Comment by kvgr
3 days ago
Training wheels are horrible thing. When i was a little kid i didn't want to let go of them. One day my mother removed them, hold me by my shirt collar and told me to pedal. At the end of the day I was riding like a boss.
As the author said, training wheels are learning backwards. You learn to pedal, but not to ride. You need to ride, then learn to pedal. And the motivation is also positive: removing training wheels is bad, cause you will fall. Adding pedals is good, because it allows you to go faster.
While this whole thread is heavily dominated by bashing on training wheels (deservedly so, I can say having tried to teach a full blown 29 year old to ride bikes), this incentive/motivation inversion you mention is interesting.
"Protections/guards" of some kind are so common (not just in software/tech, but all life) that "training wheels" has become a huge metaphor/analogy. I wonder how many other examples there are of the motivation inversion?
It is the same with education. Kids don't get anything if you are using the negative form "don't do this bla bla stop doing that bla bla" and even worse when parents add the confidence sapping "you will fall"/"you will hurt yourself".
It is better to use the positive form: "take your time and make sure you have both feets secured before moving your hand" (on a climbing wall) "stay this distance from the end of the edge of the sidewalk, the bus can pass really close"
My parents taught me to ride by pushing the bike down a small hill with me on it! Lol
Same thing though. I was ruding the bike like a boss pretty quickly.
Actually that is what we use to teach adults how to ride bikes. They get it much better if they get used to push the bicycle for a couple of hours, plus mounting dismounting it in a standstill. It teaches them they can control it and it doesn't appear like some external contraption whose sole purpose is to make them crash.
I'm an adult with cerebral palsy and it's been a lifelong dream of mine to learn how to ride a bike as an adult. I feel like I may have just enough balance to make it work.
My biggest problem with learning to ride a bike is they seem to assume the user has a certain amount of flexibility and range of motion. Also in order for me to have 'feet on the ground' I have to be off the seat. If I'm off the seat all of a sudden I'm straddling a massive metal crossbrace that's uncomfortably close to 'the boys'.
This post has me wanting to find a women's cruiser and remove the pedals. I'm ~ 5'10" I should be able to find a bike where I can easily touch the ground from the saddle
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