[HN Gopher] How to get better at painting without painting anyth...
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How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
Author : intronextron
Score : 391 points
Date : 2021-07-05 06:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.learning-to-see.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.learning-to-see.co.uk)
| shusaku wrote:
| I'm not going to disagree with the author's main point, I'm sure
| doing drills is very important. But I do question their personal
| example. When I was in high school, I played a lot of go. But
| then I stopped playing for a few years. When I started again,
| after shaking off the rust I was a much better player. And I
| wasn't doing any "drills" during those years of off time.
| Sometimes I think we just need a fresh perspective on our
| hobbies. So did the author improve because sketching is a drill?
| Maybe even if they hadn't done that they still would have gotten
| better.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You were practicing in your sleep.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| I think his stress on the value of drawing is accurate. Art is
| like programming, a large part is language agnostic and
| transferable between languages.
|
| With representational painting, the most important thing is to
| have a good sketch underneath, then have a coherent value
| design, and finally, have a good color design and brushwork. If
| you didn't nail the perspective or proportion, everything else
| is trash. Similarly, if you didn't nail your values, then no
| amount of color or brushwork will save you.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's much to be said about taking rests / breaks to let your
| brain process things without the repetition and pressure.
|
| In a weird twist, I often find myself knowing more and being
| more confident about previous (work related) projects after I'm
| out of them, once I can look at things with hindsight and think
| about them. And I realize how much I actually know about the
| domain, to the point where I think "I should go back to that
| project now" (even if it wouldn't actually work for me like
| that).
| toto444 wrote:
| I had to stop rock climbing for a year due to personal
| circumstances and to my surprise I was better when I went back
| than when I was practicing 2 to 3 times a week.
|
| I think when COVID is over and people really go back to
| practicing their favourite sport, many will experience this.
| dcx wrote:
| The exact same thing just happened to me recently after a 10+
| year break. Ranking systems seem to have shifted a little since
| I last played, but I feel like I'm playing easily 3-5 kyu
| better than I used to at my previous peak.
|
| I think this is a different process, though. My sense is that
| increased wisdom transfers very well to improvement in go. What
| is making me better is a better ability to prioritise, make
| judgments and tradeoffs, and manage risk, learned from the real
| world. This is nice but orthogonal to the techniques for
| improvement on a single skill.
|
| During the period I first started playing, I did a little
| exercise where I looked at the advice people give on how to get
| stronger. What I found was that while you'll hear all kinds of
| stuff thrown around, when you look specifically at what the
| very strongest players (go professionals) say, you get a super
| consistent answer: (1) do as much tsumego as you can stomach,
| and (2) play as many teaching games as you can with the
| strongest players you can find.
|
| This directly translates to drill and scrimmage!
| Cyril_HN wrote:
| I think people forget that the purpose of performance is one of
| two things:
|
| 1. To perform for its own sake.
|
| 2. To drill the specific skill of live performance.
|
| If you don't want to do either of those things, it is not an
| efficient way to improve. You must perform to hone the skill of
| performance, but you should not perform to practice other skills.
|
| Caveat: sometimes you can't drill multiple skills together and
| performance is the only context where you can. However,
| performing with that in mind is very different to performing
| generally.
| IncRnd wrote:
| There was a reason John Wooden is still revered as John Wooden.
|
| I was taught the difference between practice and play with a
| different phrase, "perfect practice makes perfect." I've applied
| that to every part of my life, because it's true.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Maybe this is just sticking out for me because I'm currently
| working on my visual art skills, but -- making an illustration or
| piece of visual art involves a lot of separate skills. It's like
| if someone did a million algorithms problems in Python, then went
| back to Java and touted the headline "I got better at Java
| without writing Java". You got better at executing on the whole
| thing you're trying to do in Java, sure, but your Java-specific
| skills didn't get better, so -- what are we impressed by?
|
| For any given person those algorithms problems might or might not
| have been the _most_ helpful thing to sink effort into. I know a
| _lot_ of artists struggle with issues that are _best_ addressed
| by scrimmage-type practice, not drilling. "It's the most
| effective way to build your skills" is totally defensible for
| _specific skills_ , not overall success. A lot of artists
| _misidentify_ what the skills are they need to improve. Executing
| on whole pieces forces you to reckon with your weak points, not
| just iterate endlessly on the skill you think would be cool to be
| super good at.
|
| > Constantly performing without ever practising is how amateurs
| approach things in other fields. Amateur golfers never drill,
| they just play. And being an amateur is fine. Painting for a
| hobby is fine.
|
| This is honestly not true IME. Maybe realist oil painting draws a
| different sort than the more illustrative creators I know of --
| but I know so many people who sketch constantly but never step
| beyond into more polished works because they're terrified of
| their weak points.
|
| Finally, "repeated mistakes" as a distinction between performance
| and practice is just straw man nonsense. Wanting to improve
| efficiently involves continuous iteration on what you're doing,
| no matter what methods you're going about. Find me someone who
| agrees with the idea that it's better to execute on whole works
| _and_ that this constitutes accepting repeating your mistakes,
| _or_ defend with some data the idea that drilling necessarily
| involves more reevaluation of your progress (hint: I 've known
| pianists ruin their tendons with technical exercises done wrong).
| natmaka wrote:
| This is not generic, it is not adequate for all disciplines.
|
| Painting establishes a relation between the painter and static
| entities (subject, colors...). They interact in many ways,
| however the painter is the main 'motor' and 'will'.
|
| Basketball is different because a player interacts with his
| teammates and opponents, he isn't the sole will at play. However
| I can see how experience may lead a coach to reckon that some
| individual ways (types of actions or reactions) are statistically
| better than other ones, either because their intrinsic rate of
| success is higher or because they benefit from teamwork, leading
| him to drill them in order to have them select the best ones and
| apply them properly. It may create a "team of robots" (sort of!)
| which may be crushed by an opponent team playing in a
| deliberately unusual (albeit not absurd) way, established to
| counter the particular automatic actions and reactions of the
| "robot team".
|
| Individual sports are different because there is no teamwork.
| Combat sports are particularly interesting because you need to
| scrim (spar) not simply to verify the effects of drills but in
| order to learn what no drill can effectively teach you: a certain
| mental state, coping with stress, simultaneously integrating many
| dynamic blurry variables (related to time & space)...
|
| Drill, barely spar and only use it to check what you gained from
| drills, then hop on a ring against a person who spared
| properly... and good luck to you (you will need it)!
| blindmute wrote:
| The person who drills 90% of the time and spars 10% will pretty
| much always beat the reverse person. Sparring is for practicing
| skills under real conditions. If you don't have those skills,
| there's nothing to practice in the ring other than flailing
| about and getting hit.
| natmaka wrote:
| > The person who drills 90% of the time and spars 10% will
| pretty much always beat the reverse person
|
| IMO this is true for beginners, then more and more the other
| way around.
|
| > Sparring is for practicing skills under real conditions. If
| you don't have those skills, there's nothing to practice
|
| I agree, and wrote "sparring becomes more and more
| determinant as technical flaws become more rare".
| blindmute wrote:
| Kind of true, but for pros, sparring is also a drill.
| Normally a sparring session focuses on a specific thing
| they'd like to work on, because they've mastered everything
| they can outside of the ring. They aren't doing a full
| "performance" during sparring.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| I did this in boxing. My coach was very fond of drills. I
| remember my first week (5 trainings a week) he only taught and
| drilled me how to move. No punchs, nothing. Just the various
| movements, rotation, how to shift weight, etc.
|
| I did it for about 3 months like this, with maybe, maybe a
| 30-45 minute spar session per week (and at this time, I was
| doing 3 trainings a day during week, 2 on saturdays).
|
| Had my first fight around the 3-4 month mark and won it without
| much difficulty.
|
| I see this now that I am learning padel tennis. Been playing
| for a year or so, but I hardly do any games, mainly
| practise/drills with my coach (4 times a week). Maybe 2 games a
| month. I started in September not even knowing how to play, to
| surpass most people in my trainings, since the drills make me
| play in games as I practise, since it was drilled so much,
| while 95%+ of the people do one movement in practise, then get
| to a game and change it all, reduce speed, or just hit it wrong
| because they end up 'practising' more the matches with wrong
| technique/no correction, vs the folks that repeat the same
| movement 1000 times with correction. In a few months I may even
| get my beginners coaching certificate.
|
| As Bruce Lee said: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000
| kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick
| 10,000 times.
| natmaka wrote:
| ~3% of the time for sparring seems very low to me, even for a
| beginner. 15% to 35% is AFAIK more common among competitors
| (I practice Thai boxing).
|
| Your first fight matchmaking may have been somewhat
| imperfect(?), or you are gifted :-)
|
| I'm not an expert but observed that the best way to progress
| as a fighter, for most, is not by overwhelmingly drilling.
| Drills are necessary, and may be the main component, however
| to win bouts sparring becomes more and more determinant as
| technical flaws become more rare.
|
| AFAIK B. Lee said "A fighter who trains without sparring is
| like a swimmer who hasn't immersed in the water" and
| "Remember, actual sparring is the ultimate, and the training
| is only a means toward this".
| Nevermark wrote:
| I see skill learning as a combination of understanding and
| fluency.
