Today, most educational systems are designed to work from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Students learn facts and figures and tiny fractions of knowledge long before anyone really puts things into a larger context. We assume kids should learn long division before gravitational physics, but this presents a problem for macroscopic learners. If we don’t first tell these students about gravitational physics—about what they could do with that long division and why they’re learning it—they literally cannot learn.

Macroscopic learners need context. They need to know the big why before learning the little what. It’s a scaffolding problem. Macroscopic learners need to see the whole X-Mas tree before they start to hang the ornaments. Without this scaffolding, without understanding why they’re learning what they’re learning—aka context—then little makes sense and nothing is retained.

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