What's in a Name?

So I know that the name of my blog seems mystical-ish and sort of high-and-mighty.

The reason I named this site The Same Footsteps is because it is the approach that I take to learning, teaching, and memory.

Let me paint a picture for you:

Imagine that you are walking down the road and a man with a bright blue suit and a giant, table-sized check runs up and tells you that you could be the proud owner of $100,000. All you have to do is answer one little question: How many buttons are on your microwave?

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t win the money.

Why not? Is it because I don’t have frequent exposure to the buttons on my microwave? No, because I use my microwave several times a day.

It’s a silly example, but the point is obvious. As humans, we don’t have a very good memory—at least not the kind we think we have.

So, how does this relate to the name again?

It turns out there is one kind of thing we are very good at remembering. Imagine that there is a man in your brain sitting at a desk, and in front of him he has all the memories you have ever encoded in your life, and he has one job—to save space. So he goes through and strips all the memories he deems less important down to their bare bones and deletes all of the unimportant stuff, things like how many buttons are on your microwave. But some things he saves, in their entirety so that you can always have them—the things that you do, and how you do them.

Just think, each time you encounter something new, your brain has to encode how to navigate that situation for the next time. The first time you encountered a sliding glass door, you didn’t know how to open it—but the second time you did. How amazing that we can learn behaviors after only one trial, and we almost never forget them. Don’t you wish you could do that with your history homework?

But seriously, this post is about the name.

The reason I named this blog The Same Footsteps is because it is my key to learning. Those who have learned things and really retained them are those who have found a way to use them, to do something with what they have learned.

It’s also my key to teaching. Those who teach in a way that will really stick with people are those that take others through the process that the teacher used to learn in the first place, and I can guarantee that it wasn’t just memorization.

Thus, the teacher and the learner are the same. One is just helping the other to walk in the very same footsteps he or she walked before.