|
| Understanding requires time to play and explore something. It
| enables slow but powerful problem solving into new territory.
|
| But fluency requires practice. And it's benefit is quick and
| accurate automatic responses, freeing up the brain to tackle
| novel things much faster.
|
| Together they work really well. and the repetition in obtaining
| fluency can also push understanding deep into stable memory where
| it will remain accessible years later.
|
| I have seen a lot of education where only one side was
| emphasized. When kids are pushed for time, neither side gets done
| well.
|
| I don't think anyone learning anything should move on to more
| difficult tasks until they both really understand and become
| fluent at the prerequisites.
|
| But that would take education off it's cohort centered time
| schedules. That system is so ingrained in most of our non-online
| education systems.
| praptak wrote:
| If you want to start painting (or at least the subset of the
| painting skills required to draw stuff), I suggest "Drawing on
| the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. It has some simple
| drills and presents just enough of the underlying theory to make
| you understand what the drills are for.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that
| they are themselves perfectly good works of art. Actually, I like
| them more than his paintings, a lot more. Strange article, as if
| he didn't notice the black and white works are art too.[0] He
| never stopped practising art, making art.
|
| [0] Well, not so strange in this world where ink drawings
| generally/often/usually/popularly aren't considered Art in the
| way oil paintings are. Imagine if piano music wasn't considered
| real music, not like orchestral music!
| nobody_nothing wrote:
| > _I don 't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in
| that they are themselves perfectly good works of art._
|
| Agreed, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings,
| not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between
| drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted
| as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the
| paintings).
|
| For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other
| hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I
| imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills
| that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition,
| perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings
| themselves.
|
| The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but
| they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of
| the skills the author was ultimately after.
| fma wrote:
| If anyone wants more details, I'd recommend the following book...
| Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders
| Ericsson
| Jakob wrote:
| > Repeatedly doing it right
|
| I have a funny story about that: When my sister struggled with
| Math at school, I let her solve equations she struggled with.
|
| Unbeknownst to her, every test equation I gave her was identical
| to the previous one, but she didn't notice because she focussed
| only on solving it.
|
| After repeating this more than five times, she was astonished
| that all results were equal. Between the 5th to 10th times of
| solving that identical equation, she became very good at it.
|
| Afterwards, I showed her that all equations were identical. She
| aced the school test the following day.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| The sister's name?
|
| Albert Einstein.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| *Alberta
| blindmute wrote:
| I think it's unfortunate that drills in art have been culturally
| moved away from recently. There is an active sentiment in the
| amateur art community that drill is bad, and that you should just
| draw/paint/whatever things that you enjoy, and you'll just
| naturally improve over time. This is part of why you see
| countless online artists who draw for thousands of hours and
| still can barely manage a likeness.
|
| There are very few activities for which scrimmage improves you
| faster than drill. Whether it's sports, art, chess, video games,
| cooking, or anything else, doing the actual activity is a
| relatively poor way to improve at it.
| skadamou wrote:
| This is an aside but I recently studied for the MCAT and I think
| my commitment to drilling Anki flash cards every single day was a
| big factor in my success. I did full length practice tests and
| practice problems too like they tell you to do but the amount of
| focused knowledge I was able to cram into my head by rote
| drilling w/ Anki really put me over the top. I'd never used Anki
| before and the way it forces you to look at what you're bad at
| over and over again until you get it right is very helpful.
|
| I could image making an Anki deck of colors and using that to
| drill color values as this author suggests could be really
| useful.
| MikeLumos wrote:
| Recently I've been thinking the exact opposite things.
|
| Many novice artists get too hung up on doing "exercises", because
| they're easy, straightforward, and comfortable (compared to doing
| the real thing). They waste a lot of time without improving all
| that much, because repeating exercises out of context can quickly
| become mindless, people tend to lose sight of the real purpose
| (making good drawings/paintings), and instead keep drawing boxes
| to "practice" perspective or get better at drawing straight
| lines.
|
| I think what you need is a combination of what he's calling
| "scrimmage" and "drill".
|
| To develop skills the fastest - try to do the thing that is as
| close to the specific _real_ thing you want to do as possible. If
| you want to design characters - spend most of your time designing
| characters. You won 't find a way to grow faster than by doing
| exactly what you want to get good at.
|
| Then you can analyze your artwork, find the skills you're the
| weakest at, and deliberately practice them. But still, do it in
| the context of doing the real thing.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| While watching an acrobat show, I came to the realization that
| there is probably a better way to develop skills.
|
| These acrobats were realizing dangerous performances, where
| mistakes must not happen even when doing the show thousands of
| times. And also it must have been possible to practice it right
| on the first time.
|
| My answer to that is imagination, search for the proper
| mindset, and switching to it.
|
| You have to try to imagine the thinking of someone who can do
| things naturally.
|
| It's kinda like in "the pretender" TV-show. It's one layer of
| indirection added to the more traditional "imitate the master"
| practicing technique.
|
| Some tasks are best handled when you have a specific internal
| representation.
|
| Often when you start from scratch, you don't have the right
| one, and through experience, blood and sweat, you refine it
| until you discover the representation that works well for the
| task.
|
| But when you have a representation that kind of work but is
| missing something, you get stuck in plateau which practice
| (both "scrimmage" and "drill") only reinforce.
|
| For example, with our acrobats, are they visualizing the
| actions in their head they are about to do ? Do they see
| themselves in 3D as a first person character, or in third
| player view ? Are they feeling the movements in their head ?
| Can they do the movements without doing them ? Can they create
| mental variations of the movements ? How do they handle the
| motion blur that our novice eye experience ? How do they
| evaluate the risks ?
|
| Acrobats often are born into; and people do things without
| knowing exactly how they do them. So you'll have to practice
| observation to understand (how, why, when,...) they do what
| they do.
|
| While practice is still necessary, it becomes a mere reality
| check for the performances you have mentally imagined doing a
| thousand times.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Acrobats are also doing things like practicing with a lot of
| padding and nets. And working up to the big dangerous stuff
| by doing simpler versions.
|
| I took pole dance classes for a while, for instance, and it
| was only after a lot of practice that I was allowed to start
| doing moves where I was upside down and hanging on to the
| pole with my thighs. And the beginning of that involved just
| lifting my ass over my head (after a lot of strengthening of
| my abdominal muscles) and wrapping my legs around the pole,
| and suffering through the pain of most of my weight suddenly
| being on two tender little strips of flesh in my inner
| thighs. Once they toughened up I could start doing more
| interesting things.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > The practice has changed my brain.
|
| > Here's a few of the things that came off my easel since I got
| back to painting again:
|
| This might be informative if he showed us some old painting from
| before he "changed his brain" so we can see the differences. But
| he didn't, so we are left wondering.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Leetcode it is, then.
| [deleted]
| jtchang wrote:
| Anyone who plays an instrument knows the value of drilling. Yes
| it can be boring. But it is needed to get better. You really need
| to get down to each note and make it perfect before you can play
| the measure or piece.
| Exuma wrote:
| Surprised to see his blog here, I am a huge fan. He is very
| excellent, and also his munsel color videos are very good.
| chris_st wrote:
| As much as I agree with a lot in this article, I _totally_ don 't
| understand the "Code Kata" thing promoted by Uncle Bob Martin and
| others. I understand drilling a specific skill in the arts, but
| writing the same piece of code over and over just makes no sense
| at all (and yeah, his example was solving the "Bowling Score"
| problem every time).
|
| So, anyone _do_ code katas and like /recommend them? If so, what
| does it teach you? Do you do the same problem over and over, or
| tackle different problems?
| sha256kira wrote:
| I dont like them per say, but they worked for me when I had to
| learn data structures and algos under a lot of pressure. What I
| noticed (and what I tell my students now) is that they can help
| you get to a point where you get enough muscle memory to start
| to watch yourself coding in real time and think critically
| about what you're doing when your doing it.
| tsumnia wrote:
| I don't personally do katas, but I would recommend them. As a
| disclaimer, I've written a research paper on the use of typing
| exercises to help learn CS [1]. For typing exercises, I
| consider it akin to building muscle memory at getting
| comfortable with code syntax with a variety of examples. I look
| at katas in a simple fashion, small scale problems designed to
| get you comfortable with building mental models in your head.
| There is also research out of Utah on giving super small coding
| drills with good results [2].
|
| When it comes to teaching it, the biggest hurdle is that you
| need to build a lot of small, unique exercises. This is still
| drilling, just now focusing on making the techniques flexible
| to different problems. I use the analogy of drilling technique
| in martial arts, but you could consider that training with a
| different partner to understand how the technique works with a
| new body type. The trick I've found useful is to collect a
| number of textbooks to review when thinking up practice ideas.
| If the textbook is good, it typically has "real world" examples
| modeled with the topic - for example, one I built the other day
| looked at creating bigrams from a list of words.
|
| [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3373165.3373177
|
| [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372782.3406259
| chris_st wrote:
| Excellent! I really like the idea of doing a lot of small,
| unique exercises. Even something as simple as, "Okay, you
| built a linked list of integers, now start from an empty file
| and write a linked list of floats, then do the same for
| structs (which is going to add some interesting complexity)."
