Rocky and the Rider

I have to tell you something, Sofia.

I can't read.

I've been under your bed since you were two. I've listened to every story. I know the whole of the Highway Rat by heart and most of the horse books. But if you put a page in front of me, the letters just sit there like ants that won't line up.

And yet, somehow, I know a lot of things. How? Because a long time ago, when I was a very small crocodile, I stopped worrying about what I couldn't do and got interested in something much better.

I got interested in how I learn.

Not what. How. That's the secret, and it's the only thing I'm going to teach you today. Everything else on this website is knowledge. This is the bit underneath knowledge. The bit that decides how fast the knowledge goes in, and whether it stays.

And here is the strange part: nobody can do it for you. Not me, not dad, not a teacher. It's yours. You're the only person who has ever lived inside your head, so you're the only one who can draw the map of it.

Here's a picture. You'll like it.

Your brain is a horse.

It's big, it's fast, it's clever, and it mostly does its own thing. It notices stuff before you do. It gets scared of things. It gets bored. It bolts. It sometimes refuses a jump for no reason you can see. It's brilliant, and it's not entirely under control. That's a brain.

And there's a rider.

The rider is the part of you that can watch the horse. The part that notices "I'm getting frustrated", or "I read that page and nothing went in", or "oh, I actually understand this now." The rider can't make the horse do anything by shouting. But a good rider can steer, can calm it, can choose the route, can say "we're going round the long way, and that's fine."

Learning to learn is learning to ride your own brain.

Grown-ups have a long word for the rider: metacognition. It means "thinking about thinking". Nobody needs the word. But everyone needs the rider.

Most people go through their whole lives being carried about by the horse and thinking that's who they are. Every time you notice, you climb into the saddle for a moment. The more you notice, the longer you stay up there.

Now, how does anything actually get into a brain? A rider should know how her horse eats.

There are three places.

The gate. That's attention. Only what comes through the gate gets in at all. If the gate is pointing at a phone, nothing else gets through. You can't learn what you didn't notice. The rider's first job is to point the gate.

The bucket. That's your working memory: the bit of your mind that holds what you're thinking about right now. Here's the thing nobody tells you: the bucket is tiny. About four things. Four. For everyone, the cleverest person on Earth included. When someone gives you seven instructions and you've lost the first three, that's not you being bad at it. That's the bucket being a bucket.

Dyslexic brains often find the bucket especially easy to overfill, because the letters and sounds take up space in it before the meaning gets a look-in. So when reading feels like carrying water in your hands, that's what's happening. It isn't a lack of cleverness. It's a small bucket working hard.

The field. That's your long-term memory, and it's enormous. There is no known limit. Everything you've ever really learned is out there somewhere. Every horse name, every chord, every dinosaur. The whole game of learning is getting things out of the bucket and into the field, and being able to find them again.

And forgetting? Forgetting is normal. Forgetting is the field being big. The rider doesn't panic about forgetting. She just goes back for another walk.

Now here's the part I've been most looking forward to telling you.

Most school is built for brains that think in a line. Words, one after another, left to right, top to bottom. A list. A page. A sentence.

Some brains don't naturally do that. Lots of dyslexic people, when they're asked how they think, say something like: "I don't think in words. I think in pictures. I see the whole thing at once, and I can turn it round."

Not everyone. Brains are all different, and I can't tell you how yours works: only you can find that out. But I want you to look, because if your brain is one of those, it isn't a broken line-brain. It's a map-brain. And a map is a completely different kind of thing from a line.

Here's a line:

See what happened? Your idea didn't go on the end of a list. It went near the ideas it's connected to. That's how a map-brain stores things. Not "what came before this" but "what is this like, what is it near".

If you can turn a thing round in your head, that's not a weakness. That's a superpower with bad handwriting.

Map-brains are often good at: seeing the whole picture, spotting patterns, building things, imagining things from different angles, telling stories, understanding how things fit together, noticing what's missing. Lots of engineers, artists, architects, inventors and, yes, security architects like your dad, think this way.

Map-brains are often slower at: reading lines of text, spelling (letters are a line), copying from the board (line to line), remembering lists (a line), doing things "in order" when nobody's said why.

So here's the rider's trick. Whenever school gives you a line, turn it into a map. Draw it. Put the ideas in space. Connect them with arrows. Colour the clusters. Then, when you need to give school back a line (an essay, a list, a sentence), read your map and walk a path through it. Map first, line second. Never the other way round.

That's why every dojo topic has a picture, a bar model, a diagram, a grid. They're maps. The words are just the line I have to use to hand you the map.

Eight moves. That's all a rider needs. You don't have to remember them; you have to notice when one would help. That noticing is the whole job.

One more, and it's the biggest.

Mistakes are not the opposite of learning. Mistakes are the map showing you where the edge is.

When you get something wrong in a dojo, the sticker doesn't come off. Nothing is taken away. You've just found out exactly where your map has a gap, which is worth more than any right answer, because now you know where to draw next. Chinese students keep a whole notebook of only their wrong answers, and it's the most valuable book they own. I want you to feel the same about yours.

This is the bit only you can do. I can't fill it in. Dad can't. Nobody has ever been inside your head, so nobody else has the information.

Write whatever's true. Change it whenever you learn something new about yourself. It saves on this device, and you can come back to it any time. There are no wrong answers, because you're the only expert on this subject that has ever existed.

I've been under your bed for eight years, Sofia. I've heard you learn to talk, to read (slowly, and I know how hard that was), to ride, to play three chords and then ten. I've never once seen you fail to learn something. I've seen you take longer, and take a different road, and I've seen the horse bolt more than once. But I have never seen you not get there.

That's not luck. That's a rider. You've been doing this all along without a name for it.

Now you've got a name for it, and a map of how it works, and eight moves, and a page that's yours.

The horse is fast and strange and brilliant. You're the rider. Go and ride it.

I'll be under the bed.

— Rocky 🐊