#TwistedTrope 23: Dale's crappy cone

An important use of Dale's cone: Image from Wikimedia Commons

Dale's cone is a very funny idea. It was invented by British comic actor Edgar 'Jim' Dale who knew a lot about making people laugh, but not very much about education. While on a day trip to Blackpool, the young Jim accidentally dropped his ice-cream on the sand. After a long screaming fit, he calmed down enough to notice that the up-turned cone made a pyramid shape that could be divided into convenient segments (I'm not sure this is entirely accurate - Editor).

Dale's cone of experience is so named because once teachers experience it, they realise that it is a fairly useless theory in education (well, mostly - some are still fooled by it - Editor). Dale's cone - remember the convenient segments? - claims that we only remember 10 percent of what we learn in lectures, 20 percent of what we hear, and 30 percent of what we see, and so on - but ultimately, we remember 90 percent of what we teach to others. This is not believable because there are many people who are not teachers, but they still remember a lot. Also, I'm a teacher, and I often forget lots of things such as

Anyway, some learning professionals believe the cone is useful, because it seems intuitive and conveniently gives neat percentages of what happens to memory in different conditions, even though it's misleading and also a corruption of what was intended. It was so popular it became known as Dale's pyramid of earning (is this a typo? - Editor) because Mr Dale made a lot of money out of the idea. This is despite it having less substance than soft-serve ice-cream - which was incidentally invented by another British comic actor called Margaret Hilda Thatcher - and is now considered to be snake-oil (another thing Mrs Thatcher was famous for - Editor). And yet it still caught on as a credible theory to explain memory, because those who believed in it didn't do their research and/or failed to question its validity. This is similar to believing in learning styles, unicorns and politicians who tell the truth.

Today in the United Kingdom, Dale's crappy cone of experience is so popular it has multiplied and is seen everywhere on the roads. Where the cones are grouped together in large numbers, making driving difficult, it is known as a 'cone zone.' Every year at the festive season (actually all year round - Editor), many people in Britain, especially those living in Scotland, go out on the town to celebrate Dale's crappy cone, by climbing up high and placing replicas onto the heads of stone statues (see picture above). This is considered to be the best possible use of Dales's cone of shame.

Editor's note: I don't know what the author was smoking when he wrote this, but please take it all with a pinch of salt - as you should with Dale's Cone of Experience.

Next time: 24: Maslow's awkward hierarchy

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora's closed box
6. Frankenstein's well-meaning monster
7. Thor's lost hammer
8. Noah's character ark
9. Hobson's multiple choice
10. Fibonacci's annoying sequence
11. Plato's empty cave
12. Dante's lukewarm inferno
13. Sod's unlucky law
14. Aladdin's miserly lamp
15. Batman's tangled cape
16. Cupid's bent arrow
17. Fermat's dodgy last theorem
18. Moore's obsolete law
19. Lucifer's idiotic fall
20. Adam's poisoned apple
21. Hadrian's busted wall
22. Montezuma's terrible revenge


Hadrian's busted wall by Steve Wheeler was written in London, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's