

Aggressive Learning - babul
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2009/04/24/aggressive-learning/

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Hexstream
"Try something you’re 99% certain you’ll fail at. Sign up to speak in front of
a crowd. Enroll in classes you don’t have the prerequisites for."

Doesn't sound like fun for the crowd or the teacher...

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derefr
I wonder: is it better to aim for "impossibly hard", or simply " _implausibly_
hard"? That is, it's obviously good to be challenged, but if you're in it for
the learning experience, is it better to do something so hard that you can't
_possibly_ succeed, or is it better to set the bar so that there's some small,
but nonzero chance of success? This is disregarding the fact that constantly
failing will discourage you emotionally from proceeding, as it is assumed that
the learning itself is considered the success.

To put it another way: would students learn better/faster in school, if _every
assignment_ was designed to be impossible to complete? (Obviously, the
assignments would thus go un-graded, but frequent micro-examinations would be
inserted to assert the learning derived from all the failure.) As an
interesting side-effect, in such a curriculum, any student that _succeeded_ on
an assignment could be immediately skipped ahead to the stuff they _can't_ do.

~~~
timr
Pushing against a brick wall won't move the wall -- but if you do it long
enough, it'll make you stronger.

The point is that it's good to reach beyond your grasp every once in a while.
And when you're trying, you can't always tell if the thing you're grasping for
is too far away. You just reach.

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msie
I like the point about achievable success vs aggressive learning.

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mtoledo
no. Learning and difficulty is not linear where the most impossible teaches
the most. After a certain challenging level you learn less. Like in weight
training, piano, math, etc. Learning a piano piece you cant play wont make you
a good piano player.

