Blogparade: Wie Penelope Tabellenkalkulation gelernt hat

Im Rahmen einer Blogparade habe ich vor 10 Tagen dazu eingeladen, Texte darüber zu schreiben, wie man sich eine spezifische Kompetenz angeeignet hat. Sinn davon ist, dass die Texte so besser sichtbar werden, die Bloggerinnen und Blogger sich so vernetzen und letztlich eine Sammlung von Texten entsteht, die ich dann in einem Schlusspost zusammenfasse und kommentiere. Der Titel der Blogposts wäre »Wie ich etwas gelernt habe«, wobei »etwas« dann ersetzt würde durch die Kompetenz. Eine mögliche Struktur der Beiträge wäre:

1. Beschreibung der Kompetenz (was bedeutet es, das zu können?)
2. Phasen des Lernprozesses
3. Wie habe ich gelernt?
4. Was lässt sich daraus übers Lernen ableiten?

Es ist Usus, einen Zeitraum vorzugeben: Ich schlage also mal vor, die Texte bis Ende April zu schreiben und würde mich freuen, wenn sie hier mit Kommentar verlinkt würden oder ich eine Mail mit einem Link erhielte.

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Hier der Beitrag von Penelope, sie hat ihn auf Englisch geschrieben:

I was 23 and had been devoting myself to fine arts, dance, literature and languages since the age of 16. I hated maths, science, geography and anything I was expected to learn without being told why. At 16, it had been my opinion that life was hard enough without the need to solve abstract problems that did not serve to make me any happier.

Needless to say, after 7 years away from numbers and logic, my grasp of anything more complicated than basic arithmetic was poor.

Having arrived in London as a tourist, determined to get a job and stay there, I managed to be hired by an agency as an office “temp” (temporary worker) even though I couldn’t even type. At the first company I was sent to, one of my duties involved updating a spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3, the precursor of Excel.

When I first realized that the numbers I could see in the cells of the spreadsheet were the result of hidden formulas, my tiny brain was suddenly set on fire! I was both horrified and intrigued. I thought that such trickery was an outrage! – but also utterly fascinating. I knew I had to figure out how this craziness worked! After several weeks of struggling to understand some of the formulas, I managed to get myself on a Beginners’ Course in Lotus 1-2-3. (In the meantime, the company I was sent to as a “temp” had hired me as a permanent employee.)

At the Beginners’ Course, I was even more shocked to discover that I really knew nothing about how the world worked. I didn’t even know that to work out a Profit, you had to subtract the Purchase Price from the Sales Price. How could I know such a thing? I had never worked in a shop, and had never given this matter any thought at all. But this was actually less important to me than learning the magic of those formulas, which caused correctly computed numbers to appear.

As a result of learning the power of spreadsheets, I later became a computer programmer (aka software developer). If I hadn’t had that experience, I would perhaps have gone through life without ever finding out how fascinating the field of numbers and logic is.

I still love to read, draw and dance, but numbers, logic and science in general is where I find a never-ending source of interesting problems that need solving.

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Comment: This is not really „how“ in terms of the steps I took, but „how“ the subject grabbed me and enabled me to learn difficult concepts (to me they were difficult) because I was so fascinated.