Pray this day, on one side of one sheet of paper, explain how the Royal Navy is prepared to meet the coming conflict.
Winston Churchill, Letter to the Admiralty, Sep 1, 1939
Winston Churchill was aware of the power of brevity. The discipline of condensing thoughts into one side of a single sheet of A4 paper resulted in the efficient transfer of information.
A tenet of our teaching system is that every lesson is presented on two facing sheets of A4. We’ve had to double Churchill’s rule as they didn’t have to contend with screen grabs in 1939. If we can’t teach an essential concept in two pages of A4 we know that the subject matter needs to be broken into two smaller lessons.
Lesson left-hand page
Lesson right-hand page
How this book avoids wasting your time
Over the years I have read many hundreds of computer text books and most of my time was wasted. The big problem with most books is that I must wade through thousands of words just to learn one important technique. If I don’t read everything I might miss that one essential insight.
Many presentational methods have been used in this book to help you to avoid reading about things you already know how to do, or things that are of little interest to you.
Learning by participation
Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.
Confucius, Chinese teacher, editor, politician and philosopher (551-479 BC)
Confucius would probably have agreed that the best way to teach IT skills is hands-on (actively) and not hands-off (passively). This is another of the principal tenets of The Smart Method® teaching method.
Research has backed up the assertion that you will learn more material, learn more quickly, and understand more of what you learn if you learn using active, rather than passive methods.
For this reason, pure theory pages are kept to an absolute minimum with most theory woven into the hands-on lessons, either within the text or in sidebars.
This echoes the teaching method used in Smart Method classroom courses where snippets of pertinent theory are woven into the lessons themselves so that interest and attention is maintained by hands-on involvement, but all necessary theory is still covered.
