Sucky Schools - How To Repair Our Education System

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. "We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world." Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the language of music. It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: "Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way."

In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one's third-grader hasn't completely memorized his circle of fifths. "I'll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply wont apply himself to his music homework. He says its boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs."

In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. "It's a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they'll really appreciate all the work they did in high school. Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one. To tell you the truth, most students just aren't very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn't care less about how important music is in today's world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She's going to make one hell of a musician someday."

Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. Of course! he reassures himself, No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!

I took the above directly from A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart. It's a great piece of writing and I totally encourage you to read it. He talks about math education. ("I complain about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes"). But there's a lot more wrong in our education system than just mathematics teaching.

In this article, I will show you what's wrong, how did it get so bad, and what we can do about it.

What's wrong with our education system

John Dewey, while visiting a classroom one day, asked the students what they might find if they dug a hole in the earth. The students exchanged puzzled looks, and nobody answered. He asked again, and was met with silence. Finally, the teacher suggested that Dewey had asked the wrong question. "What is the state of the centre of the earth?" she asked her class, and all the students chorused, "Igneous fusion!"

1. Facts instead of understanding

Our schools are fact-junkies. We teach students thousands of useless facts that will be forgotten as soon as the next exam is over. Hell, usually they're forgotten even before that, and then you see students cramming late into night, only to forget it all within 48 hours. How's that for effective use of everyone's time.

The worst subject in this regard is mathematics. Here is a type of problem. Here is how to solve it. Yes it will be on the test. Do exercises 1-35 odd for homework. What a sad way to learn mathematics: to be a trained chimpanzee.

Math educators are consistently finding examples of how kids can do calculations without really knowing what they're doing. Students given the problem (274+274+274)/3 set about laboriously adding and then dividing, completely missing the point.

Which brings me to the next point.

2. Facts and techniques instead of creativity

Somewhere along the way, our education system forgot the value of creativity. People are saying things like "there's no need to reinvent the wheel" and "experts have spent years thinking about this, why should you think about it?"

It's like all the answers have been found and all that's left is learning facts and doing routine tasks.

The fact is, creativity is like the car's spark plug. A spark plug gets a car's engine started, and then the whole car can move forward. Yet if this little gadget is damaged, the whole car will become just an inert hunk of metal.

Your mind is an amazing biological machine, but it would be just sitting there idly without creativity. That's why the current education seriously hurts learning. It takes away the joy of discovery, it takes away the students' enthusiasm, it takes away the fun of learning.

Creativity is what makes us human, and what makes us far more valuable than a machine. Companies value creativity very highly. (at least the better ones. Think Google). If our creativity is stomped upon and discouraged at school, the schools are doing the exact opposite of what they were created for.

3. Grading

This is a huge topic, I can only scratch the surface of it in this article. I'll explain it fully in another article devoted solely to this topic. And yes, I've got everything backed by scientific research. Wait for my article about this to get all the references.

The gist of it is that emphasizing grades:

1. Undermines students' interest in learning

Once good grades become the point of learning, students stop caring about the learning itself. In fact, they come to hate the idea of learning. Once they leave college, they'll never want to hear about learning again. And that's perhaps the worst effect of our education system. Not only does it do a great job at stopping students from learning anything at school, it even stops them from learning for a long time after.

2. Makes failure seem overwhelming

Hey, failure's not a big deal. It helps you learn. In the words of Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM: "Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure."

Avoiding failure leads to needless perfectionism. It leads to stress. And most importantly, it leads to less learning. See my article Learning Mastery 3 - Fail Early, Fail Often on more details why failure is good for your learning.

3. Leads students to avoid challenging themselves

Here's a question for you (get ready, it's a tough one). Will you build more muscle by lifting a 20 kg weight, or a 1 kg one?

Yes.

Similarly, you learn more by tackling challenging tasks. You learn by tackling tasks you don't know the answer to yet. Avoiding challenging tasks gives you better grades - but worse learning. Plus, easy tasks are boring. This, again, undermines interest in learning.

4. Reduces the quality of learning

This is almost a paradox. The whole point of grading is to help students learn. But emphasizing grades makes students focus on the grades instead of learning. And as a result they remember less.

"The archer who sets his eyes on the prize will miss the target."

