Surfing With An Accent
Surfing with an Accent is a book that illuminates how we can learn to do challenging things as we get older, outside of our “critical period” in which to learn them. A good example of a critical period is learning a language: If you don’t do it by early adolescence, you’ll always speak with an accent. When I decided to try to learn to surf big waves when I was about to turn 40 - far outside of my “critical period” - I wondered, Will I always surf with an accent? The question that I address in the book is: Can we learn to do hard things after we're supposed to? My answer is that we can, but the learning process is different. In the book’s odd chapters I tell my own story of learning to surf big waves, where I define how learning new things as we age is different. In the even chapters I pull from my 15 years of experience as an education entrepreneur to explore the story told by science.
As a founder of both a tutoring company and an educational software company, my expertise is understanding how people learn and creating systems that align with the styles of different learners. In this book, I define why learning new things as we age is different, and how older learners can exploit this information to improve their chances of success. The odd chapters serve as the narrative foundation of the book, while the even chapters provide the mortar that makes my story worth something more than a pile of bricks.
More than ⅔ of Americans, some 200 million people, are over the age of 25 - all older learners by some standards. Ultimately this is a book about how all of these people can take on new challenges, and in the process develop a rich cognitive, physical, and emotional experience that they would not otherwise have. Surfing with an Accent uses engaging storytelling, simple metaphors, and powerful thought experiments to take the reader on a journey to understand how the human mind and body work as we age and to discover what we are all capable of learning as we get older. Armed with this knowledge, and freed from the newcomer’s anxiety that we all suffer from when taking on new challenges, readers of Surfing with an Accent will be empowered to try new activities at any age.