In my own experience, it has required both repetition, and variability.
I learn something new, every day, but what I learn, and how it is implemented, is highly dependent upon the phase my project is in.
Right now, the project I'm working on is in the "home stretch." There's still a lot more work needs doing, but it's fairly predictable, well-practiced stuff.
Getting to this point, though, has involved two years of researching alternative approaches, strategic and tactical designs and decisions, pivots, backpedalling, and bug-fixing.
And every day, I have been writing Swift code. Most of the time, I'm using the same techniques as I was yesterday, but, every now and then, I try something different. Sometimes, that becomes a new habit.
In my personal opinion, there's really nothing like developing and releasing shipping applications to provide a rich experience in both repetition, and variance.
A common tactic in practicing music is to play a passage slowed down, sped up, with varying rhythms, up/down an octave, etc, with the idea that if you have complete mastery you can also play it the way it's written.
When I took kung fu I was told "Do it slow, do it fast, do it normal." Slow and normal helped you refine your technique; fast helped you commit the technique to muscle memory so you don't overthink it. Training for speed also adds power.
Not my experience. I'm learning to sing, my spouse is a pro singer, she told me "pick a song, preferably one you don't know well so as not to be biased, sing it a thousand ways over and over, try it right, try it wrong, try whacky stuff, try nonsense stuff, talk it, rap it, twist it, warp it around, then do it all over again a thousand times, and finally, sing it your way."
Years ago, I was in a tiny town trying to teach kids to ride horses. It was a volunteer deal with a poorly-organized group. I was a fairly solid rider who had learned horsemanship through a patchy mish-mash of getting handed horses that were easy on beginners, getting handed horses who were way out of my league, buying an animal that was way out of my league (We finally match very well now after owning her for 13 years), and a few dozen lessons spread out over 10 years. I didn't know anything about how to teach children to ride. I honestly still don't know much about kids in general. Thankfully, learning and how to learn is super interesting to me, so I spent many a long drive home trying to figure out what components go into learning horsemanship.
Obviously these kids aren't going to go through my same experiences. They probably won't have a family friend who invites them out to ride a reliable, but energetic, old horse. They won't blunder into a job where they're spending 30 hours a week on horseback like I did. They've got an hour or so once a week to build their skillset. Teaching a kid the cues and posture and how to ride correctly - there's a thousand books for that. Getting them comfortable and to the point where they can handle a weird situation and a horse acting out, there's not much for that. I finally realized that while riding correctly and being held to a high standard by your instructor is very important, jacking around on horseback is important for making it second nature. (On well-broken, very well-behaved horses) try to whack the other riders in the arena with a lead rope. Play pony tag. Make dares, try stupid crap unless I tell you you're going to get yourself dead.
When you're always focused on what you're doing, you miss out on getting that instinctual reaction. I've come to call it fluency. If this happens, then _ . You've got to be able to roll with the punches and the best thing I've worked out for learning that is play.
Being free and egoless like a kid accelerates learning like that so well. Learning to ride as an adult means un-learning the fear we acquired along the way, which is often a big transformation for them, and learning things as an adult is hampered by the need to reconcile the new thing with what we already believe. It's a huge lift. I think mastery is achievable at any age, but the price is almost always "everything," because mastery is not technique, it really is a becoming.
While I was never pro, I still ride more days than not, and what I've arrived at from it is posture is the effect other people observe, but to your excellent point, only after we have polished a free and fearless foundation that comes from that time in the saddle, where everything just becomes natural. If we try to affect the posture without that foundation, we get heavy german seats and hands and floppy dressage legs. That affected rigid looking seat is about submitting the horse to our aids, whereas a seat that is the effect of the free foundation you can learn more easily as a kid is about releasing the horse's willingness from our need. The posture that is the polished effect of that freedom has more grace, like a dancer or a matador instead of that of a performer or a soldier. The lightness that is the result of it is the effect of a rider's patient posture, which to an observer, looks straight, but they can't see the underlying suppleness of it unless they are at that level themseves. If you ever see any old videos of Nuno Oliviera (the last riding master of the 20th century), I would say that his posture is an expression of this patience, which comes from his first hand knowledge of what is possible, and the horse is responding willingly because it is being met with the confidence of his knowing, and so when it moves, it is following him, but following at his leg, and really, through his body it is reading the intent of his mind. In this sense, the key to mastery is learning patience, and knowing when to be impatient.
Anyway, way to trigger a dressage bro, not a lot of opportunities for that on this site. :)
Six years ago I caught a cold that affected my throat. After four days, I recovered from every symptom except the phlegm in my throat, which has persisted continuously from then to now. It catches my voice and blocks me from singing normally. (And, unless I cough regularly, it builds up over time to the point that my airway can become severely restricted.)