Grading really is like shooting yourself (or, rather, the students) in the foot.

Simplicio: So you're saying we should just stop assessing students? Let them to do whatever they want?

Salviati: I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying we should move towards more meaningful forms of assessment. Verbal assessment is much more accurate than summing up the whole year of a student's work in a single number or letter. I'll say more about verbal assessment later.

Simplicio: But verbal assessment is very subjective. Number grades, on the other hand, are objective and precise.

Salviati: Just because you add up all the year's marks and average them doesn't make them precise. Each of the individual marks remains just as subjective as it was. Averaging all the grades and calling it accurate is like the story of the Emperor's nose. A long time ago, the Emperor of China wore a veil, and never showed his face. The people wondered how long his nose was. So one man went around and asked a thousand people what they think - how long is the emperor's nose? Then he averaged those numbers. Surely the resulting length of the Emperor's nose must be accurate, because it was found scientifically.

Simplicio: You're saying all the individual grades are subjective. But what about standardized tests? Aren't those objective?

Salviati: Standardized tests have probably done more harm to our education than anything else. Let me explain...

4. Standardized testing

If grading is like shooting yourself in the foot, standardized testing is like cutting your leg off with a chainsaw. To quote a teacher:

"We spend 25% of our time taking standardized tests, 50% of our time preparing for standardized tests and 15% of our time resting after tests. There's only 10% of our time left in which the students can actually learn something."

Standardized testing is like a black hole that sucks up and annihilates any learning it gets close to. It bends the very fabric of curriculum and students' time. The teacher above might have been slightly exaggerating, but she's closer to the truth than most of us would dare believe. In the words of another teacher, speaking about demands to raise standardized test scores:

"Sure you can raise standardized test scores. Just eliminate arts, restrict extracurricular activities, and spend hours on end drilling the students on test-taking techniques. And sure enough, the test scores will increase. What a meaningful measure of learning."

Not only does standardized testing annihilate meaningful activities like arts, it also emphasizes all the wrong things. Since it's "objective", it assesses facts instead of creativity. Therefore preparing students for these test means teaching cartloads of pointless facts, rather than meaningful concepts and ideas.

5. Competition instead of co-operation

Researchers know that the best way to progress is co-operation. They live in big communities, sharing ideas, openly discussing things over lunch and helping each other. If everybody kept their ideas secret in fear of losing them, we'd still be living in the middle ages.

Yet schools somehow didn't catch on to this. In schools, co-operation is called cheating, laziness, "not doing one's work" and a dozen other unpleasant names. Schools would have us believe that the only way to achieve something is on your own. It's quite a wonder our schools don't churn out crazy sociopaths, who are afraid to share any of their ideas or feelings with others.

Humans are like individual parts of a machine. Each of them is amazing in its own right, but together they are so much more.

The schools also teach us that everybody else is competition. After all, the standardized testing is all about sorting people in baskets like "the top 1%" and "the top 10%". This leads to students becoming adults who undermine others' efforts and trash-talk people behind their back. Because their education has taught them that everyone who's more successful is taking opportunities away from them.

Someone in the top 1% richest people in a third world country is much poorer than someone in the top 20% richest in the US. Similarly, giving everyone a great education would stop the need for sorting people. After all, if the top 20% of students were as good as the top 1% now, none of the top universities would complain about receiving "average" students. Students could spend their time learning instead of being sorted.

6. Students as passive receptacles of knowledge

Have you noticed that in a traditional classroom, a teacher does about 80% of the talking, and the other 20% is divided among all the students? I mean, sure, it makes sense. The teacher knows more. Therefore his talking will be more useful than the students' talking. If the students are allowed to talk, the air will be filled with half-baked ideas and misconceptions. On the other hand, if the teacher is talking the whole time, the air is filled with pure distilled wisdom.

There's only one problem. The classrooms are there for the students, not some third-party ethereal observer who might happen along.

Learning is an active process. When the students discuss, talk about the new material, try to explain it to each another and figure it out together - that's when learning happens.

Simplicio: But you can't get students to talk about topics they know nothing about. You've got to tell them about it first, so they can discuss it.

