PROJECT NARRATIVE

January 27th, 2021

Traditional education equips students with the tools to succeed, supposedly.  Anyone who has been through the grinder of the industrial education system knows that this is vaguely accurate: there are a whole bunch of tools that we learn, but much of what such education attempts to impress upon students is quickly forgotten.  

How is it that years later when someone finally comes across an issue where calculus or trigonometry is useful, almost everyone has to look it up instead of just apply the tools that were handed over by school?  The issue is that such tools at the time of their apparent ‘learning’ lacked context.

We are story animals.  We understand our life and the way things work through a network of stories that we invent, learn and share.  A story is something constructed and pieced together.  We build stories in our mind, and we start doing this at a very early age, using them to understand the world we live in but also just for fun.  Kids alone at play will narrate the adventure of their toys aloud as they spontaneously generate adventure.  This is practice in cause and effect.  First this happens, and then the next part can happen.

All complex projects form a kind of adventure, a winding path toward fruition that ultimately sticks in our mind in the form of a story.  The tools picked up and learned along the way during this adventure stick and persist in memory because of their placement in a story structure.  

Some short time ago a tiny meme circulated in coding circles.  It captures the idea of seniority or expertise.  It’s simply when a senior developer looking at a problem can say “oh I’ve seen something like this before.”  Expertise often boils down to a good amount of experience.  (And no, the similarity between the words is not a coincidence, see Episode 63 The Etymology of Fear). The expert references their experience, that is, the narrative of their own life to quickly retrieve and unpack methods and strategies that can be reapplied in the present.  This is so natural that we don’t even see the presence of the story, memory simply hyperlinks into it.  This is the exact same mental machinery at work that dictates why the Netflix movie we recently watched is so much more memorable than any of the facts in the flashcard deck that we laboriously try to push into our minds: one has narrative, the other does not.

Narrative forms a kind of memory retrieval structure, and often important concepts are imbedded in it’s structure, like the idea cause and effect.  And this is how school fails, the tools we are supposedly given have no narrative, like the flashcard deck the tools have as much context as a pile of stuff dropped off for goodwill.

However, when tools are acquired within the context of a story, they stick.  A project that requires a student to find and learn specific tools in order to bring that project to fruition automatically embeds those tools in a context and a story where they are essential.  The story of how the project got done simply doesn’t make any sense without the tools and methods discovered.  

The narrative aspect of a project allows a person to later recall embedded tools by projecting the relevant part of the narrative up for the mind’s eye to reference.

THE ART OF LEARNING

January 26th, 2021

Many teachers fall into an understandable trap slyly laid by the ego.  Being the one in the know there is a pride in the ability to dispense and provide one’s superior set of knowledge to those in the role of ‘student’.  More than a few teachers, professors or just friends trying to help parade their privileged position with more than a little pomp.  It’s an understandable trap because teaching, by default, has an air altruism and generosity attached to it as though the credentials wipe away any flaws in actual performance.  The real world of course functions on the opposite principle, actual performance tops credentials every time.

The very best teachers understand that teaching is not a privileged position in terms of knowledge but a special liminal role.  The goal is to get someone who can’t or doesn’t know, to understand or do.  It’s perhaps poetic but a little quaint to say a teacher is a shepherd in the process of someone else’s learning.  This is true, but it goes beyond this.  A great teacher doesn’t teach any one subject but teaches a student how to learn.  The metaphorical equivalent would be a shepherd that trains all it’s sheep to be wolves, capable of taking care of themselves all on their own without the help of the shepherd.

Autodidacitism is a key to great teaching.  This is self-teaching, or learning on your own.  The double role that a person casts themselves in creates an important curve of perspective.  The self-learner isn’t just trying to figure out something new, but also paying attention to aspects and trends of their own learning.  The self-learner has to shepherd their own motivation, cultivating it and protecting it against too much frustration.  This is a crucial aspect that often isn’t present with an actual teacher who provides encouragement and reassurance that the next step of success isn’t far off.  The self-learner has to nurture motivation in the absence of knowing what’s around the next bend, and this skill, if honed becomes an exceptional asset when that self-learner in turn becomes a teacher for someone else.

The art of learning becomes a topic independent of subject, and the pure autodidactic clues in fairly quickly to the fact that if the art of learning can be honed than all the world’s knowledge and know-how suddenly becomes a split oyster.  There’s simply no contest between someone who learns one thing well, and another person who learns how to learn.  

Great teachers are themselves great learners, and because of this, the division between student and teacher remains forever blurred as the teacher learns alongside the student.  A classroom or a mentorship, no matter how behind or oblivious the student is an opportunity for the teacher.  Often that opportunity is to learn deeper about the subject at hand by exploring a student’s unique slow-motion capture of the topic.  Most likely a student asks a question never before considered by a teacher.  A weak teacher will freeze up at the idea of something they don’t know, and usually try to dodge the question.  Whereas a great teacher grows evermore curious with such unconsidered angles.  But beyond this, the opportunity to understand more about the art of learning is perpetually on hand in any classroom.  The swirl of student perspective, patchy in it’s blindness of the topic is the real object at hand for any teacher.

Knowledge is secondary.  The classroom as a laboratory is primary.  A teacher who is in tune with this meta-subject of learning irregardless of topic becomes doubly equipped for future students, by both having a deeper understanding of the subject and a deeper understanding of how students learn that subject.

