Welcome to the Revolution- A new (old) way of learning- The Way of the Unicorn

Welcome to the Revolution!


I believe most of us, old and young, who have been through university and graduate education, have the same recurring nightmare: piles upon piles of reading, where we had to underline and guess what was significant or what we would be required to remember. Then, even if the instructor reviewed in class, normally we would still be required to remember something from the hundreds of pages we were assigned.


What a ****ing nightmare! Think about the average graduate student that has a 5 course load. Each class may assign 50 or more pages per week, x 5 is 250 pages/week, x14 is 3500 pages/semester. Plus extra reading and studying for exams.


So the honest question for all of us is, is the textbook supposed to be the major source of learning? And just how does the student distill what is important if instructors don’t do it for them? And, if the instructor distills the important parts, how is reading beforehand really a productive use of time?


My experience in my education was that the courses where I relied on the instructor, not the text book, to do the teaching were the ones I got the most out of and still remember. As an example, I was honored to have W. Edwards Deming as an instructor at NYU Stern. No textbook no homework, just come and listen. Because it was HIS subject and he knew it. Another was Military History with Bela Kiraly, a Hungarian General who led the forces that resisted Stalin after WWII.


IN all of this, we should make a distinction between remembering and learning. The former will help you pass tests (not everyone is as good at remembering as others) but will not embed the learning in your head. In fact, an hour later, our mind tells us to jettison the weight and forget the stuff you will no longer need. If we really learn, it becomes muscle memory and our cortex keeps a drawer for it.


To make things a lot worse, here comes Gen Z: born connected, with a virulent dopamine addiction, reducing their attention span to almost nil. When we ask them to read 50-60 pages, they don’t; not necessarily because they don’t want to, because they can’t.


So, depending on a book to do the teaching and preparing the student to think about the subject enough to discuss it articulately in class, doesn’t work, especially in today’s world and especially with foreign students. Now the student, who is not stupid, recognizes that their job is to survive, and the way to do that is do what is necessary to pass or get your grade, whatever that is.


Most of us are in denial of those facts, and the publishing companies, who at least partially get paid by weight, don’t want us to face up. Now including links and other digital doohickies that make the text look not so archaic seems to be the answer.


It is not. Add digital case studies to the text, that is what the student will look at. The ONLY thing. So now they paid for the textbook because they need to get to the case studies.


As an instructor who had spent decades in international business, when I started teaching, I subscribed to the old formula. What did I know? After a couple of years of teaching I had to face up to the fact that the textbooks were not getting read and, even if they were, nothing much was being retained.


My decision then was to eliminate the textbooks and base my teachings on what I knew and believed, supported by videos and other digital media which were much shorter and much more to the point. And I found that discussions and presentations, which were dependent on the students’ thought, were the most valuable learning elements.


So I came up with the idea to write something which would be short, to the point, and require the students’ time for thinking not reading. Thus came The Way of the Unicorn and, with the guidance of the publisher, became a unique interactive playbook not a textbook. The terminology itself explains the difference.


This was all intuitive on my part as a leader of students and someone who was responsible for providing the plays they would use after graduation. They would not enter the workplace as a blank slate.


I didn’t know, when embarking on the project, that wise men before me had led a path to this methodology. The guiding principle for The Way of the Unicorn was stated by Ben Franklin, and maybe was originated with Xun Kuang:


“Tell me and I will forget. Teach me and I will remember. Involve me and I will learn."


THAT is how we need to teach our students and we must provide them with the media which will accomplish this. Granted this is a gift of our technology so we should use it and not be stuck in the old ways because booksellers want us to continue to be in denial or because that is the way it has been done before; for them to change to this format would be cannibalizing billions of dollars of inventory and a sea change of approach.


The military actually has been practicing this forever. When you go to basic training, your training focuses on involvement: Here’s your rifle, now shoot. Oops. You learn because you have to.

This is indeed a revolution, and welcome to it. It is welcome for both students and instructors. Welcome to The Way of the Unicorn!

NOTE: If you qualify as a university instructor or administrator, you may email me at mls19@nyu.edu and I will arrange for you to have guest access to the publication.