Salviati: If you just tell the students about the topic, they won't really understand. Sure, they'll be able to answer carefully crafted questions that exactly match what they were taught. But they won't be able to use their knowledge in new creative ways. They won't have real "gut-level understanding".
Concepts need to be actively created by the student. They can't be passed from the teacher to the student. You can pass on facts, but you can't pass on concepts.

Simplicio: Create the concepts for themselves? They can't be passed on from the teacher to the student? It sounds to me like you're saying teachers should just sit back and let the students learn on their own. Like we don't even need teachers in the classroom.

Salviati: Oh yes we need teachers. Teachers help the students discover concepts by asking the right questions. Then they let the students discuss it among themselves without immediately jumping in and correcting every little mistake.

Simplicio: Wait, teachers shouldn't correct the students' mistakes? I thought the whole point of a teacher is to help the students overcome their misconceptions and teach them the truth.

Salviati: The teacher shouldn't immediately jump in and correct the mistakes. Instead, he should ask the students another question that reveals their mistaken assumptions. For example, let's say the students are trying to simplify the fraction 19/95 . They come to the solution of crossing out the nines to get 1/5, which is the correct answer.
A bad teacher would immediately jump in and say "No, no, no! That's wrong. THIS is how you simplify a fraction..." (In fact, the teacher probably wouldn't even let the students try to figure it out on their own. He would begin the lesson by "This is how you simplify fractions. Now do exercises 11-25 on the handout. Stop talking, John! Turn around David, and pay attention. This is important, it will be on the exam. Come on, get going.")
A good teacher would just say "Ok, how about simplifying 3/12?" and let the students figure it out. This might involve the students fiddling with a group of twelve marbles, to really get a deep understanding what 3/12 means (3 marbles out of 12)

Simplicio: Doesn't that take an awful lot of time? It seems simpler to just tell the students how to simplify fractions. Why the whole circus with "figuring it out" and "inventing the concepts for themselves"?

Salviati: Because that's the only way the students can really understand the concepts. You can't pass on understanding, it needs to be created by the students themselves. If you just teach them a technique, it will be forgotten as soon as the next exam is over.

Simplicio: I'm still not convinced by this whole "actively creating concepts" thing.

Salviati: Let me show you another example...

A first-grade teacher in Massachusetts shoves aside all the classroom furniture and uses masking tape to outline a large boat on the floor. Its the Mayflower, she tells the children - the very ship we've been learning about. She hands a piece of paper to a student named Zeb and says it's a message that the king has given him to deliver to the class. Zeb reads aloud that the ship can't sail until we tell the king how big it is.
"What should we do?" the teacher asks. "Who has an idea?"

After some false starts and some painful silences, a boy named Tom volunteers that it can't be three feet because he knows (having just been measured by the nurse), that he is four feet and the boat looks bigger than he is. Other children now join in, one suggesting that they find out how many times Tom can fit in the boat. It turns out the boat is four Toms long. Problem solved!

But wait a minute, says the teacher. How will the king know what that means? After all, he's never met Tom. She waits for someone to remember that Tom is four feet tall. No one does. Instead, Mark suggests that the boat can be measured with hands. He does this several times (rather sloppily) and gets a different answer each time. After more discussion, the class realizes you have to start right at the end of the boat, and then make sure there's no space between your hands when you put them down. Finally Mark concludes to everyone's satisfaction that the boat is thirty-six hands long. Done!

Well, just to be sure, says the teacher, let's have Sue (the smallest child in the class) measure it again. Oh, no! Now the boat is is forty-four hands long! Confusion and animated discussion follow. The children realize that all hands on deck are not of equal length. By the time someone proposes using people's feet instead, time has run out. But the teacher has them return to the problem the following day. One child now remembers that the king knows Zeb, and argues that the boat can therefore be measured in multiples of Zeb's foot. The class is so excited by this that they decide to use Zeb to measure everything in the room, and the teacher lets them.

It isn't until the next day, returning to the topic yet again, that she begins to make the lesson explicit for them. She invites the children to think about the importance of a standard form of measurement. And only after that does she finally introduce them to the use of rulers.

How did the system get so bad

Some people (like Howard Gardner) argue that schools are doing their job perfectly. That is, that their job is to dumb people down, take away their enthusiasm and creativity, and create a timid, uncreative, easily controllable workforce.