| tsumnia wrote:
| Take a look at my [2] link then (Google Scholar or
| ResearchGate have the PDF without a paywall)! John Edward's
| group out of Utah made ~30 small exercises exactly like
| that. "Make a loop the goes to 3", now "Make a loop that
| goes to 4", now "Make a loop that goes from 2 to 4", ok now
| "Loop from 4 to 1", etc.
|
| And from my own work and Edwards, students enjoy these
| types of practices. They seem trivial to us experts, but
| they are appreciated by novices.
| agustif wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| There's a SaaS that let's you do this https://typing.io/
| tsumnia wrote:
| There are a few that have adopted typing practice with code
| (https://www.speedtyper.dev/ is another one). I think they
| focus a little too much on training your typing speed
| rather than helping expose new concepts/examples without
| making them coding problems.
|
| Either way, yes, practicing code writing without solving
| coding problems does help learn CS concepts. I
| conceptualize it as some of the issues with CS/coding comes
| from "analysis paralysis" where you don't know what to do
| and even though you were told "use a loop", you don't
| really know what that means or are still struggling to know
| how to implement a loop. Drilling these lower level
| practices helps reduce that by saying "let's not worry
| about problem solving for a second, let's just focus on you
| getting comfortable with implementation". Then, there is
| less hesitation because the student knows "use a loop"
| means write out the syntax for the loop, THEN figure out
| what you want to loop.
| blindmute wrote:
| I don't know why anyone would repeat the same code multiple
| times, but I have found that practicing leetcode does actually
| improve code skill, even when the coding job doesn't have any
| complex algorithms. Just the practice of solving the algorithm
| has carryover to normal work problems, which would make sense
| as it's basically distilled code logic practice.
| chris_st wrote:
| Oh yeah, I can definitely see doing a lot of small, not-
| necessarily-easy challenges as a way to improve. Even doing
| the same one, but in a different way ("now use an array
| instead of a linked list") would be good.
| mceachen wrote:
| Many coding challenges are great drill work: but if you can,
| have your code read by someone else to ensure you're
| practicing how to write readable, maintainable code.
|
| Leetcode solutions seem to be regularly "golfed" into being
| unreadable and intractable. Don't practice that!
|
| At least in my experience, well-defined and functionally
| isolated coding challenges rarely happen at work, though.
|
| Another skill you'll need to hone is listening to your
| userbase/business partners and translating what they're
| saying into actual specifications.
|
| Doing this adequately is a prerequisite to success.
|
| Doing this well (hearing what they _need_ , separating the
| "need" from the "how", and being imaginative in what a clean
| implementation would look like) can both reduce what work is
| needed now, and set up future success to be more likely.
| chris_st wrote:
| > _Leetcode solutions seem to be regularly "golfed" into
| being unreadable and intractable. Don't practice that!_
|
| AMEN!
| mch82 wrote:
| > I paint realism in oils, mostly still life.
|
| I showed my grandma (98) a photo on an iPad. Her immediate
| reaction: "there's no reason to paint realism anymore". The
| method described in this article might work for realism in oils,
| but please don't accept it as the exclusive way to create art.
|
| Art is about understanding the tools you're using to create (for
| example how paint mixes, moves, dries, interacts with a surface),
| then choosing which tools to use and how to use those tools to
| convey an experience to an audience. Art is about
| experimentation, exploration, communication. Art is about
| studying & talking with other artists to learn how they work, the
| processes they use, how they solve problems; sometimes copying
| them and then extending beyond.
|
| My point of view on this developed as I studied art in high
| school, through AP art, and then minored in fine art in college
| alongside my engineering degree. Plus many hours painting with my
| grandma and my mom.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > The method described in this article might work for realism
| in oils, but please don't accept it as the exclusive way to
| create art.
|
| The method in this article applies universally to any art,
| music, any creative endeavor, and frankly even non-creative
| endeavors.
|
| It can be reduced to this: take time to practice, improve, and
| eventually excel at specific skills/techniques that comprise
| your craft, with no regard for any sort of big picture during
| this focused practice.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| > Art is about studying & talking with other artists to learn
| how they work, the processes they use, how they solve problems;
|
| Everything else makes sense to me, but isn't this a bit narrow?
| It implies that all art is the search for some higher truth,
| and that it can only be achieved as a communal effort. This
| academic, analytical approach would seem to fit your personal
| art career and that of many artists important to at history.
| But surely there is still artistic truth in the individual
| practising and experimenting for themselves, outside any scene
| or context. There are also examples of people doing this who
| are considered important to art.
| mch82 wrote:
| You're right. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
| test_epsilon wrote:
| What were the remaining reasons to paint realism after
| relatively cheap color photography came about ~100 years ago
| and before the iPad was made, out of curiosity?
| thatcat wrote:
| There wasn't any really, surrealism and abstract art
| developed slightly before that
| egypturnash wrote:
| This reminds me of the time I picked up a brush for the first
| time in something like a decade and was surprised to find that
| all the time I'd spent drawing stuff with my Wacom tablet meant
| that I was able to put the ink exactly where I wanted it to,
| while thinking a lot about how much pressure I was putting on the
| brush to make its line width change organically. The last time
| I'd used one was when I was still struggling with properly
| constructing forms on the page.
|
| You do a thing long enough and it sticks in your head in some
| surprising ways. Though I wonder how much the constant churn of
| this year's hot language and framework gets in the way of that
| for programmers. I'm glad I went into art instead.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| All of this advice is equally true with practicing a musical
| instrument. You will _not_ get better if you just play songs
| /pieces fully over and over. You can, and often do, get worse.
| And it's _hard_ , because making music is what it's all about.
|
| I don't know who said this quote originally, but in the piano
| world, one says "practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes
| permanent."
| nefitty wrote:
| In middle school, my orchestra teacher taught "Practice doesn't
| make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect." It's a lot
| easier to perfect atomic-level techniques than an entire
| composition.
|
| She also taught us not to "stop and start over" when we made
| mistakes. I think that is sort of like "don't try to optimize
| early, get the code working then refactor later."
| samplatt wrote:
| >"Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice, makes
| perfect."
|
| That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.
| mitko wrote:
| Four years ago my sensei invited another sensei for a
| seminar and the other sensei said nearly exactly the same
| thing, but I never heard my sensei say it. Is your sensei
| Fujishima?[1]
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20
| ipaddr wrote:
| Is the world this small?
| samplatt wrote:
| Nope.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| It's an extremely common quote, often attributed to Vince
| Lombardi, the football coach. Nobody's sensei made it up.
| lask wrote:
| Another important reason to not start over is to make it a
| habit to continue playing even when you make a mistake. If
| you are performing and you make a mistake, then you don't
| want to just keep on playing.
| thwave wrote:
| My piano teacher used to say "It's not a video-game, you
| don't go back to the beginning of the level every time you
| lose."
| SeriousM wrote:
| > She also taught us not to "stop and start over" when we
| made mistakes.
|
| This is so true. I learn piano myself and I'm a trackmania
| gamer for years. Learning a piano piece (some bars or full
| length for easy pieces) is quite the same as learning a track
| layout in trackmania. You have to go through the whole,
| regardless of the speed to see at least where it leads you.
| And if you just restart after the slightest error, you will
| perfect just the begin of the track yet you will struggle
| every time once you reach the unknown parts.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think playing songs / pieces does have value, especially if
| you're starting out, in that it trains your motor skills -
| finding the keys on a piano, strings on a guitar, etc. It won't
| make you a musician, but it'll get you up to party trick level.
| Anyway here's wonderwall.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| "Practice makes permanent" is a perfectly reasonable goal for
| someone who needs to perform the same set of songs many nights
| out of the year.
|
| Musicians don't always "make" music - that's _not_ what it 's
| all about. Musicians may only need to "play" music.
| renox wrote:
| Easier said than done: my son is learning guitar but it's the
| holidays. Not easy to make him practice during the holidays
| given that I'm not a musician..
| bloaf wrote:
| For art and music there are pretty clear and well defined skills
| that can be drilled.
|
| Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
| Jakob wrote:
| Most writing drills are about reading critically:
| http://www.criticalreading.com/
|
| Look into universities and approaches from Professors:
|
| Jordan Peterson's writing approach is based a lot on drill:
| https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.co...
|
| Umberto Eco's "How to write a Thesis"
| someguyinthe wrote:
| I assume that'd be doing some subsection of writing, like
| focusing on dialogue, or describing a scene, etc. From what I
| gather, you'd want to focus on one thing and try and get really
| good at it, then you could write a short story as a "scrimmage"
| to see how you've improved as a whole
| okwubodu wrote:
| I'm not a writer but I've used one drill where you set a theme
| and handwrite off the top of your head without pausing or
| erasing up to whatever set length. Like freestyling.