This seems like it would be professionally relevant to a professional singer. Does your wife have any knowledge of such a problem, or how it might be addressed?
As an experiment, try eliminating dairy from your diet. While unrelated to your backstory / being sick, it's known among singers to avoid dairy before a performance to avoid excess phlegm.
I found one mildly locally active antibacterial throat pill that was the only thing that would remove some persistent phlegm like that. I'm not even sure if it was a cure, or just a remedy.
I was about to bring an example from my own musical journey as well. Picking up a second instrument (from an E-Bass to an E-Guitar) has made learning music theory easier and more interesting. It's all the same, but you're looking at it and use it from different angles with different instruments.
Seems to be an argument more for spaced repetition and incremental reading.
"If your collection combines knowledge pertaining to different subject domains, the stream of new ideas and unexpected associations coming to your mind may surprise you"
https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning
Spaced repetition and incremental reading don't have to be a conscious effort or implemented with flashcard systems, in fact it might be better not to, depending on your goals.
After extensive practice with such systems (talking years between physical flaschards, supermemo and anki), I found it leads to shallow understanding and bad linking between knowledge bits, even though I make sure I understand before committing something to spaced repetition. The valuable part looks like to be in the effort of understanding, thinking deeply and widely and summarizing. If you frequently read, practice and revise your knowledge and see how it interlinks, you will approximate spaced repetition at the very least.
All in all flashcard systems taught me how to study effectively by being forced to understand and "atomize" knowledge, so it wasn't useless.
> After extensive practice with such systems (talking years between physical flaschards, supermemo and anki), I found it leads to shallow understanding and bad linking between knowledge bits
The issue with flashcard style practice is that it doesn't offer much in "application"-learning, which may help explain the shallow understanding. Spaced repetition needs to be repetition of applying the concept, not reviewing it. I know that its not easy to do for all domains, but if you look at musicians (as another poster described), actors, artists, athletes, and martial artists (to borrow the article's reference), their spaced repetition is more about applying their craft to build muscle memory as well as create "a-ha" moments of insight.
I think that's less an issue with spaced repetition than something it doesn't cover. Spaced repetition helps you practice recalling facts (which are really just connections/associations), it isn't practice in doing the thing the facts are about. It certainly makes practicing doing the thing the facts are about easier, though, because you're not constantly having to context switch between doing the thing and looking up facts.
I've just started to think of spaced repetition as "personalized daily quizzes" to sort of partially dismantle the mystique built up around the process. Less the self-programming method it's usually written about as than a scheduler, one that gently reminds me "do you still remember that thing you learned? If not, this is what it was."
> create "a-ha" moments of insight.
This happens all the time with spaced repetition, and when it happens, I can make another card. People who do spaced repetition are intentionally trying to trick themselves into doing this when we mix up cards of completely unrelated subjects and do them at the same time. Switching from system to system constantly is supposed to make you see accidental parallels and find lucky insights. That's not strictly spaced repetition as such, but it's something that people have added to it, which shows they're aware.
Oh I'm not dismissing flashcards as not a worthwhile endeavor, quite the opposite. Check out the other comment I made in this thread (or through my profile) on different modes of engagement. If anything, I believe we DON'T do enough of this lower level practice in western education anymore because its not promote critical thinking (as much as other methods). My argument is that if you are struggling in those other methods, you should absolute do these types of lower-level practices.
> Spaced repetition and incremental reading don't have to be a conscious effort
> The valuable part looks like to be in the effort of understanding, thinking deeply and widely and summarizing.
Which part of this is not conscious effort? You just made a stronger case for such automated systems, especially for people who don't have good memory or abnormal levels of discipline and motivation.
I read it as "flash card systems can be low-effort, but the value comes from effort, so taking a low-effort, automated option is not necessarily best".
Maybe the paragraph isn't phrased in the clearest way, but I agree with this interpretation, if that is what they meant.
This sounds very much like differential learning (see Wolfgang Schollhorn) to me. In my personal experience it is a very potent training method when it comes to learning motor skills, and having observed two children learn to crawl and walk it also seems to be a "natural way" to learn for us.
I also observed myself learning non-motor skills better when applying this method in some form. I think most people here know about the yearly Advent of Code challenge. Often people use it to try out a new language and have fun. I believe one of the key reasons for its success (besides the fun) are the frequently similar, but slightly different, problems. Forcing people to approach it from slightly different viewpoints and trying out small variations, thus resulting in a deep understanding and learning effect.
> MuZero was trained via self-play, with no access to rules, opening books, or endgame tablebases.