The outlooks of the good and the bad teacher could not be more antithetical.  While the gatekeeper of knowledge is concerned with the ego’s pleasure of a power dynamic, the great teacher has never stopped seeing the classroom as a place to learn, not just for the student, but for that teacher who remains a student.

The great teacher becomes a student in the art of teaching, which is no different than a student who pursues the art of learning.

NAVIGATING MISTAKES

January 25th, 2021

There’s an ideal and a hope that mistakes can be crept up on, tip-toed around, and altogether avoided if only the right degree of caution is exercised.  For some things, very larger things, this sort of ideal is a necessity.  It would be an irreversible mistake if we had recklessly stumbled into nuclear war, as it seems we’ve come very close to several times over the years.  Many AI researchers also believe that Artificial Intelligence is also an area that poses great potential harm, meriting a need to move slowly and carefully along the path of progress.  But on an individual level, the risk and downside of making a mistake is rarely if ever of such a magnitude, even relatively speaking.  

The majority of our hesitation and fear of mistakes probably arises from a school system which was singularly focused on mistakes which detracted from a perfect score.  The straight-A student is essentially a student who made no mistakes, no missteps.  

As impressive as that feat might be in the eye of say - college admission bureaucrats, there is very little real world utility in the perfect score.  The most capable and successful are those who can squeeze every last bit of insight from a mistake - not success.  The ability to reapply with a more nuanced understanding is the key to a great deal of progress and personal success.

A large concern with avoiding mistakes likely just generates a kind of procrastination.  It’s an excuse bred by a hammered-in notion of preparing for the test, but outside of school, the best things we can accomplish are additive: they are things we build, be it companies, a piece of writing, a house, a friendship, a career, a reputation or any variety of project.

Life is much more like the blank page as opposed to the test with predesigned answers.  The mistakes made while adding to the blank page contain the real jewels of learning, because a mistake  encapsulates a blindspot - an area where our idea of the world is flawed.  The mistake in real time is an opportunity to zero in on this flaw and fix it, making our measure of the world a bit richer, a bit more nuanced.

Navigating mistakes isn’t so much about avoiding them at all costs but using them as places to pivot, like sign posts that point towards a better direction.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: PATIENT PILGRIM

January 24th, 2021

The pilgrims filtered one by one through the narrow passage into the cave.  The attendant who lead them walked up to Lucilius’s side who opened his eyes and smiled at the attendant.

“These students have journeyed from very far to learn from you,” the attendant said.

Lucilius nodded at the group that had assembled before him.

“They say,” said the attendant, “that one of their group reached enlightenment under the guidance of the last master they trained under.”

Lucilius looked at the group curiously, then turned to his attendant.  “Which one?” He asked.

The attendant translated Lucilius’ request and in a moment it was clear, the group turning to look at a young man sitting among them.

“Ask this enlightened one for me,” Lucilius said,  “what is enlightenment like?”

The attendant translated and the whole group listened as the enlightened student spoke.  Lucilius looked to the attendant when he was finished.

“He says that he’s had no thoughts since his enlightenment some weeks ago.”

Lucilius grew more curious, smiling with some delighted amusement.  There did seem to be a particularly serene air around this one individual in the group, and clearly the rest of the group held this person in a bit of awe, reverence.  

“No thoughts…really?” Lucilius said mostly to himself.  “Well,” he continued.  “We are all a patient bunch of people, being interested in meditation…”

The attendant translated as Lucilius paused with his points.

“We have no issue waiting.  So we will wait for your next thought,” Lucilius said nodding toward the student.

The attendant finished translating, and the smile upon the enlightened student remained - for a moment.  But as slivers of time began piling up, a lace of doubt seemed to thread into the face of that enlightened student.  The serene smile seemed to relax to a more neutral pose, and the glow in his eyes seemed to sober and clear.

“Oh…” the student said.  He said something more, and Lucilius looked to the attendant for aide.

“He thinks he may have just had a thought,” the attendant said.

The two, along with everyone else continued to watch the enlightened student until he said something else.

“Yes, he seems to be thinking now,” the attendant said.

Lucilius nodded gravely.

“Well,” he said, “now that that’s out of the way, shall we begin our practice?”  

FEED THE WRITER

January 23rd, 2021

A desire to write doesn’t always come with an idea.  How many countless hours have been spent agonizing over the blank page and blinking cursor?  Like any system that creates, it requires an input.  We do not magically generate inspiration from no where.  All ideas come from some kind of connection between two or more parts outside of ourselves.  And the best input for the writing mind is, reading.

This is perhaps the most obvious but under-utilized hack for getting the words to start flowing on the page.  The short version of the hack is to just read until you find yourself disagreeing with the author, and then to simply write down why and what.

A second version of this hack is to literally copy out the words of another, and then just branch off once the flow is there.  Hunter S. Thompson supposedly typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald just so that he could know what it was like to write a great novel.  But the exercise likely had more benefit than he planned.

Most often though, reading reminds of other things, and remembering isn’t simply a reminder but a connection: between the text at hand and something else.  It’s that connection that often hides the kernel of an idea to be explored, written about.

It’s perhaps funny to think that staring at a blank page perpetuates much of the same.  Reading nothing means, writing nothing.