| vladTheInhaler wrote:
| You might be interested in Peak, by Anders Ericson. The author
| mentions him briefly, but the book is well worth reading. He
| looks at the case of Benjamin Franklin, and some of the
| strategies he used. In brief, he found pieces of writing that
| he especially admired, and transformed them in various ways,
| then tried to reproduce the original from the transformed
| versions. The version that seemed the post practical was to
| create a cue for each sentence, and attempt to reproduce the
| original wording from the cue. Another was to scramble the
| sentences of the piece and try to put them back in what felt
| like the most logical order. These seem pretty mechanical and
| rote, but they tie into an overall approach Ericson lays out
| called _deliberate practice_.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| I'm quite sure there was a great example in the book "Talent is
| overrated" that goes through this with one of the early US
| presidents. Basically this guy wasn't much of a writer but then
| he employed the "deliberate practice" technique to methodically
| study, pull apart, rewrite and review+correct some of the great
| writings of the day, to improve his own writing. And ultimately
| he ended up apparently being a great writer. I guess there's a
| science to most things.
| totetsu wrote:
| Have a look a the writing for academic purposes material for
| second language learners.. there are books that break down
| writing into a process with stages that can be drilled.
| aaron5 wrote:
| I have one that I think helps - of course I made it up, so I'm
| biased.
|
| Take a passage from a book you think is written well. For each
| sentence, ask yourself what, in your own terminology, the
| sentence is _doing_ - what 's the function of the sentence. For
| example, "a person reacts bodily" or "a decision is made
| involving time".
|
| Then write your own passage for an entirely different story,
| wherein each sentence accomplishes the same function as what
| you encoded from the other passage.
|
| For example, I did this to begin a children's story, taking my
| template from the first page of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.
|
| THE READER by Bernhard Schlink
|
| When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and
| lasted until spring. As the old year darkened and turned
| colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't start to improve
| until the new year...
|
| LULLABYE by P Aaron Mitchell
|
| When the moon first appeared my little Zienna hid from it. The
| moon waited to see her for about 18 minutes, which is a long
| time for the moon. The moon felt for her with its beams but she
| just hummed to herself in the molasses jar. When the moon
| looked the other way she climbed out...
|
| Maybe the relationship isn't obvious to anyone else, and that's
| okay. It's still good practice - you force yourself to tell
| your own story in a cadence that matches (at least to you) that
| of a strong writer.
| gpt5 wrote:
| To extend on this - this method is extremely useful at work.
|
| When writing a doc, look for similar doc and not just copy
| their high level structure, but at the paragraph structure in
| the same way the parent poster has mentioned.
| autofellatio69 wrote:
| Okay, I know this sounds crazy and probably difficult because
| we're pretty inflexible as human beings, but if you try my
| method, you should be able to accomplish what you're setting
| out to do. First, you're going to want to sit up with your back
| against the wall. You should be on the floor for this. Now,
| scoot forward a bit, enough such that you can place your feet
| against the wall behind your head. Next, you will use your feet
| firmly planted against the wall to push your torso forward.
| With the leverage of your feet against the wall. If you "cannot
| reach" you should still be able to angle your hips upward and
| meet yourself halfway. From here, you should be able to slide
| it all the way in your mouth. Good luck, friend. :)
|
| Also, please do not try this if you have a wife and kids. It
| will ruin your life, trust me, I learned the hard way.
| runevault wrote:
| There are a lot of different drills, several of which are
| listed below but will touch on.
|
| 1. Copy something you like. Take a
| sentence/paragraph/page/scene and just retype it in. This
| sounds crazy, but pushing the words not only into your brain
| but back out through your fingers gives your brain a different
| avenue into them.
|
| 2. Object writing. Learned this one from Pat Pattison's writing
| better lyrics, but most of the techniques are generally
| applicable. You take an object/idea, and for 5-10 minutes write
| about it using all 6 senses (the standard five plus motion).
| The more you do this the more your writing will shift (at least
| in my experience).
|
| 3. Journaling. Morning pages (3 pages at the very start of your
| day) is a common one for writers, learning to take the filter
| off and just write. A lot of crap might come out, and you'll
| just write about the day before or your concerns about the day
| ahead a lot, but the act of putting the words down will help
| you shift your writing.
|
| 4. This one isn't a drill but I wanted to include it: explore
| other types of writing. If you are interested in academic
| writing, try making short stories or poems. Exploring entirely
| different uses of words will help you build new, because intent
| shapes the way the brain uses the words, and learning to unlock
| different pathways can have surprising results.
| macintux wrote:
| That's an interesting question. My completely uneducated idea:
| reproducing masters' works.
|
| Take a novel, or something shorter, and type it up, thinking
| with each sentence, each page, why they wrote what they did,
| and what they left out.
| thatcat wrote:
| HS Thompson did this
| mch82 wrote:
| What audience are you writing for?
|
| Drill by frequently publishing work to that audience so you can
| get feedback and iterate. Build up larger works over time.
| brudgers wrote:
| The premise of Wooden's methods is that the players already have
| a lot of experience playing basketball. Many many games by the
| time they got to UCLA. Informal and formal.
|
| And that's my caveat for this as advice on painting. If a person
| doesn't _already_ have a history of painting, by which I mean
| starting and completing paintings as paintings, no amount of
| drill is going turn them into a painter. The willingness to
| execute paintings has to be there.
| temp234 wrote:
| Does anybody have any reading recommendations or thoughts on
| the topic of how people _with_ drilled or otherwise refined
| skills can turn into people who come up with and complete
| mature creative projects? In creative contexts I know a lot of
| people who get stuck on just drilling their skills forever or
| who want to be mature creative project-completers but
| mysteriously aren't getting it done. I've read a lot about how
| people get world-class good at things ("10k hours") but I don't
| think those books explain why one person successfully completes
| a unique comic, album, short film, or novella and another
| person struggles with that goal all their days, either only
| producing derivative work or never completing their work. Some
| of the focus on "10k'ing" your way to world class skill feels
| like a distraction from developing as an independent thing-
| finisher. Some incredible creative work has been completed by
| people with decent-but-not-world-class skill.
| mabub24 wrote:
| You are relatively correct. The 10k "rule" and other general
| guidelines are just that --- guidelines for something that
| often bucks guidelines and is better for it.
|
| 3 things an artist make:
|
| 1. Finishing and finishing often. You should not be making
| the same thing all the time, but you should be consciously
| iterating in any direction you like as long as you are still
| finishing. Great painters, writers, musicians, are constantly
| making stuff, you only see the polished stuff that ends up
| through the filter.
|
| 2. Studying the great works in whatever your chosen
| field/style/genre. Know the "rules", the normal directions on
| the map, before you break them and decide on a shortcut or to
| buck convention all together. All great artists, even the
| enfant-terrible avant-garde artists, are extremely
| knowledgeable in art-history in their chosen field and can
| explain extremely precise opinions on the merits of one
| artist or movement. Most postures of naivete are just that:
| posturing. Great artists know their stuff.
|
| 3. Surrounding yourself with other artists. You need people
| who will look at whatever you finish and tell you about it.
| Hopefully, these people should be as interested in good art
| as you, and as well versed or more well versed in art history
| as you. Engaging in communities of artists will make your
| imagination and creativity soar.
|
| You absolutely need 1 and 2. You can get by without 3, but
| you will likely never achieve true greatness without it.
|
| Everything else after that is luck.
| noahbradley wrote:
| I'd somewhat change #1 to "starting and starting often." I
| see far, far too many art students fall into the trap of
| wasting hours finishing work when they'd be better off
| starting more pieces.
| mabub24 wrote:
| Definitely. I think were we to rewrite #1, we could say:
|
| 1. Start often and finish often; do not be afraid to
| abandon something that is not working. Learning what is
| not working will come from starting and finishing more
| often over time, along with reflecting on the work you
| have done. This is where the benefits of #3 come into
| play. A good community will not only praise your work,
| they will tell when something isn't working or doesn't
| work.
| brudgers wrote:
| How much gets finished is a matter of commitment to
| working more than a matter of ambition.
|
| The wasted hours are the hours that they are not working
| on the thing. One hundred hours is only a bit more than
| four days...and if you use both hands, barely more than
| two.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think "finishing often" means precisely that students
| can't be spending too long finishing work. They have to
| stop and move on ASAP so they can finish again. I think
| there's importance in finishing vs starting; it's easy
| for creatives to get stuck starting a project and never
| learning how to complete.
| brudgers wrote:
| For art, it's not skill or technique that makes someone an
| artist. It is simply the terrifying decision that what you
| make is art. Terrifying because the only gatekeeper to being
| an artist is you. Declare yourself an artist and you are.
| Call what you made art and it is.
| blindmute wrote:
| It is however skill and technique that in large part makes
| someone a good artist. Like it or not, art is a physically
| skilled medium.
| brudgers wrote:
| There is no such thing as good and bad artists. That's
| what makes the decision terrifying.
| blindmute wrote:
| There definitely is such thing, and claiming otherwise is
| a weird, very recent trend.
| brudgers wrote:
| Van Gogh is why there aren't. There are establishment
| artists and folk artists and lots of oblique trajectories
| off that axis but that's not good and bad.
|
| Or as Harry Truman opined. "If that's art, I'm a
| Hottentotte."
| chris_st wrote:
| Yup. When I was painting, I spent some time thinking about
| what it "meant" to be an artist. I finally decided that an
| artist is just executing a vision in some particular
| medium.