Normally I'm all for conspiracy theories, but I don't believe this one. I believe everyone is doing what they think is best.

1. Teachers don't know better teaching methods

I've met teachers that have lost interest in teaching, and just sort of come to the classroom as a boring job. They don't care about the students and wish the day was over as soon as it starts. But these are rarity.

Most teachers want to help students learn. They care about the students. And that's what hurts me most - they do all the wrong things, but with the best intentions. If this majority of teachers only knew that there are better teaching methods, we could change the system for the better. They would be glad to help the students learn better.

2. The administration wants accountability

Students and teachers generally realize standardized testing is bad. But we're powerless to change it. The school administration sort of realizes it. But the big administration out there, who never set a foot in a classroom except for a photo shoot for their campaign, they adore standardized tests. They want accountability. Because then it seems to them like they know how much learning is happening, when they see the standardized test scores.

The trouble is, they don't realize that learning has nothing whatsoever to do with standardized test scores. They might be in fact inversely correlated.

3. The Current system is *familiar*

After going through the system for 12 years, we don't realize things could be different. In fact, we might even start to resist change ("If it was bad enough for me, it's bad enough for my kids"). I personally hope as few kids as possible will have to suffer through what we had to suffer through.

Parents also pose a big problem to making effective changes. To them, it's reassuring to see students get grades, and to have the teacher firmly in control of the classroom, talking most of the time. After all, if the parents have gone through the system and turned out fine, surely the children can as well. And also, if it's boring, annoying and painful, surely it must be good for you.

It's as if they subscribe to what might be called the Listerine theory of education, based on a famous ad campaign that sought to sell this particular brand of mouthwash on the theory that if it tasted vile, it obviously worked well.

Parents get very nervous if you propose them to put their child in a progressive school. They get nervous when the students don't get grades (instead they get specific and positive feedback, to really help them learn). The parents get nervous when the students do most of the talking, when the teachers seems to fade into the background and let students learn instead of being the center of the classroom, they get nervous when students are allowed to get involved in the creation of their own curriculum.

Thankfully, most parents' worries dissipate if they actually visit such a school. They see the students sitting or lying down in groups, excitedly discussing things. They see students' projects plastering the walls (and I'm not talking about twenty look-alike projects set by the teacher. I'm talking about projects the students take on themselves). They see the teacher giving helpful advice and guiding the students, without telling them all the answers and without being the ultimate authority.

What we can do to change it

I've described a lot of positive changes we could implement. While it's by no means a complete guide, it gives you a good idea of what schools could be like.

I know we won't change the system overnight. That would involve all the people at the top suddenly realizing the truth. Unfortunately, they're buried too deep in paperwork to notice what's going on in real classrooms.

To quote Alfie Kohn:

[The educators] sit on Mount Olympus, where no children live, and insist that students be made to learn. They like to talk about motivating kids, as though motivation could be imposed from the outside. They are fixated on observable, testable behaviors (such as correctly pronouncing the words on a page) while ignoring the people who are doing the behaving (and whether they care about, or understand, those words.)

It would be a damn near impossible job trying to change the people at the top.

The change will have to come from the bottom. We need to spread awareness among students and teachers. Let everyone know that things could be different! We don't have to suffer through 12 years of boredom and mindlessness! Learning can be fun!

In fact, learning and fun go together. Taking the fun away from learning is like taking tires away from a car. You can still move the car along, but you won't get very far, and it will require lots of effort.

So what can you do to help change our education system?

1. Send a link to Lockhart's Lament to your maths teacher.

This isn't guaranteed to make a difference. It probably won't. When I sent the link to my teacher, he went right on teaching in his old way. He simply called it "the same old rant, but written in an interesting way". But it's worth a try. If even one out of a hundred math teachers will start teaching REAL mathematics, it will be worth it.

2. Send a link to this article to anyone you think might be interested.

I sent copies of Lockhart's Lament to several of my friends who I knew would be interested. They then sent it on to others, and those to others.

If you know someone who isn't happy with the current school system, or is generally open to change, you might want to send him this article.

Or, the simplest and yet very effective action:

3. Digg this article, or give it a thumb up in StumbleUpon.

The more students and teachers realize that schools could be fun and interesting, the better our chances to change the system. Saving our education doesn't get easier than this. Just one click, and you can make the world a better place.

