Saving Time and Making Fun

I'm going to outline a few scenarios that do not absolutely require instruction, but good instruction makes these situations far more worthwhile:

Learning Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for the first (or first in a long while) time.

Not just learning about disciplines like chemistry, physics, and statistics as a base for understanding natural phenomena, but directly applying them.

Learning a creative art-making skill such as sketching with charcoal or learning how to do 3D modelling.

Interlocking Morasses

D&D is a morass of systems that interact with one another in order to develop a coherent story from the combination of three things: the motivations of its players (including the Dungeon Master), the statistics and attributes of its characters, and the resolution of conflict through randomness via dice rolling. Clearly they influence each other outside of the probability space where dice determine the outcome, if you don't attack the guard you won't have to roll to make an attack. However, the system seems to favor dice rolling as the conclusion to most everything.

I enjoy that randomness to a certain extent, but sometimes I like systems like Fate or less complex games like Wilderness of Mirrors because it's not about a success/failure dichotomy determined by ticks of five percent from one to twenty. Nudging an outcome you've selected or knowing that you can absolutely succeed at a task if you're willing to invest the resources allows for alternative solutions that don't require a bridge of tasks to reach the conclusion you were hoping for where each step along the bridge can mean falling to your death, sometimes literally.

Going even further from the mathematically exact randomness of twenty-sided dice, systems like Microscope exist to create entire universes without the challenge of rolling dice or using attributes. Microscope relies pretty much exclusively on paper notes and quick, generally wacky, roleplaying. It has easy to follow mechanics for drilling down into details as well as establishing broad rules of the universe you are creating. A game like this requires very little instruction, if any. It is only helped by instruction in the same way your average board game is, it speeds up the process of getting ready to actually play the game.

For anybody who's played Dungeons & Dragons, especially third edition, you know the number of options avaliable to you as well as combinations therein is staggering. From a DM perspective this wealth of choice is more or less neutral, but the ability for players to abuse it and unbalance the game is both counterproductive and annoying as hell. If as a player you are isolated from the DM then it's fairly rational to assume that you want to build the most powerful character you can, but by working under a helpful DM you can head off a pointless conflict before investing in the choices that bring you to it.

The Magic of Science

I think the easiest way to see the real power of an instructor in an academic setting is to look at one of the more depressing aspects of science in education: the potential abuse of power dynamics between teachers and students, advisors and researchers, overseers and underlings. If you spend any amount of time looking into the path women take to becoming established in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields you will find multiple stories from women like this who either felt forced out of a field they loved or dealt with unnecessary and wrongful adversity, potentially on the behalf of others on top of any personal struggles. Instructors and advisors can wield an incredible amount of power, vastly affecting the perspective and experiences of their students in ways that are unimaginable.

Learning to see the world outside of lenses offered academic instruction isn't always easy to do. Just look at how a field manual guides birders, they focus on taxonomic distinctions where someone else might just see flashes of color to paint. To apply an objective lens, a guiding hand can be immensely useful. I personally love learning scientific information about the wilderness that I can hike through, but I also always find a way to just look at a vista using the skills I was taught in photography and art classes to see interesting arrangements of shapes, colors, and light. Personally, from a naturalist perspective, there are two main reasons why I find nature hikes so fascinating. The first is that I didn't really do much of anything with nature before I got to the latter years of high school, the second is that I still don't go on enough excursions to see ecological niches that I want to observe. Nearly all of nature is novel to me.

For those who were fortunate enough to receive (or give themselves) a competent education in statistics and probability, rational observation of the natural world can be incredibly rewarding. You can suss out information that isn't readily available by just looking at a single plant or animal. You can make educated guesses and not feel like an idiot for being wrong; you can instead feel like a biologist for being wrong. If you actually are a biologist, then those statistical skills you are supposed to use are truly necessary. I've interacted with far too many undergraduates who have no functional understanding of statistics but are planning on going to grad school. This is rather worrisome on a larger level to me. I am also planning to pursue a graduate degree and I don't feel remotely ready to apply a statistical skillset to research that I am interested in doing. I would much prefer my potential future colleagues have a decent background in the area of statistical analysis rather than not.

Well, okay, I do feel remotely ready, but only barely.

I'm not Artistic

There are a certain few steps at the beginning of learning a new artistic skill that are immensely difficult to glide through at speed. Taking a piece of charcoal to a large, blank page can be a daunting task. It doesn't seem to change between total novice and skilled master, a blank page is a wall blocking you from seeing the art you want to make.

Truly sad is the number of interesting, creative people who have told me they either aren't artistic or aren't creative. I'm pretty sure every human being is creative in some capacity. You must have the capability of creating a coherent, communicable thought and translating that into actual communication to be able to exist among other humans. To me, that is much more creative than something like making a simple giraffe sculpture out of clay. A giraffe is an existing animal and shape, clay sculpture is an existing skill, and neither of those two things are originally creative as a result.

Things like Paint Nite are really awesome for spreading means of expression and enriching ordinary lives, even if they do lean on the use of alcohol to spur such expression. If you don't ever touch things like paints or charcoals then something like Paint Nite is almost certainly an incredible amount of fun and the novelty means that the activity can bludgeon you with that creative bone you assumed you never had. I often worry about people expressing complete thoughts without dialogue as their only means of communicating, a dialogue is the perfect space to alter and improve concepts in your mind and reinforce your knowledge base about issues that matter to you. Giving people a means of artistic expression is one way to force someone to engage in that dialogue, even if it is just with a piece of canvas or a sheet of paper. Getting you to this dialogue is the reason why you have an instructor teaching you how to paint.

If you have a bit of time, buy some soft art charcoals and start sketching shapes and objects. You'll probably make something you like, even if by accident.


See you later.