| chris_st wrote:
| This question came up in a guitar discussion group I'm part
| of. Someone who was really good at the drills wasn't happy,
| because they could kind of only do the drills. You _have_ to
| perform eventually, which for painting is finishing
| paintings, musicians performing entire pieces, etc. And I
| think that 's a beginning towards an answer to your question:
| find something in your hobby (or job!) you love and do that
| as a performance. Drills are there to serve the eventual
| performance, they're not an end in themselves.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I got from "I draw isolated images" to "I draw comics" via
| the middle step of "I drew a Tarot deck". I had to figure out
| a lot of shit about managing long projects that _cannot_ be
| completed in a single day to do this. Tables to help me see
| at a glance what was available to work on, at what stage.
| Ways to think about coming back to the project again and
| again.
|
| Once I had _that_ done I could tackle stuff like "telling a
| story" which is a whole other kettle of fish.
|
| Ask yourself what the shape of a finished larger thing is.
| How can you break it down into pieces about the same size as
| doing some of the drills you're used to? What are the parts
| of it that require new kinds thinking and working? Make time
| to do that.
|
| Take examples of stuff you want to be making and break it
| down. For instance I found it a useful comics-making exercise
| to take a short story by an artist I liked and write one
| sentence describing what happens on each page. That got me
| thinking about how _much_ story could easily fit on one page.
| arkj wrote:
| The will to do the drill will bring the willingness to execute.
|
| I am not a painter but I followed a pure drill approach to
| teach html/css/javascript to 12 of my operations/monitoring
| team members (11 males 1 female, aged 24-27) who lost their job
| during start of Covid.
|
| None of them had any background in programming or engineering,
| 3 of them dropped out after two weeks.
|
| All those who went through the drill got jobs as developers. 7
| as react developers, 1 test automation and 1 script developer.
|
| All I did was ensure the drill and motivate them not to give
| up. They were all from very poor families so the motivation
| part was easy - hope of a better life at the end of drill.
|
| The mantra is, don't fool yourself, type it, clock the hours
| and don't miss the meeting.
| runevault wrote:
| I think the key is that you have to spend some time doing the
| entire thing, but you have to be willing to go back and rework
| your fundamentals in smaller chunks (examples from the article
| being anything from composition to eyeing distances to color
| mixing).
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The 'wax on, wax off' drill worked for Daniel Laruso in The
| Karate Kid.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Yes, but that was a movie.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I think you're extrapolating his advice into something it's
| not. He is advocating a way to improve (by focusing on narrow
| tasks and skills), and he never says this will turn your into a
| painter.
|
| But if you _are_ a painter (or whatever) then don 't always be
| in "performance" mode, because that limits improvement.
| mauritzio wrote:
| Imho he did not be became better at "painting" but he made better
| designs for _paintings_. He trained one important aspect of the
| whole piece of art, the design. The aspect of applying paint was
| not trained, so that probably has not improved.
| username90 wrote:
| A skilled painter isn't just someone who is good at applying
| paint the way he wants, similarly as how a skilled writer isn't
| just someone who writes the words he intends to write. The
| skill includes all aspects required to make great pieces.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| > But drill isn't popular. It's widely seen as boring. Worse,
| there's a body of opinion, especially in education, that
| considers it an ineffective way to practice. That's a shame,
| because it's the most effective way to build your skills.
|
| This resonated with me as I watch my kids go through school.
|
| Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common
| core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and
| double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a
| worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2
| problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing
| just for a simple subtraction problem.
| analog31 wrote:
| Math teaching has never been successful. Nobody knows why we do
| it. The parents all learned it the old way, meaning that they
| got good test scores but did not retain any useful facility
| with math beyond their obligatory high school and college
| courses. A few people who managed to carry math to the level of
| being an art, like painting, probably can't tell you how or why
| that happened.
|
| My kids did lots and lots of drill. But no proofs.
|
| I struggled with math until we started to do proofs. Then it
| came alive for me. I loved sets. My school also used a series
| of textbooks in which some of the problems had no answer, and
| you were supposed to write "no answer." Those problems were a
| special rare treat that motivated me to do all of the problems.
|
| For most kids and their parents, math functions as some sort of
| diligence / obedience / IQ training that they hope will get
| them into a better college and job before it is forgotten.
| Zababa wrote:
| When I was in school we usually had at first some drill
| exercises, and then at the end some bigger problems. I think it
| was a nice balance, and the problems acted a bit like a reward.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| When I was in middle school, we used the Saxon method of
| learning math. Every lesson set contained new concepts AND
| forced students to answer questions to old concepts. By the end
| of the year, we were fluent in all the concepts regardless of
| the last time they were taught in class, because we were
| constantly forced to solve equations from all parts of the
| book. We all loved that approach because it kept us in
| practice.
| grecy wrote:
| > _But drill isn't popular. It's widely seen as boring. Worse,
| there's a body of opinion, especially in education, that
| considers it an ineffective way to practice. That's a shame,
| because it's the most effective way to build your skills._
|
| When you sign up to become a snowboard instructor in Canada
| they basically say "You should already be able to snowboard.
| We're not going to teach you that. We're going to teach you how
| to teach".
|
| As you move up the levels, you spend more and more time on
| pedagogy (teaching other teachers).
|
| Virtually all of it is drills - breaking down a small skill
| into an exercise or challenge or "do this 100 times before you
| get to the bottom" - then you "put it all back together" and
| ride.
|
| I can teach someone in half a day what took me a month to teach
| myself when I learned with no instruction. Drills are an
| awesome way to teach & learn
| smw wrote:
| Any chance you know of a decent video showing how to teach
| someone to snowboard? (or ski?) I'd love to understand the
| best way to do that.
| grecy wrote:
| I've never seen a video that actually lays it out.
|
| The course to be a level 1 instructor (the lowest level) is
| three days intensive.
|
| Level 2 is four days.
|
| Level 3 is a five day course, plus separate two day exams
| (on and off snow).
|
| Level 4 (highest level).. well, I'm not there yet, it takes
| most people three years to do all the training and pass all
| the tests.
|
| For virtually everyone you have to snowboard/ski full time
| (100+ day seasons) working on your technique and teaching
| at least every day for about ten years to pass level four.
|
| The teaching isn't something you can learn from a couple of
| hour video.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> Math used to be taught with more drill style.
|
| There are many ways to suck. We tend to think in folksy wisdom:
| simples rules, simplifications, generalities. Practice makes
| perfect. 10k hrs. Problem solving. Etc. Often, we bounce back
| and forward between one such slogan and another.
|
| Folksy wisdom requires folk to be wise. You can't just distil
| it into a statement and run with that. A great instructor might
| be extremely focused on drill X or exercise Y. In reality, X or
| Y outside the greater context is not the same.
|
| The 10k hrs "rule" is a good example. I reckon I'm closing in
| on 5k hrs of chess. I'm not very good. I could have probably
| improved more than I would be with just 500 hrs training on a
| team, with an instructor, game analysis, tactic training,
| competition, etc. 5k hrs of bullet while on the toilet is not
| that.
|
| Now... I'm not saying that the book _does_ claim that playing
| 10k hrs of ultra-casual chess while on the toilet leads to
| mastery. You need more context. Drill & Scrimmage, in this
| article's terms. "Deliberate practice" in Anders Ericsson's.
| Competition in other's terms.
|
| No matter what though, I think that the actual formula is not
| expressible. There will be a way of sucking while still
| ostensibly following the formula. You need the subjective human
| element. A person, training themselves or others who is focused
| on the goal of improvement, with the methods used as tools.
|
| A lot of canonical examples like sports, art or whatnot us an
| "art & science" adjacent terminology.
|
| TLDR, you'll also find plenty of example of rampant suckage and
| plateaus using drill oriented methods of teaching.
| porb121 wrote:
| > That's a shame, because it's the most effective way to build
| your skills.
|
| this is just not true. blocked practice (i.e. practicing the
| same task repeatedly) is generally worse for long-term
| retention than mixed practice strategies where you vary the
| practice conditions or interleave different tasks in practice
|
| e.g. if you go through 100 problems of 2 digit multiplication,
| you will probably have worse retention than if you went through
| 10 of those problems, then 10 division problems, then 5 word
| problems, then 10 3 digit multiplication problems, and so on,
| equating practice time
|
| drilling _feels_ like a really effective way to learn because
| you do better at it and quickly develop muscle memory or mental
| shortcuts, but your performance on practice tasks is really not
| a good signal of your actual learning or retention.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275355435_Learning_...
| kiba wrote:
| _Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common
| core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and
| double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I 'd rather them crush a
| worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2
| problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing
| just for a simple subtraction problem. _
|
| The problem with these 20 problems of basically the same
| identical challenge is that it's actually less effective than
| intermixing of different kind of problems, at least according
| to learning science.
|
| You and I may prefer 20 problems that practice straight
| subtraction, but that's not what the science says is actually
| the most effective learning strategy.
|
| You want different kind of problems in a problem set. It
| shouldn't be straight subtraction, but also additions, word
| problems, and so forth. This creates a level of desirable
| difficulty, which embeds knowledge more deeply than something
| that is very easy to do by rote.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You are combining too many things. Focusing on 20 simple with
| increasing difficult problems builds visual memory, pattern
| matching which is lacking with a few compounds problems.
|
| The science must be missing some inputs because the current
| theory is lacking.