Self-play algorithms essentially mutate and select according to the game rules. For a generally-defined mastery objective, are there subjective and/or objective game rules, and is there a distance metric for ranking candidate solutions?
Also when practising throwing stuff, practising at varying distances yields better results than practising only at the single distance that is used to compare performance.
I think it has something to do with "Memory Palace". You solve the same or similar problem in different contexts. There is something similar and something different about the problem in all these different contexts. While seeing the different parts you also see the similar parts and can see how those are connected other by the dissimilar parts.
It is like seeing a 3 dimensional object from multiple viewpoint. Some things change some stay the same. You understand and thus remember the thing better because you know it's "essence", what is the same about it always.
Hmmm ... I'm a fan of differential learning and other techniques for variablity of practice. Was just reading through https://perceptionaction.com/vp/ earlier today. However I'm not convinced motor learning research transfers to all learning, which seems to be the basis for the claim made in the blog post. My own experience is motor learning is quite different to learning symbol manipulation tasks like maths and programming.
I'd actually disagree and my current research in CS Education is attempting to incorporate sport pedagogy into the learning process! I do plan to read through your link more thoroughly later tonight so thanks for that.
In a nutshell, we knock that CS1 courses have a high number of drop/fail/withdrawals due to several different factors. These include course difficulty, time management skills, and not feeling welcomed in the community (lack of representation, assuming CS students must love video games, etc). I don't focus much in inclusivity (though a number of faculty at NC State do), but I'm looking for methods to reduce difficulty. My thesis stems from methodologies I've used while teaching martial arts - specifically focusing on lower-level "build blocks" practice.
We can represent different learning activities by the amount of "creation" a student must engage in - Passive (watching lectures) require no creation, Active is repeating solution steps, Construction is critiquing steps, and Interactive is a co-creation process between the student and another student, instructor, or system. These form the ICAP framework by Mickie Chi. My arguments are that if a student is struggling with an Interactive exercise, like a traditional coding problem, then they should "downgrade" their practice to something lower level like self-explanation or debugging. However, if THOSE activities are still difficult, we can downgrade to an even lower-level of having them simply repeat (the mindless 'copy the dictionary' activities modern education hates).
My rationale again looks at how technical skills, like martial arts, are learned. Typically we start with warm ups, a brief demonstration on a few movements from the instructor, and then students are asked to pair up and drill the moves. Then the instructor builds on the moves with another demonstration, and then students repeat their process. Eventually, students spar (or apply the technique in a live problem). I argue that traditional coding problems are analogous to live sparring because students need to incorporate writing code, problem solving, debugging, code tracing, etc. If they struggle with some of those skills, they struggle in the activity. Rather than having them learn all the skills "in situ" while coding, maybe lower level deliberate practice targeting a single skill can help strengthen their overall foundation.
> specifically focusing on lower-level "build blocks" practice
This has been my experience with teaching math and CS.
The biggest causes of failure is not identifying and teaching prerequisite skills.
The key point is prerequisite. Many times the skills needed to pass a math or CS class are not part of that class's curriculum.
Students who have encountered the building blocks already tend to do well, students who have not, tend to fail - no matter how much the class goes over the material in this class - because the problem lies before that material.
That's where I think specifically the Active exercises can help. We gave students in a CS2 optional typing practice throughout the semester [1]. These students performed better on exams, made higher learning gains and uploaded less buggy code to GitHub for projects. The results were also significant for students that performed below the median on the first midterm and only started doing the exercises AFTER the midterm. Granted, the students were still self-selecting to improve their status, but it does help establish methods for helping even students in higher level courses.
This is my experience as an adult studying calculus, linear algebra, dynamic programming etc.
Calculus is mostly algebra. If you can’t reliably solve algebraic equations, derivatives and integrals will probably be a step too far.
Algebra is mostly arithmetic. If you can’t reliably add and multiply rational numbers, solving for unknowns is going to be patchy at best.
The key part as a student is learning to recognise when I needed to re-tread the primitive operations. Having to go back and practice the mental arithmetic I first learned in primary school was a hit to the ego, but at least I could recognise and take that step. When I was in my late teens / early 20s I was much less able to swallow my pride and back-track.
> When I was in my late teens / early 20s I was much less able to swallow my pride and back-track.
This is, in my opinion, one of the issues with adults attempting to pick up new skills, in addition to that mythical "free time". Many of us have been conditioned that if we aren't masters in something immediately, its a lost cause. If someone suggests that we do "what kids do", then we think we're too "grown up for that". A good example would be tracing drawings. Many kids learn this way, but to suggest an adult do it and provide positive reinforcement in doing it is almost non-existent at the adult level.
