Stories are a Scaffold

India Coffee House in the 90s was different. It was located on Bangalore’s M.G road, housed in the now derelict Shrungar Shopping Complex. It had an old world vibe, with retro posters on peeling walls, ancient tables, and a large plate-glass window at which I used to sit and watch the world go by. Today, it seems like a desolate place, peopled by the elderly and a scattering of hipsters. Back then, cafés were still rare, and that venerable old institution bustled with a mix of journalists, ad-men, professors, writers, artists—the type of folk who need a periodic caffeine fix.

I was in my early 20s, and a regular at Coffee House, and so was a physics professor who moonlighted as a consultant for ISRO, India’s version of America’s NASA. As a side hustle, this professor conducted physics and maths tuitions at home and since we were both Coffee House regulars, we would occasionally chat. A recurring theme in our conversations were his tuitions. He used to complain about how hard it was to get his students to understand even basic concepts. Some of them, he said, asked him about quantum physics from time to time, and he railed at them to study classical physics first.

When I look back at his complaints today, I suspect that the good professor was suffering from what educational psychologists call the Curse of Knowledge. This is a peculiar type of cognitive bias, in which it is difficult to imagine not knowing something once you’re already an expert in it. Psychologists have confirmed this bias over the years, the most famous being the one by Elizabeth Newton¹, when she had the subjects in her experiments tap out melodies of famous songs, and had the tappers predict how many of those will be recognised by listeners. The tappers overestimated their predictions by a massive margin. They expected 50% would get it right, but only 1 in 40 listeners did.

This bias doesn’t anounce itself. It creeps up on you. One moment, you’re an amateur, a few months or years go by and bam—you can no longer remember what it felt like to be a beginner. I’ve seen this bias in almost every teaching situation I’ve encountered. People who are excellent at what they do, struggle to connect with their students. I’m not spared either. Though I’ve known about this bias for a long time, I still catch myself succumbing to it.

Yesterday, someone tagged me on a post ²by Kunal Bahl, who is famous for founding a business called Snapdeal. “Help needed” Bahl wrote, with far more exclamation marks than necessary. “My daughter’s school has asked me to speak to Grade 4, 5 and 6 students about financial literacy!… I want to take the conversation further—helping them think about smart spending, saving, investing, budgeting, and entrepreneurship. This is a harder problem than I thought! “

I was probably tagged because of my work at Byjus, once called the world’s most valued Edtech startup, now almost bankrupt. At Byjus, I developed a unique way to teach Art & Design concepts to children. I used stories, and so that is what I advised Bahl to do. “Tell stories. Don’t complicate it with advice on techniques and so on. With children that age, all that is needed is a spark“.

A LinkedIn comment is hardly the place to elaborate on why I made that particular recommendation, and in any case, given Bahl’s celebrity status, that post had gathered a little over 400 comments, so there’s an excellent chance he has not spotted it yet.

But I can spell it out here. The reason for my recommendation is to avoid the Curse of Knowledge. Bahl runs a VC firm which invests in companies in the finance sector, like Razorpay, Khatabook and Credgenics. He is a Wharton School graduate with a background in Systems Engineering and Operations. You see where I’m going with this? It’s our physics professor all over again.

If Bahl decides to directly speak to the children about “smart spending, saving, investing, budgeting, and entrepreneurship“, as he wrote in his post, there is a pretty good chance that only a fraction of the kids will understand what he’s talking about. What he needs to do is build a scaffold, and the best scaffolds, in my experience as an educator, are built through metaphors, analogies and most importantly, stories.

Children understand stories, and at that age, they expect a summary or a message to be attached to it (The moral of the story). Stories have a beginning, middle and an end, so there are events that the child will remember, and if written well, stories shine a light on abstract concepts.

Around 4 years ago, MICE labs, an organisation that encourages business innovation in the field of medicine, invited me to give a talk on entrepreneurship³. My audience were a mix of MBA and medical students. Now, entrepreneurship, though it comes under the umbrella of business, is distinct from running a business. According to Saras Sarasvathy⁴, a prominent scholar in this field, entrepreneurship is not just about starting a business; it is a way of thinking and acting that focuses on using whatever resources are on hand to create new opportunities.

A lot of people think that being a business owner and an entrepreneur is the same thing. Especially so, I’ve observed, if they have an MBA degree. Business schools teach business concepts, and rarely entrepreneurial principles—and since these terms are used interchangeably, B-School students tend to conflate the two.

To establish this crucial distinction, I started the talk with the famous story about the Mouse Merchant ⁵from the Jataka Tales. I adapted it a bit to suit the situation, but it formed a great starting point to present case studies illustrating the idea that being an entrepreneur and running a business are related, but are not the same thing.

In educational psychology, there is a concept called the Zone of Proximal Development. The gist of it is that learners can learn on their own, up to a point, after which they need support from someone who knows more about the subject. Teachers build bridges, taking the learner from what they know to what is as yet unknown.

This process of bridging is called scaffolding, and stories are a fantastic way to approach such scaffolds.

Notes