| ajmadesc wrote:
| "The science is wrong because I disagree" - ipaddr
| harry8 wrote:
| I'm not seeing any research linked. It will have to be
| pretty convincingly done too because we've seen a metric
| ship load of issues in psych research of late.
|
| I don't have an opinion on the issue at hand. "Because
| the science says" With nothing in support makes me really
| suspicious. It really starts looking like "Because
| $authority says so you may not question" Which is the
| opposite of what scientific inquiry is meant to be.
| pps wrote:
| Last page contains references for scientific studies
| http://pdf.retrievalpractice.org/InterleavingGuide.pdf
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| They are not the only one, I see the same. Kids without
| math drills have problems in storing crucial bits of
| information in long-term memory and consequently fare
| worse at solving simple arithmetic problems than myself
| when I was much younger. I'm not talking about complex
| things but basic arithmetic, like multiplying digits,
| adding fractions or, more importantly, dealing with
| ratios. Drills give you a considerable advantage here.
| doix wrote:
| I have another peice of anecdata with my
| parents/grandparents. They grew up in the USSR and went
| through school there, drilling (according to them) was
| extremely common.
|
| They can still remember some peoms verbatim over 70 years
| later (in my grandfathers case). And they still
| remember/understand pretty much all the math they were
| taught. When I was doing my Advanced Highers (final exams
| in Scotland) I was asking my parents for help and they
| could answer all the questions without looking things up.
|
| I looked up the exam paper[0] I sat, I'm pretty sure
| there's no way I'd get an A again if I sat it right now
| without studying for it. But I'm pretty sure my parents
| still woudl.
|
| [0] https://www.advancedhighermaths.co.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/201...
| gotorazor wrote:
| I had a bit of schooling in that kind of educational
| system (Asia) before continuing schooling in North
| America. I'd say that you there is no free lunch. You're
| always giving up something for something else.
|
| I had a job 10 years ago doing in-person training at a
| company trying to digitize their paper-based office for
| the first time. They were in a commodity distribution
| business, so while the math isn't hard, there is a lot of
| day-to-day arithmetic (conversion between unit of measure
| and price/unit vs total price) for all the employees from
| the warehouse guy to the sales staff.
|
| The system introduced a change in their workflow. Before
| in their old manual paper system, people just kind of put
| things on a truck and figure out later how much got
| shipped and how much to invoice a customer. The whole can
| be very hand-wavy. There was no live inventory system
| either.
|
| Digitization meant that sales have to write sales orders
| that had precise units to be sold. Based on inventory,
| they know how much they will actually ship and they know
| that down to the dollar. Everybody suddenly had to start
| being aware of the math involved in their work.
|
| It was kind of funny to see a bunch of blue-collar, ex-
| con, high school dropouts learning faster than all the
| college-education office workers. The college-educated
| guys were too drill-orientated and approached the work
| like the math worksheets that everybody is talking about.
| The ex-cons had a working relationship with the numbers
| on the screen and the things that are hanging off their
| forklifts. Many of the white-collar clerks had been
| getting by memorizing formulas. They had no idea what any
| of those formulas mean.
| kiba wrote:
| Sure, you can drill them. I am just saying you should
| intermix them with other problems.
|
| I am not telling you to do multiplying digit only 1
| times. That would be silly. I would be telling you should
| mix up multiplying digits with other previously learned
| concepts, say 10 addition and 10 subtraction questions,
| and the rest can be 80 multiplying digit problems. I
| don't know the optimal intermixing ratio here, but it
| shouldn't be a straight 100 multiplying digit problems
| which all use the same algorithm to solve it.
| wisty wrote:
| The current theory isn't particularly lacking, the average
| teacher (let alone layperson's) understanding of it is
| lacking. Plus there's dozens of rubbish theories that are
| sorely lacking so you have to find the researchers that
| actually do solid research.
|
| IIRC (see the above, it applies to random comments on the
| internet) drill work is more effective (but feels less
| effective to both teachers and students) if it's mixed up
| with different topics or question types, kind of like how
| doing a kata is better than doing exactly the same punch
| 10x (obviously katas are not ideal either, at least not as
| the only tool).
|
| Really you need a bit of diversity, and IMO two of the big
| traps to fall into are overly homogenous drill work (which
| doesn't retain as well as mixed drills, but looks effective
| because anyone who doesn't eat their crayons can do it
| without thinking too hard) and one-off problems (do an
| assignment where you solve a heavily obfuscated problem
| once, then pretend that it's now something that students
| actually understand, when they've literally just answered
| one single question assuming they even did it themselves).
| stenl wrote:
| In first grade we were given a workbook for learning how
| to write the letters. There was one whole page of A, one
| page of B, etc. You had to write maybe 100 As in a row.
| The kids quickly figured out that the fastest way to do
| it was to first write the left slant 100 times, then the
| right slant 100 times and finally all the 100 crossbars.
| So yes, you do need a little variety to defeat such
| shortcuts.
| varjag wrote:
| What a brilliant way to teach kids economies of scale.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| According to the article this is actually a really good
| way for kids to learn and improve. The point being that
| just practicing the lines is hugely important.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Exactly. That page full of A's, whether they "cheat" it
| or not, will teach the kids how to draw all lines that
| make an A. Repeat that with other letters, and _then_
| throw combination of different letters into the mix,
| which will force kids to draw one letter at a time,
| _after_ they 've already mastered all the component
| movements in isolation.
| [deleted]
| Treegarden wrote:
| In reality the problem is more complicated and the issue is
| that the current media of teaching via worksheets and
| teachers is lacking and insufficient, which renders this
| debate obsolete. What you have is different parts, learning
| new stuff, practicing it, but also spaced repetition. Those
| need to be in balance with each other but also rely on
| cognitive overload, tiredness and motivation (among others)
| of the learner. So what you really need for a solution is
| software that replaces those work sheets and does a good job
| (as opposed to many of the current cheap learning apps) of
| giving you the right task at the right time. Eg. it knows
| that you have been drilling stuff and gotten good at it and
| so now its time for some more mixed stuff that could be
| paired with srs (stuff that needs refreshment). I think apps
| like kahn academy are good but could be improved and
| personally tried to build my own language learning flashcards
| app[0] after becoming frustrated with duolingo where I have a
| 2000 day streak.
|
| 0 - https://ling-academy.com/ It's a bit of a mess. I found
| that its pretty hard to build a language app.
| mushishi wrote:
| Cool idea, my first impression is that there should be some
| kind of mini-arcs or long phrases that make the content
| more digestible. What I mean is that now the speaker goes
| on and on, and the subtitles are abruptly changed to
| another set of words. As a learner, I would like to have
| better sense when the words will disappear. I noticed it's
| arbitrary Youtube content so it's hard.. A simple testable
| solution for arbitrary content: option to _automatically_
| pause/slow down the video just a for second before changing
| to the next set of text. Another simple and stupid idea
| would be to show previous words below the the current
| context.
|
| In the long run usage of a particular user, maybe the app
| should not highlight words that it knows you have
| encountered in previous videos many times or if the system
| knows you have mastered that word -- in case the system is
| testing user, did not notice if it does.
|
| Btw. Not sure what is the difference between green and
| black colored words. (Don't know Spanish so hard to guess.)
|
| Also there's some typos at the landing page, at least
| these: "Activley", "wont be"
|
| Seems like a great concept, good luck :) (I don't find
| Duolingo that effective either.)
| Treegarden wrote:
| Appreciate the feedback! My biggest challenge is to
| polish features. I have taken out a few features from the
| app because they where buggy and would break. I always
| had some ideas and prototyped them in the app but then
| after trying it out and getting a feel for it, I would
| jump to another idea instead of polishing the prototype.
| I'm definitely gonna improve the youtube feature,
| especially the ui. Also, showing the previous subtitles
| in smaller font somewhere is a great idea! Thanks for
| that.
| interesting22 wrote:
| This is very interesting and I'd like to share info about
| this with my wife, as we're approaching this challenge right
| now.
|
| Do you have any articles or references that you'd personally
| recommend, in order to learn more?
| SiVal wrote:
| Do yourself a big favor and read the book "Why Don't
| Students Like School?" by Prof. Daniel T. Willingham. He's
| a prof of psych at the University of Virginia specializing
| in the application of cog sci and neuro sci to K-12
| education.
|
| I don't know who chose the title, but it doesn't describe
| the book, which is really a collection of articles about
| the results of experiments comparing various learning &
| teaching techniques. Only one chapter is about why
| children, who like learning some things, don't like school.
|
| Willingham publishes in academic journals and in journals
| for educators, so you can find other writings online. He
| tries to persuade teachers that so much of what the elite
| grad schools of education teach is intellectual fashion out
| of touch with actual cog sci findings, but all he cares
| about are the science experiments.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Huge upvotes for this. The book isn't just about
| learning, it's about how our minds really work - as
| opposed to how we think they work.
|
| It's as useful for insights into practical intelligence
| as it is for theory-of-teaching.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I am of course not an empirical scientist in that area but I
| tutored math middle school students when in High School.
| [Note: This was in Germany and not in the US so it wasn't
| 'common core']
|
| You see, the students who failed at the interleaved problems
| initially, were rocking it when I had them work through like
| 3 of these 20-similar problems worksheets before moving on to
| the 'pedagogically designed' problems.