Let's change the world!

The Low-Informaton Diet

I turned on the TV. They were showing the evening news. War. Earthquake. Terrorism. Corruption. Death. I turned off the TV. Guess I'm not missing anything I thought.

I'm going to say something now that might shock you. Ready?

I don't watch the news. I've watched them about two or three times in the last 3 years, and one of the experiences is described above. I don't buy the newspaper, and haven't read one in years.

I know, I know. How can I be a responsible citizen? How do I know what's happening in the world? How can I be so ignorant?

Living without "the news"

I used to be like most people. I would watch half an hour of evening news every day. I would read the newspaper, and watch political debates at the weekend. But one day, I realized how useless this inflow of information is to me. (okay, that last sentence was complete bullshit. Actually, we moved to a new apartment, one without a TV. But the point is, I stopped watching the news.)

And I felt great. After a few weeks, I realized I'm not missing out on anything. From time to time, I'd hear people talking about some catastrophe, and have no idea what they're talking about, but that's about it.

I believe information is like food for the brain. There is good healthy food, and there's junk food. Similarly, there's good, useful information, and there's junk information.

Starving will leave you without energy. Eating a bit of food will give you energy. Therefore, surely eating more food will give you more energy. Yeah, right.

Elvis Presley died because he lived at a time when nobody realized how bad junk food is for your health. He consumed some 50 000 calories a day towards the end of his life (20 times the recommended amount).

I believe we are now living at a similar time as him... except it's not junk food that's the problem, it's junk information.

The trouble with most information is that:

1. It's irrelevant

2. It's negative

3. It's non-actionable

And, of course, it's seriously time-consuming.

If you fill your mind with junk information, the useful stuff will get drowned out. It's like eating a good balanced diet throughout the day... and then stuffing yourself with two super-size menus of junk food in the evening.

If I had a formal process for deciding whether to consume a particular bit of news, it would look something like this:

1. Is it actionable?

2. Is it positive?

3. Is it relevant? (to me, or my interests)

By this virtue I haven't been following the presidential elections - this information is non-actionable, neutral, and irrelevant to my interests. (I still heard all the main updates from friends and acquaintances).

Now, I don't strictly follow the process above. I wouldn't mind hearing awesome positive news from my areas of interest, even if they're not actionable. (for example scientists inventing a new, cool, more efficient solar panel.)

I also don't strictly avoid all negative news. But the fact is, you can't fight starving children in Africa, earthquakes in China, corrupt politicians in America, and melting glaciers in Antarctica, all at the same time. You're better of choosing one area, and making the world a better place there. I personally chose self-improvement and education (stay tuned for next Saturday - I've got a great post about education coming up).

Consuming less information will allow you to do more with what you have.

Winding down for the day

One big reason why many people watch the evening news is because they just want to sit down and relax for half an hour after a long day. That's perfectly alright. But please avoid the news. Here are my favorite alternatives, in order of preference:

1. Take a quick nap

Sometimes this isn't possible, for whatever reason. If so, move on to the next alternative.

2. Read a FICTION book

For several years, I read only non-fiction books. I felt like time spent reading a fiction book would be wasted. Of course, that led to too much consumed information. I couldn't really make use of so much information.

Plus, half an hour of reading fiction is better than sleeping pills for putting the troubles of the day behind you.

3. Watch a TV series, or a movie

Watching TV alters your brain wave patterns. If you watch TV right before bed, your sleep will be more shallow, and lower quality. If you're going to watch TV, switch it off at least half an hour before bed. Your morning self will thank you.

The Low-Information Challenge

Now that I've given you reasonable alternatives to watching the news, here's my challenge for you:

Do not watch the news, or read a newspaper, for two weeks straight.

At first you might feel like the world's going to come to an end if you don't watch it closely. But when you talk to a friend or colleague over lunch, and ask them what's happening in the world, you'll notice you didn't miss absolutely anything. It's still the same old, same old.

Free your mind of information overdose, and your happiness and productivity will soar.

Stay tuned for next week's article! I'm going to tell you all about education, and how to fix our education system. You'll learn why giving students grades is bad for their learning, and much more. Learning can be interesting, learning can be fun!

