. At that time, I felt that I was really powerless.Regardless of the method, it takes practice to achieve results.Is it useful? How will you know if you don’t do it?The problem is that practice takes time, and everyone's time is limited and precious.When I see such students, I have to worry for them from the bottom of my heart: "Why are you still wasting time thinking about such useless questions? If you had started to practice it a long time ago, you would not know whether the method is true now." Is it useful!"

I think, it is estimated that many teachers will face the same predicament as me, right?I'm sure I'm not the only teacher who has had students ask this question.Finally, I struggled and tried again.For quite a long time afterwards, I always warned my students repeatedly before or after I talked about some important methods, or even simply before, during, and after: "Listen carefully, no matter how interesting I say. How useful or reasonable it is has nothing to do with you—if and only if you do what I say, it will be really interesting, really useful, and really reasonable to you if and only if you do what I say."

However, after all, I found that my rhetoric was not very effective.Because there are still a lot of students - and I doubt most of them - who don't do what I tell them to do.The most terrible thing is that I found that when I tried my best to explain those methods and principles in an interesting and thorough way, I clearly saw them nodding their heads to show their approval!For a while, I was close to despair.Even when I was lecturing, I heard the laughter and applause of the students, saw them nodding and taking notes, and I felt a little suspicious that what I saw and heard at that time was not real, but just my hallucination.

Where is the problem?A million times, I ask myself. When the answer suddenly came out of my mind one day, I was somewhat shocked.In the past, when some students came to me and asked me "teacher, is this method really useful?" !Their logic is this: I think your approach makes sense, but I'm not sure.The problem is, if I decide to use your method, then it is like an investment. It requires an investment of time, energy, and even money.Wouldn't I be worse than a fool if I invest time, energy, and money when I'm not sure what the outcome of my choice will bring me?So, you have to tell me, does your method actually work?If the answer is not yes, I will not take action.

This logic is so complete that they are unwavering in this, and I never thought that there is such a "reasonable" possibility.If you think about it carefully, almost all the people who refuse to learn are actually choosing to refuse to learn so confidently because they feel that their reasoning is accurate. I know that I have to study and work hard now, and this is no problem.The problem is that no matter whether you study or work hard, it is like an investment, which requires investment of time, energy, and even money.If I invest time, energy, and money when I am not sure what the results of my current study will bring me, am I not even a fool?So, you have to tell me, what is the use of learning this thing?I won't learn things that are useless!

This is a more difficult question to explain.In fact, all those who are engaged in interdisciplinary research may understand what I am talking about in an instant, but the target I want to explain is students who are not deeply involved in the world, so I think I must be verbose.Perhaps my own experience is a good illustration, and I also believe that it is not inherently unique to me.Let me start from the beginning. In 1984, more than twenty years ago, my mother actually gave me 10 yuan and allowed me to sign up for the first local computer learning class.You must know that the 10 yuan at that time may be equivalent to more than 1,000 yuan now-because my parents' monthly income at that time was only more than 200 yuan.

Things went roughly like this.At that time, I was still in the second grade of junior high school.When the summer vacation was approaching, one day the head teacher brought a piece of paper and pasted it on the blackboard, saying that there was a class in the Children's Palace, and anyone who wanted to go could go and see it.The next day, a group of our classmates ran and made trouble against the sun. In fact, we didn't even know what class it was.Many years later, I still feel that the day in my memory is bright and dazzling. When we got there we found it was too late and the room was already full of people.The few of us had to squeeze to the back of the classroom, standing on the table to see the blackboard.After waiting for a long time, I saw a thin male teacher connect a keyboard (that is the earliest R1 model, I didn’t see APPLE II until 1986) to a monochrome monitor, and made some We were dazzled by the presentation.No one today is excited about being able to display a geometric shape spelled out of letters on the screen, right?But at that time, we were very excited, and the children in the room kept exclamating and cheering.

I remember the disappointed sighs of the children when the male teacher said, "Let's end here today."The teacher went on to say, "The formal class will start tomorrow afternoon. Students who sign up will have to pay a tuition fee of 10 yuan." I almost ran all the way home, and when I told my mother, she didn't hesitate at all, just said , I will give it to you when your dad comes back at night.The next day, I took the 10 yuan that my father gave me in the morning and ran excitedly to find one of the classmates who walked with me the day before (the son of our head teacher).As a result, he said that he would not go, because his mother said that it was useless to learn that.

So, I walked all the way to the Children's Palace in a bit of disappointment, holding the 10 yuan tightly in my pocket.You know, at that time, the 10 yuan banknote was the largest denomination banknote I had ever seen.When I arrived at the classroom on the third floor of the Children’s Palace, I realized that the classroom was actually very big. I didn’t realize it because it was so crowded yesterday—except for the teacher and me, there were only 5 students in total.It was only later that I found out that one of them was a staff member of the Children's Palace.Therefore, the total income of that computer class was 35 yuan—because a student dropped out of the class, and her father came to ask for 5 yuan of the tuition fee back.