|
| And epistemically I think it makes a lot of sense to train
| basics and build upon that.
|
| I think Math education could benefit a lot if we split the
| subject in two courses, 3h per week on drill (Arithmetics),
| 2h per week on the beautiful math (can also expose the
| student to axioms there, functions, mappings, etc, more
| complex problems and solving that with math, potentially with
| CAS support). Best separated with different teachers.
|
| Fact is, most high school graduates will find it challenging
| in their lives to apply the 'rule of three'. During the covid
| pandemic we have seen that members of the executive branch
| have no understanding of exponential growth (bad during the
| pandemic, but I wonder how the fiscal policy is affected by
| that??).
|
| Maybe we need to rethink mathematical education once again.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Along the same lines, Alfred North Whitehead had a very
| similar approach to education and learning as a whole saying
| it is cyclic with one important stage being precision
| analogous to the idea of practice with a later stage of
| generalization analogous to the idea of performance.
|
| > Whitehead conceives of the student's educational process of
| self-development as an organic and cyclic process in which
| each cycle consists of three stages: first the stage of
| romance, then the stage of precision, and finally, the stage
| of generalization. The first stage is all about "free
| exploration, initiated by wonder", the second about the
| disciplined "acquirement of technique and detailed
| knowledge", and the third about "the free application of what
| has been learned" [0]
|
| [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/#PhilEduc
| kebman wrote:
| > You and I may prefer 20 problems that practice straight
| subtraction, but that's not what the science says is actually
| the most effective learning strategy.
|
| Hi, I'm an pedagogue and a licensed teacher. Another way to
| phrase that, is that humans tend to find repetitive tasks
| overwhelming and boring. Got a load of dishes you have to do?
| I bet most people feel right at home in that gnawing urge to
| postpone that mundane and monotonous task. I mean how many
| times haven't you sat there with a really dull chore and
| started daydreaming until someone snapped you out of it?
|
| The fact is, humans need variety, but more importantly we
| need a sense of _agency._ You kinda lose that when you 're
| forced to do something repetitive over and over, and so
| naturally it's not a very effective way to learn or teach.
|
| If you're faced with repeating something 20 times, even with
| slight variations; first off it's overwhelming, and second if
| you feel that it's forced on you, then you lose agency. In
| other words, you're no longer the owner of the task. In turn
| that means you're no longer in control, so why would you
| slave away for that "evil" tutor over there? This is why
| repetition isn't very effective pedagogically speaking,
| because worst case it can even create antipathy towards you
| or the task you're trying to teach.
|
| On the other hand, it's exactly _repeating_ something over
| and over that makes you master it, though... But how can you
| master a thing when it 's too bloody boring to learn in the
| first place? Enter motivational strategies! And tactics to
| heighten morale.
|
| This is explains why you may prefer solving 20 problems that
| practice straight subtraction, because you're already
| motivated for it, and then it's easy. But when you're dealing
| with an entire class of pupils, you have to make sure as many
| of them as possible feel the same way about those tasks, or
| they'll fall behind. And so, at the most basic level,
| teachers need to vary their approach to a topic in order to
| effectively teach it. This means finding new ways, new
| angles, to look at a problem, and make sure you get some
| variety in between, so the thing doesn't become boring.
| Meanwhile, if you already know that your pupils are very
| motivated, you can get away with more straight repetition.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I was taught math with the drill style. Being forced on a daily
| basis into repeatedly solving problems you struggle with,
| trapped with no ability to escape, by people with power over
| you (eg. parents), having your worth judged based on your
| ability to solve problems forced upon you, and once you learn a
| skill your parents find a new weakness to torment you with, is
| traumatic.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| That's more of a reflection on the people doing the teaching
| than the style of teaching itself I think. This is purely
| anecdotal but I absolutely hated most of my pre-university
| education as it felt like jumping through completely
| meaningless hoops. I'll still happily practice scales or
| musical fragments by rote on my guitar for hours on end
| though, and this is a very effective method for me. It took
| me a long time to figure out I actually love learning, it's
| just that there's a lot more to learning than the industrial-
| style process that goes on in the average British
| comprehensive.
|
| If a person's approach to educating their kids is coercive
| ("jump through our hoops or you'll be working at McDonalds
| your entire life") or downright abusive ("you're a worthless
| child to us if you don't meet this grade") then the results
| can be catastrophic. For every success story, this kind of
| maltreatment will produce many people who give up on learning
| altogether or drive themselves headfirst into mental illness.
| I definitely think history will judge this period as a bit of
| a dark age in education, the fact that people who've long
| retired still report exam nightmares says a lot about the
| completely arbitrary and needless pressure we put our
| children under.
|
| In my experience being "well-spoken" (ie having an accent
| that's fairly close to RP) and being quick at picking things
| up has served me far better than any qualifications I have,
| both in the tech industry and out of it.
| SilverRed wrote:
| Seems like a pretty poor way to really understand math
| anyway. If you memorize some formula you may learn how to do
| a specific problem faster but if you teach kids to understand
| how the formula was built from first principals, not only can
| they solve the problem, but they understand how to build the
| solution from scratch rather than pulling a premade solution
| from the memory bank.
|
| Memorizing solutions isn't useful anymore. We have google to
| list out formulas. A deep understanding of problem solving is
| far more important and something you cant trivially search.
| varjag wrote:
| Right now there are students who have trouble opening up
| algebraic expressions or forget to cancel negatives in
| multiplication while doing exercises on advanced concepts.
| All for lack of practice.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Those kinds of kids were common 10, 20, 50, 100, and more
| years ago.
| varjag wrote:
| Now they are ubiquitous.
|
| Downplaying it to 'dumb ones' is not helpful when they
| can solve polynomials without much trouble but are
| getting burned on concepts that should have been drilled
| down properly in middle school.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Now they are ubiquitous
|
| They were saying that back in the day as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Johnny_Can%27t_Add
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You can't _understand_ a formula without repeatedly
| applying it to great many problems, playing with it until
| you get a feel for how it behaves. Without that, you 'll
| only be "understanding" your own imaginary version of a
| formula, a simulation in your mind with no grounding in
| reality.
|
| Same with understanding anything else in life - you don't
| really understand anything until you get to the point you
| can, in your head, predict a _specific_ outcome, test it,
| and be proven correct, _repeatedly_.
|
| (At some point you may learn to gain robust understanding
| purely from simulating things in your head, deriving
| insight from lower-level principles. But this itself is a
| skill, a hard one, which few people master. It's not
| something a random kid, or adult, can do.)
| JackFr wrote:
| The deep understanding comes after knowing the facts.
|
| At a low level, you can point out all the patterns that are
| in multiplication tables, but they won't be remembered
| until the student has internalized the facts.
|
| At a higher level, teaching epsilon-delta proofs isn't a
| good way to learn calculus. Memorizing the building blocks
| and the chain rule is.
| foxes wrote:
| That is not a problem with the drill style per say but toxic
| teachers and parents. You can make someone drill without
| tormenting them for failing. I think doing drills is good if
| done in a supportive setting, but it is also and should not
| be the only way to teach.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Do you know any kid that signed up for math drills? It's
| nearly always imposed by parents or teachers.
| throwyuno wrote:
| I loved math drills. In first grade we would get a sheet
| of simple math problems and the teacher would give us 5
| minted to complete as many as possible. I was good at it,
| and it was one of my first experiences of competition and
| being better at something than my peers. I don't know if
| any of that is a good thing, and it definitely would have
| sucked if I had been slow at math.
| odshoifsdhfs wrote:
| My kid would be super happy with it. His teacher as a
| 'reward' for doing his language-related stuff on
| time/quicker, lets him do math worksheets
| Aunche wrote:
| I was certainly more excited by math drills more than
| attempts to make math "fun."
| tsumnia wrote:
| Funny enough, this is my current gripe with learning CS
| in K-12 settings. The mindset I have on it is "we're just
| teaching it to them at younger age because they can't say
| no".
| danielheath wrote:
| There's a big difference between the kind of learning that's
| effective in going from zero to knowing basics VS the kind
| that's effective in going from basics to mastery.
|
| I don't think drill is an effective method for early-stage
| learning, because you don't have the mental framework to hang
| the new knowledge off yet.
| eloisius wrote:
| Resonates with me too. I'm studying Chinese full-time and the
| classroom format is extremely drill-heavy. Here's a sentence,
| now say it this other way, using this new grammar device that
| we just learned. Here's another, and another, and another.
| After that we _mostly_ rote memorize characters (mostly,
| because they do have fragments of meaning that you can reason
| about sometimes). We drill on reading and writing characters
| daily. There is little to no "creative" homework or classroom
| activities like writing a dialog and acting it out in front of
| the class, as we did in Spanish class when I was in high school
| in the States.
|
| At first I was afraid that this learning style would be
| ineffective. Foreigners here often malign the Taiwanese
| education system as full of rote memorization, drills, and
| testing. Yet, the average Taiwanese can put together functional
| English sentences. A great many of them can speak fluently,
| even if they've never gone to an English speaking country.
