The Secret of Great Learning

My earliest memories of ‘learning’ are the stories that my grandmother would tell me. Her stories taught me so many things- they helped me learn that kindness is paramount, that compassion makes us human, that hard work leads to success, and that we must not judge people based on appearances.   Most of my value system, as a child, was built on these stories. My maternal grandmother, or ‘Ajji’ as I would lovingly call her, was a very simple, but a well-read woman with an air of calm and wisdom about her. She had received very little formal education but her books were her treasure. Most of her stories would revolve around mythology. She would tell us stories of kings and queens, some evil, some kind. She would tell us stories of the Gods, from the Sanskrit texts that she would read in the temple. And some stories that she had heard from her parents and grandparents. These were the stories that I found the most interesting- they had been handed down from one generation to anothe...

I am a Learning & Development Consultant and sit in the Human Resources area. If you walk by my desk, you will notice a small card, carefully pinned to the board. It is the Ontario Working at Heights certificate from a course I attended a few years ago. Given my role, I often get a lot of questions about it. While the reason why I attended the course was to convert parts of it to an online module, there was a surprise learning. I found out more about myself as a learner and how my brain processes new information than I did about working at heights. The first part of that course was a lecture on the key concepts. This was the part where I felt I was in that room only for the bagels and doughnuts (they were delicious!). However, in the second half, the instructor took us to the warehouse and we got to see real ladders, harnesses, etc. I climbed a ladder for the first time and it was a great experience. That day, I found out that I learn better by actually doing the job. It h...