I was walking past one of the bookshelves in our living room when a green binder caught my eye. It belonged to one of my kids, left over from a college French class. The spine read “The Capretz Method.” I stopped. I knew Luiz Capretz as a professor who taught software engineering, not French. His claim to fame was simple: people learn differently. The key idea being that people don’t all learn programming the same way, and many struggle not because programming is inherently too hard, but because it’s taught in a way that doesn’t match their cognitive style.
That idea feels especially relevant now. New people are being introduced to software development concepts and terminology through agentic AI tools, and many are hitting the same old wall. Capretz believed that programming education should adapt to these styles instead of forcing one rigid approach. What struck me was that his method had now been applied to learning French. I suppose C++ and French are both languages, right? So I am going to assume that this concept did indeed translate well into foreign language study.
My own experience learning foreign languages was always brute force vocabulary lessons. I do not think anyone was following the Capretz method when I was in high school. Although, we did have a teacher who loved to play his guitar and sing popular Spanish love ballads. Maybe he was pioneering Capretz after all? Actually, I think he was just doing what he could to survive the day with a bunch of rowdy and obnoxious high school boys taunting him about his heavy accent and comb over. Poor Mr. Gomez. He tried to teach through multiple modalities, but it was lost on those souls.
I am glad I paused at that book. I realize now that as I try to learn some new things myself, it is a good idea to experiment with different learning methods and modalities of digesting material. In today’s world there is every conceivable way to learn. If something is not landing well with you, try something different.
“If Capretz was right, you have a unique way of learning, and until you find it, you will struggle picking anything up.”
So here is what I am doing. The next time I feel stuck on something I am trying to learn, I will stop and ask whether the problem is the material or the method. Then I will try one other way. A video instead of an article. A conversation instead of a tutorial. A hands on experiment instead of reading documentation. Just one shift, and see what happens.