| That's a lot more than you can say for the Spanish-speaking
| abilities of non-Hispanic Americans.
|
| Drilling like this let's me build confidence, memory muscle,
| and trains you to quickly pattern match and respond without
| giving the logical part of your brain time to get in the way
| and start translating slowly. It actually works outside the
| classroom too, I'm repeatedly surprised how natural words or
| grammar I drilled in class feel when it comes up in daily life.
| I cannot imagine the American style of incorporating a bunch of
| other activities into the exercise would help at all.
| tasogare wrote:
| > Yet, the average Taiwanese can put together functional
| English sentences. A great many of them can speak fluently
|
| Not true at all in my experience. I met only a few people
| there speaking English or French and all where young and most
| studied in a language department at university. There's
| surely a big divide along age categories and probably a
| North/South divide as I sometimes read people on the internet
| claiming Taiwanese are somewhat good in English, while I
| haven't seen that at all where I went (mostly Southern part).
|
| That being said I agree with the rest of your post. Anything
| trying to make learning Chinese fun is actually a waste of
| time, and rote memorization is extremely effective. In fact,
| it's one of the most effective way to learn vocabulary
| (Nation, 2001). I find it very sad that bad methods like
| Remembering the Kanji are hugely popular when they are in
| fact a waste of time. The amount of bad content on the
| internet is staggering. I think the biggest issue is that
| most people lost the willingness to put efforts in learning,
| and want everything immediately.
|
| As for learning Chinese, it also helps speakers of Chinese
| are usually very keen on correcting mistakes and teaching
| things even when not asked.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| > In fact, it's one of the most effective way to learn
| vocabulary (Nation, 2001). I find it very sad that bad
| methods like Remembering the Kanji are hugely popular when
| they are in fact a waste of time. The amount of bad content
| on the internet is staggering. I think the biggest issue is
| that most people lost the willingness to put efforts in
| learning, and want everything immediately.
|
| Are you talking about this book?
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/learning-vocabulary-
| in-...
|
| I haven't read the whole book, but quick skimming got me to
| this part:
|
| > The highest vocabulary test scores were from the small
| number of learners reporting mnemonic techniques. The most
| commonly used strategies were effective but not as
| effective as the lesser used visualisation, mnemonic, oral
| rote rehearsal and retrieval strategies. Clearly, strategy
| training in memory-enhancing techniques could have useful
| effects.
|
| I can't imagine learning Chinese characters without any
| form of mnemonics.
| eloisius wrote:
| > I can't imagine learning Chinese characters without any
| form of mnemonics.
|
| Username checks out :). Have you learned Chinese? I'm not
| convinced that my method is the best by a long shot, but
| I don't use mnemonics. I've tried memorizing other things
| with tricks like the memory palace, and either I don't
| know how to do it or my brain is busted, but I've never
| been able to create a "palace" much less store
| information I want to remember within it. I recently read
| about the mnemonic peg system and thought it might be
| useful if I could use radicals as "pegs." So far I just
| haven't been able to employ any of these tricks to my
| advantage.
|
| My memorization routine (about 10 new words per day) is
| to write down a whole list ~30 words, writing the
| character and it's pronunciation (I use zhuyin).
| Sometimes I do this in class while we're going over the
| chapter's vocab. I set a timer for 5-8 minutes depending
| on how many new words there are, how "hard" some of them
| look at first glance, how many have unusual radicals I
| haven't used frequently, etc. Looking at just the pinyin
| or zhuyin I try to write them all down before the timer
| goes off. If I can't write a whole character, I at least
| try to write down some of the radicals, if nothing at all
| I just skip it and move on. Afterwards I grade myself and
| looking at the characters in my textbook again, I write a
| new list of just the words I couldn't write. I practice
| writing them several times until I feel like I have the
| hang of it. Then I test again. Repeat until I can write
| the whole list. After I can write them all, ideally, I
| would retest again after some time, sometimes I do.
| Unfortunately, I usually don't have enough time and I
| have just barely gotten them memorized before it's time
| for a chapter test and then a new load of vocab.
| Fortunately old words get rolled into new chapters and
| having to write essays and stuff gives me more practice
| after they've had a while to stew.
|
| If there is some One Easy Trick that I'm missing that
| would make my routine 10x more efficient, I hope someone
| can share it, because this routine is very tiresome and
| time consuming. I have played a bit with visualization,
| where I would close my eyes and imagine every stroke of a
| character without actually writing it. It works, but I
| need a really quiet environment for that.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >Have you learned Chinese?
|
| Yes, and still am. Not really active anymore since I'm
| busy with other things. I don't read much, but I can read
| a book, albeit slow and with much difficulty. Writing I
| do even less, and handwriting I never really did apart
| from tests and filling in forms. Speaking and listening I
| do every day. After a while I just decided to not focus
| really much on handwriting because it easily takes the
| most effort for something I actually barely use.
|
| I've played a bit with memory palaces for fun and found
| them to be effective, but really not for Chinese
| Characters. I mostly used my own flashcards with Anki. I
| used pictures and tone colored characters to help. That
| worked fine, but making the flashcards also took a lot of
| time so it wasn't really perfect either. Having many
| synonyms also complicates the whole ordeal. But overall
| spaced repetition really, really helps with managing lots
| of vocabulary. You can have a deck of several thousands
| of words without too many issues. If you find words hard
| to remember it's also OK to just delete them (Anki also
| helps with this by automatically labeling cards you often
| fail as leech).
|
| The mnemonics I use are the "build in" ones in the
| characters, maybe you already do this by yourself and
| actively learning them won't change too much. Nearly all
| characters have some meaning and/or pronunciation
| component hidden in them which can help you remembering
| them, or guessing their meaning or sound when you first
| encounter them.
|
| I don't really think about radicals since those are just
| arbitrarily chosen components used only for paper
| dictionaries (and who wants to use those in the age of
| smartphones...). Some random examples of interesting
| components: Chuang , is a character that is not used
| anymore (I think) but it means disease and if any
| character has this component you can be very sure it's
| some kind of disease.
|
| Yue is a tricky one. It's moon and it often really
| doesn't make sense in words until you know that Rou is
| often corrupted into Yue . The Yue in Nao doesn't mean
| moon but meat/flesh.
|
| Some characters change depending on where they appear as
| components: Shui /San , Ren /Ren .
|
| I like to use the Outlier Linguistic Dictionary on Pleco
| for looking up how characters are build up and see if it
| can help me remembering the character. I find little
| stories help me to remember words/characters. A character
| I forgot how to write and just looked up: Hong
| (rainbow). It' made of the component snake/insect/worm
| because the ancient Chinese thought it looked like a
| snake in the sky. Gong is there for sound because
| gong/hong sound similar. Or Qu (take/get/fetch), it's
| literally a hand taking an ear.
|
| I don't think mnemonics is the One Easy Trick that will
| make your routine 10x more efficient, but depending on
| how you learn now it could really boost your efficiency.
| If you're not using any form of spaced repetition yet I
| think that really could be it.
| eloisius wrote:
| Thanks a lot for the advice! I misused "radical" before
| but actually meant components, not the one arbitrary
| radical. Remembering characters as a block of components
| definitely helps. I think that would fall under the idea
| of "chunking" that memory experts talk about. Sometimes I
| remember a character on the first go because it's a
| combination of components I'm very familiar with. I
| haven't checked out the Outlier dictionary but I'm going
| to now. I often go looking at the character components to
| help me remember them, but better composition that
| Unicode data would but great.
|
| I use Pleco flashcards to do spaced repetition. Not sure
| how it compares to Anki, but it takes almost no effort to
| create new cards, and that's good for me because I can
| easily get sucked into fiddling with tools instead of
| using them.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| Yes, some kind of drilling is definitely necessary, the issue
| is that traditional drilling is not efficient and there is so
| much more to language learning.
|
| I don't think traditional drilling doesn't work at all, it's
| just super inefficient and boring.
|
| That said, I also kind of feel that dialogue with other
| students isn't that useful.
|
| I don't know about English in Taiwan, but if it's similar to
| Mainland China then then many of them started with learning
| English when they were 3 or so. The level of English you get
| from that is rather disappointing.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| We made factflow.io as a side project to help parents drill
| with their kids. I found it useful with mine, anyway. It's
| free.
| btkramer9 wrote:
| I've noticed something similar in University that was very
| frustrating for me.
|
| Freshmen and Sophmore year all math classes had tens or
| hundreds of problems that get progressively harder and bring
| out every corner case e.g. take then derivative of x^2 then
| 2x^2 then x + 2x^2 then sqrt(x) + 2x^2 + 3x^3. Eventually you
| could derive the most archaic equations
|
| Junior and Senior year Engineering homework is like 2 Epic
| questions with 10 parts that feed into eachother. I would have
| learned more and been more confident if they gave like 10-20
| starter problems and then one final epic one at the end.
|
| I feel like this is similar to the story of a pottery class
| having half the class make as many items as possible while the
| other half had to make just 1 perfect piece. The group that was
| targeting quantity actually produced better pieces then the
| group that was targeting 1 perfect piece
|
| edit: typo
| killingtime74 wrote:
| If I wanted to be a better entrepreneur or engineer what drills
| would I do? Talking to customers? Marketing?
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