The Human Nature Club Author:Edward Lee Thorndike Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DIFFERENT WAYS OF LEARNING "Mr. Elkin," said Miss Atwell, who was acting as chairman, "what have you learned this week, and how did you learn i... more »t?" 'Well, Miss Chairman, in order to be sure to have something to report to-night I took this chance of learning something that I should have learned long ago—to ride a bicycle! So far as I can recall the somewhat perturbed state of mind that I was in during the attempts, it was something like this. I'll make use in my description of a record which my wife kept at the time. I tried an hour each morning. The first morning I would sometimes fall over at the start; sometimes describe a short curve and then flop; sometimes go along with the front wheel wobbling for twenty or thirty feet. I poked with my feet, and pulled this way and that with my hands, without much, if any, idea of what I was doing. I felt good when I kept going; that was about all. The farthest I went that morning was about forty feet. My wife says that I made thirty-eight attempts, rode about two hundred and fifty feet in all, fell over at the start nineteen times, had eleven of those meteoric curved dashes, and eight rides—short and zigzag ones, however. This morning I rode five miles, falling off only four times, and then with fair provocation in the shape of a stone, a rut, a lot of sand and a terrifyingmilk-cart. All I can say about the progress from the first attempts to my present skill is that the useless jerks and pulls of arms and pokes of legs and bendings of the body gradually died out, and the right way of holding and pushing and sitting became the regular thing. My wife's records of the number of tumbles each day, the longest trip made, etc., show that pretty clearly. "I learned just by the try, try again method, with no explanations f...« less