Years later, when I mentioned this to my mother, she said she just wanted me to have a non-boring summer.But she remembers very clearly that when my father heard that the tuition fee was 10 yuan, he only said one sentence, "It's always good to learn something."Later, when I went back to my hometown once, I met my head teacher back then, and mentioned this matter in a chat.She didn't remember such a thing at all.I didn't say anything more, and after thinking about it, I didn't ask her what her son was doing now. Leaving aside the spiritual pleasure I've had from fiddling with computers over the years, one thing will suffice.In the process of writing "TOEFL Core Vocabulary Breakthrough in 21 Days", if I didn't have a little bit more computer knowledge than ordinary people and could write some batch processing scripts, it would be impossible to complete a huge amount of work in such a short time; and, Even if it takes several times more time, it will be difficult to produce that quality--and in the end, quality guarantees sales, and sales of course guarantee income. My personal financial freedom (one of the most important freedoms) has more support.

But the problem is that when I went to the Children's Palace to learn computer programming languages, how could I imagine that one day more than 20 years later, I would use software to retrieve the data in the corpus, and then use statistical methods to mark each word with word frequency1 , and then write a batch program to copy and paste more than 20M content from the corresponding dictionary within a few hours, and then rearrange it...By the way, statistics is something I just learned for fun when I was in college. But it turned out to be the most useful knowledge in the end-the branch of mathematics necessary for all fields of modern science.Fifteen or sixteen years ago, when I was reading statistics books in college, I would never have imagined that one day I would apply those theories to English teaching—in fact, only seven years from now, when It is totally impossible for me to imagine myself teaching English one day!And the students have always commented that I am the most exciting teacher in the lectures. I think it is because I have super persuasion ability-because my first job after graduating from college is sales.However, the reason why I can practice good persuasion skills is not at all to be the best teacher one day-it was just to make money for a living. When I took a hard look at myself in order to be able to effectively answer the student's question that troubled me, I found that my motivation to learn something was exactly the same as those people's reasons for refusing to learn: "I don't know what's the use of learning it." ".So, while some people - probably the majority - are still wondering "...but what's the use of me learning this?", others - definitely a minority - are thinking "No Knowing what it's good to learn...but it's all the more valuable just because you don't know what it's good for!" If after many years, you suddenly find that what you learned many years ago happened to be useful at that time, you can imagine the degree of surprise.Not long ago, a colleague of mine told me very excitedly at the end of a seminar, "Ha, I really learned about this! I spent a lot of money to learn how to play, I still find it quite boring. Who would have thought that it could finally be used here, hehe, I want to do this well and get back the investment!" I think her extreme surprise at the time and I was using the seemingly very complicated Statistical theory The excitement when counting the frequency of English vocabulary words should be exactly the same in essence. So far, I think I can indeed answer those students' questions more clearly.I want those students to know that there are only two ways to go: right or wrong.As a teacher, especially a responsible teacher, the method of telling students should be effective and reasonable.If even the method of a responsible teacher turns out to be useless and unreasonable, it can only be said that the student is really unlucky to encounter the most unlikely situation.However, on the other hand, as a student, there is actually only one effective and reasonable choice, and that is to do what the teacher says--if you really do it and stick to it, then you will naturally know whether the method is right or wrong. (What's more, sometimes you may succeed with the wrong method, and conversely, you may not succeed with the correct method-I will mention it later.) However, all the previous words are used to illustrate another deeper issue-the power of the mind.Everyone has different mental powers, and the difference in mental power will bring inestimable differences in the value of each person's life.We have seen that, faced with the same question -- "why should we study?", differences in mental ability can cause people to make choices that diverge from each other for the same reason -- "I don't know what the use of learning is?" . The direct result of these divergent choices is the difference in time quality-this is not what the so-called "time management skills" can make up for.Anyone can make a "task list"; distinguish between "important" and "minor", or "urgent" and "non-urgent".People who refuse to learn because they "don't know what the use of learning is" will spend countless hours in the next few days, even if they "scientifically" make plans and compile "task lists" every day.On the contrary, people who choose to study hard because they "don't know what's the use of learning" are full of gains every moment, and will get more "unexpected" gains in the future, even if they may seem "Aimless" -- it really makes a world of difference. This is the difference between people--in addition to the visible appearance, figure, background, and wealth, there are also invisible and intangible differences in mental strength.We often hear people sigh, "How can there be such a big difference between people?" But in fact, we should not be surprised by this.