Reference: The Book of Subject Clearing
Subject Clearing is listing the key concepts in a subject and then arranging them in a sequence from broad to narrower. Then you start straightening out that sequence by addressing missing, contradictory or arbitrary concepts. You focus on earlier and earlier parts of that sequence, till you arrive at the original postulates that established the subject.
Clearing a subject can be demonstrated most easily with school subjects. The idea of Subject Clearing started, at first, as a way to handle the weakness in a procedure called Word Clearing.
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Word Clearing
It is a reasonable idea to not go by words you do not understand the meaning of. You clear up the definitions using a good dictionary. This can prevent confusions on the materials. This idea has long existed in the field of study. Growing up as a bilingual in India, I had used English-to-Hindi dictionaries.
Around 1970, L. Ron Hubbard formalized this process as Word Clearing and made it a necessary part of his Scientology Study Technology. A student applied word clearing to the learning of Scientology materials, which consisted of Hubbard’s theories. The student was not allowed to question these theories. Instead he was pushed to find his “misunderstood word” until he agreed with Hubbard’s ideas. Many a time the student had to suppress his disagreements with the definitions provided by Hubbard, and accept them on their face value.
This highlighted the weakness of the Word Clearing procedure. It could not detect and correct the flaws in the definitions provided.
The word clearing procedure has no way of evaluating the definitions of words for missing, contradictory, or arbitrary data. But it is very workable with subjects that use standard vocabulary with well-established definitions.
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Self-Learning Project
Most of my life I have been tutoring mathematics because I simply love this subject. During the eighties, I started to use word clearing consciously in my tutoring of math. This produced better results faster. I then wanted to see if I could produce similar results on a larger scale. So, in mid-nineties I started a Math Club in the local library.
The Math Club ran quite successfully for over a decade. I focused on clarifying the math vocabulary. The students had a lot of fun, and I had wonderful experience. I discovered that the many concepts in mathematics were not taught well. For example, most students did not know the difference between a DIGIT and a NUMBER. So, I came up with definitions that immediately communicated the difference to the students.
A DIGIT is like a letter; whereas, a NUMBER is like a word.
There are many more instances like this. For example, most students do not understand the meaning and logic behind “division by zero.” A number divided by zero is not zero but infinity. But why?
I then put together The Book of Mathematics to answer such questions, and bring clarity to the fundamentals of mathematics. Around 2006, Sal Khan launched the Khan Academy. It provided further materials for learning math in a wonderfully simple way. My attention then shifted to self-learning. The goal became teaching the students to become self-learners.
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High School Dropouts Project
In 2015, I worked with High School dropouts at a facility of the Metropolitan Ministries of Tampa in New Port Richie, Florida. It was an eye-opening experience to get to know the hopes and aspirations of these young students after the disappointments and despair they had gone through. I documented my first encounter with some of them at this link: Troubleshooting Difficulties. My efforts to address their difficulties using word clearing didn’t go too well.
These students were much older than those I had worked with earlier. They had a long trail of misconceptions behind them. They soon became exasperated with any effort to track down their earlier misconceptions. Then I hit upon the idea of doing a series of lectures that introduced the basic math concepts in a logical order. These lectures introduced the basics in the form of well laid out definitions. The first lecture introduced MATHEMATICS with some fun puzzles (see What is Mathematics?). The subsequent lectures cleared up some fundamental vocabulary.
This lecture series was highly successful. This experience provided me with the following understanding:
- Students get fired up when you are clarifying the right concepts that they are missing.
- This happens rapidly when students are presented with concepts in a logical order.
- This also requires concepts to be explained with great simplicity and total clarity.
- This provides the fastest way of learning a subject.
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Start of Subject Clearing
That later concepts in a subject usually depend on earlier and broader concepts. This led to the discovery that a subject can be learned rapidly if its concepts are presented in the order from broader and more fundamental to narrower and more specific. This was the the start of subject clearing. This approach applied not only to school subjects, but also to the subjects encountered in life, and to the subject of life itself.
It is found that this approach often leads to the discovery of concepts that need to be clarified better, and even to holes in the subject that are camouflaged by assumptions and arbitrary concepts. Many concepts are defined so ambiguously that they lead to contradictions. One can, thus, develop an optimum sequence of key words with precise and concise definitions to learn a subject.
After a student understands this list of key words he can study the subject rapidly on a self-learning basis. An alphabetically arranged glossary may also be put together, so one can find the keywords and definitions conveniently, .
Over time, as the understanding in the subject improves, the definitions evolve to become more precise. As a subject expands, for example, when we study many religions together, the key words for similar concepts may be indexed together.
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Summary
Subject Clearing is a new method that lends itself to self-learning. It may be used to develop an optimum curriculum for studying a subject. That curriculum may easily by self-studied by students in a large supervised classroom. Students can self-study and learn at their own pace since there are no teachers and lecturers to keep pace with.
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