Honestly, an adult version of Sesame Street (not "adult" in sex, drugs, violence, but the simplistic dialogue with repetition) may help adults learn a new language, but its competing with other factors like time, general attention, thinking this is "worthy" of our time, etc.
That doesn't make sense. There always is some overlap between tasks somewhere, but learning to program is generalization, and learning martial arts is motor control. There's no reason for them to be connected. That words like "active" can be applied to both, doesn't mean much. Should you find that your method works better than an existing method, that doesn't mean the metaphor for your method has any basis in reality.
> learning to program is generalization, and learning martial arts is motor control
I disagree; both programming and martial arts require a level of technical motor control. Its easier to define and connect in a physical skill since that is where motor control is studied. However, programming as a technical skill involves familiarity with syntax, familiarity with the tools (literally keyboard and mouse), and translating plans into valid syntax. Likewise, sparring in martial art is as much a problem solving skill as it is in programming - you need to evaluate the problem at hand and do problem decomposition to create subgoals until you produce an actionable item.
> There's no reason for them to be connected
The connection to martial arts works for me because that's something I've done for over a decade. It doesn't immediate click with everyone if they don't have that same history with it. However, many people have seen parallels when I describe this through learning music, dance, chess, or second language acquisition. They recognize the skill was a combination of lower level technical knowledge and higher level problem-solving/creativity. My base thesis is "if you're struggling, why not focus on refining the lower level skill you seem to be having trouble with"?
I don't know if this is relevant but I found it fascinating.
I saw a documentary, long ago, about primary school students in China with abacuses. They used the abacuses for mathematics, and they were blindingly fast with them.
And then they stopped using the physical abacuses and just sort of mimed the actions with their hands. And then, later, they stopped using their hands.
So, as far as I could see, they were training themselves to do maths via their muscle memory, and it seemed terrifyingly effective.
Of course they differ. If they didn't, the best athletes and musicians would also be the best physicists, writers, and politicians. Planning skills may overlap, and possibly transfer, though.
The article's title is itself a clickbait.
Starting the article to invalidate Bruce Lee's quote shows how much unworthy to read the rest. He spent all his life studying the body and mind and practicing dozens of martial arts to create and improve his own style, your fat pale narcissist ass dares to say that ? I hate it when people speak about subjects they have no clue about.
> Bruce Lee is reported to have said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” With all due respect to Mr. Lee, he might have been wrong about this one.
Yes, Bruce Lee must be wrong, because obviously it has to be one end of the spectrum or the other /s. How about the man who has practiced 100 kicks 100 times each? Maybe he’s the one to fear.
I think a better metaphor for the main point of the article might be the man who has practiced one kick in 10,000 different ways.
If he practiced it 10,000 times in the exact same spot on a punching bag he wouldn't have the same understanding of it that he would if he practiced it high, low, with the other leg, in a tournament bout, on the sand, eyes closed, after a punch, etc.
The use of the Lee quote in the article is strange.
Of all people, Lee would never say to practice 10,000 times in exactly the same way ... and definitely wouldn't suggest doing so 10,000 times on a punching bag, seeing as Bags Don't Hit Back [0].
Lee obviously meant "the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times" in varying conditions, with varying timing, energy, and motion ... not in a single dead pattern.
An easy comparison is take a driver who's had three months of experience driving versus somebody with three years, they'll be a huge gap in proficiency. Now take the three-year driver and compare them against someone who's been driving for three decades, you're fine surprisingly there's very little difference in ability.
Our brains are ruthlessly efficient and the moment that they can optimize away learning, that's when you're no longer acquiring skill.
Such an idea has been discussed for centuries. Adam Smith warned division of labor would lead people to become “…as stupid and ignorant as it is for a human creature to become.” by repeating the same career behaviors for too long.
IMO this explains a great deal about current society stuck on the idea re-training is a waste, the habit of re-electing politicians for decades being one outcome of living life “on the career escalator.”
Such an inner monologue becomes a default state of being.
Accepting simple memes like “will work for money” become the norm and “will work to acquire knowledge” becomes vulgar language.
I learn something new, every day, but what I learn, and how it is implemented, is highly dependent upon the phase my project is in.
Right now, the project I'm working on is in the "home stretch." There's still a lot more work needs doing, but it's fairly predictable, well-practiced stuff.
Getting to this point, though, has involved two years of researching alternative approaches, strategic and tactical designs and decisions, pivots, backpedalling, and bug-fixing.
And every day, I have been writing Swift code. Most of the time, I'm using the same techniques as I was yesterday, but, every now and then, I try something different. Sometimes, that becomes a new habit.
In my personal opinion, there's really nothing like developing and releasing shipping applications to provide a rich experience in both repetition, and variance.