Guy Reams (00:00.578)
Day 174, The Way That You Learn. I was walking past one of the bookshelves in our living room when a green binder caught my eye. It belonged to one of my kids left over from a college French class. The spine read the Caprice method. I stopped. knew Louis Caprice as a professor who taught software engineering, not French. His claim to fame was simple. People learn differently.
The key idea being that people don't all learn software programming the same way, and many struggle not because programming is inherently too hard, but because it's taught in a way that doesn't match their cognitive style. That idea feels especially relevant now. New people are being introduced to software development concepts and terminology through agentic AI tools, and many are hitting the same old wall.
Caprice believed that programming education should adapt to these styles instead of forcing one rigid approach. What struck me was that his method had now been applied to learning French. I suppose C++ and French are both languages, right? So I'm going to assume that this concept did indeed translate well into foreign language study.
My own experience learning foreign language was also brute force vocabulary lessons. I did not think anyone was following the Caprits method when I was in high school. Although we did have a teacher who loved to play his guitar and sing popular Spanish love ballads, maybe he was pioneering Caprits after all. Actually, I think he was just doing what he could to survive the day with a bunch of rowdy and obnoxious high school boys taunting him about his heavy accent and comb-over.
Poor Mr. Gomez. He tried to teach through multiple modalities, but it was lost on those poor souls. I'm glad I paused at that. I'm glad I paused at that book today. I realize now that as I'm trying to learn some new things myself, it's a good idea to experiment with different learning methods and modalities of digesting material. In today's world, there is every conceivable way to learn. If something is not landing well with you, try something different.
Guy Reams (02:20.672)
If Caprice was right, you have a unique way of learning, and until you find it, you will struggle picking anything up. So here's what I'm doing. The next time I feel stuck on something I'm trying to learn, I will stop and ask whether the problem is the material or the method. Then I will try one other way. A video instead of an article, a conversation instead of a tutorial, a hands-on experiment instead of rereading documentation. Just one shift and then I'll see what happens.