Learning Mastery 3 - Fail Early, Fail Often

This is the third part of my Learning Mastery series. You might want to read the first two parts (if you haven't done so yet):
Learning Mastery 1 - Feedback Is The Key
Learning Mastery 2 - Post-Practice Improvement

I touched on the subject of failure last time. This time I'll take it a lot further.

Why Failure Is Good For Your Learning

Failure is natural feedback. Every time you fail, you get a message about how well you're doing, and you get a chance to change something.

It's quite natural to try and avoid failure. We don't like failing. It makes us look bad in front of other people. It makes us feel bad (unless viewed correctly - which is what I'm teaching you here). In fact, it makes sense to try and avoid failure, because if you avoid failure, that means you're doing good, right?

Wrong.

I recently learned to snowboard. And I didn't do it by avoiding failure. If I tried to avoid falling, I would ride down the whole piste sideways (the snowboard perpendicular to the hill, me facing forward.) But that wouldn't let me learn much. It would also be pretty tiring for my legs, and it wouldn't be fun.

So instead I embraced failure. I tried figuring out how all the motions affect the way I ride. What happens when I put more weight on the front foot, or how twisting my body affects the riding. I fell like 50 times the first day, and I didn't mind. That isn't to say I was intentionally falling the whole time, but I didn't care if I did. My goal was to quickly figure out how my motions affect the ride, and that's what I did.

Which brings me to the first rule of welcoming failure:

Welcoming Failure - Rule 1:
Don't worry about failure. It's quite natural to fail and look bad a lot when you're first learning something.

And so I learned snowboarding in two days. Or about 7 net hours (including breaks drinking wonderful swiss hot chocolate). The third day I just enjoyed the snowboarding, without worrying about learning. (I'll talk some more about "fun and learning" later in this article.)

Fail Often

Not worrying about failure is just the first step. The next step is rigging the circumstances so that you fail more often.

I like to think of this concept as the development cycle, based on my favorite Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a six-month development cycle - meaning a new major version comes out every six months.

This gives Ubuntu a lot of opportunity to get feedback and improve. And that's why it's a lot better operating system than Windows Vista (whose development cycle took some six YEARS).

Shorten your development cycle

So how you do use this idea of a development cycle? Let's say you want to learn to draw. Don't start by drawing a full-size painting. Start by making small drawings. That way you can finish a dozen drawings in the time it would otherwise take you to finish one. You fail a dozen times more often, and get dozen times more feedback. It lets you improve much faster.

Welcoming Failure - Rule 2:
Shorten your development cycle. You will fail more often, get more feedback, and learn faster.

But as with all rules, you can't take it too far. If you tried making a drawing every thirty seconds, you wouldn't learn much.

You need a certain amount of time to learn new things. If you set your development cycle too short, you won't learn much. It has to do with *Post-Practice Improvement* and the fact that you need time to accumulate feedback. Also, if you do things too quickly, you tend to pick up bad habits (like stress).

In my time, I've learned many board games, like chess and draughts. I learned you need to find the right development cycle there too. I found that 5-minute games (5 minutes per person per game) are better than 30-minute games for learning. But taking it too far, like 1-minute games, I can't do all the thinking and analysis I need to really learn. And playing without thinking simply doesn't help you learn.

Which brings me to Rule 2.5 , complementing Rule 2.

Welcoming failure - Rule 2.5:
Only shorten your development cycle so much that you can still maintain full attention. If you find yourself doing things too fast and without thinking, you probably set your development cycle too short.

Now you know as much about failure as a seasoned hunter knows about tracking animals. Get out there and fail! (somehow this sentence didn't come out as motivational as I imagined)

Fun and Learning

I've been talking about learning so much you might come to think the point of doing anything is to get better. Well guess what... just getting better at something won't do you any good unless you enjoy it.

From my experience, we learn about 95% of our skills for fun. We learn the other 5% because we need them for something else we're doing (you might learn about marketing and how to sell something because you need it for your job. Then again, if your job involves selling things, you probably enjoy it - so that would fit under fun.).

This gives us today's final rule (or rather guideline - I'm not forcing you into this):

Guideline 3:
Have fun.

Yet there are times when you can sacrifice a bit of fun now, to have more fun later. For example learning a piano piece. You could just start slowly playing both hands from the beginning of the piece, and get mild enjoyment since it sounds something like the original. Or you could practice to maxmize learning (you pianists out there - see Fundamentals of Piano Exercise). You would take a few days to learn the piece well. Then you could spend weeks playing it well, at full speed, with all the nuances you want.

You would be trading off a few days of mild enjoyment now for weeks of real fun later.

You might also find yourself in situations where you can just have fun now... or delay it a bit to have MORE fun later. Use your judgment and decide what you prefer in the situation. I sometimes choose to simply have fun now - it's a perfectly fine decision.

Stay tuned for the next article in the Learning Mastery Series. We will explore how you can help yourself learn by helping others, how to chop up a skill into smaller bits for easier learning, and the fine art of hypothesising.

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About my last blog post:

You regular readers out there might have noticed my last blog post was pretty random... and out of schedule. The fact is, I woke up in the middle of the night and had this totally hilarious idea (it seemed hilarious at the time). I couldn't get back to sleep until I wrote it down. And since I'd written it down, I figured I might as well post it.

When I woke up in the morning, I read the post again. It was only half as funny as it seemed at 4 am. (still funny enough so that I would post it anyway)

I learned something, and figured I might as well share it with you:

If you have a brilliant humor idea, write it down, then wait 24 hours. If it still seems funny, you can do something with it.

STFUbuntu - The HOT New Linux Distro

"STFU n00b!"
- every 12-year-old kid out there

Have you ever wished your computer had the balls to tell you to STFU? Have you every wished it T4LK3D L1K3 7H1S? Have you ever dreamt of saying STFU every time you tell people about your HOT new distro? Have you ever dreamt of having sex with a rodent?

Yeah, yeah. Haven't we all?

Well, now's your chance!

STFUbuntu is just out, and it's the HOT new thing! It includes amazing new features like:

• All text (including webpages) is parsed through a filter, to M4K3 17 L00K L1K3 7H1S!! Because reading stuff like that is 1337!!! Yay! Fun! Zomg LOLOLOL xD
• remember the old annoying system beep you used to get when you did something wrong? Well, it's back, except now it's a recording of a 12-year-old kid yelling "STFU n00b!". Just the thing you want to hear when you're still sleepy at 9 AM and enter your password wrong!
• A HOT new default wallpaper! (see picture above)
• remember Microsoft Bob? We have one too! Except he's called STFUbuntu pwnerer. He pops up at random intervals and tells you to STFU!

Don't wait any longer! Now's your chance to get your hands on STFUbuntu!

You don't have to wait any longer to be told to STFU.

Really.

STFU!

Learning Mastery 2 - Post Practice Improvement

This is the second part of my Learning Mastery series. In Learning Mastery 1, I shared with you the power of feedback. I explained why the best feedback is positive and specific, and how you can get more feedback to improve faster.

In this article, you'll learn, among other things, why master pianists only practice one hour a day (the ten-hours-a-day practice is a myth), how taking breaks makes you learn FASTER and why you should welcome failure with open arms. You will also learn how to use the same principle as the master pianists to learn any new skill orders of magnitude faster.

Post-Practice Improvement (PPI)

A weight-lifter's muscles don't grow while he's lifting weights. They grow between his work-outs.

Few people know that the same is true for learning skills. Learning is mostly building new and stronger neural connections. This is a slow process, and happens between practice sessions.

Master pianists have long been aware of this fact. They practice in such a way as to maximize Post-Practice Improvement (PPI). This means they learn a certain piece, then go away from their practice, and when they come back the next day, they can play the piece far better!

I first learned about PPI from the (free) e-book Fundemantals of Piano Practice. It's a must-read for all you pianists out there.

Maximizing PPI

So how can YOU maximize your PPI when learning something new?

The first rule is this:

The last thing you do has by far the biggest impact on Post-Practice-Improvement.

Let's say you're learning to play tennis. It doesn't matter if you serve correctly a hundred times in a row. If your last few serves go wrong because you use bad arm/hand movements, your brain will remember that. It will then emphasize the neural connections based on those incorrect moves. The next time you come to practice, your serve might be worse, not better.

In fact, this is not at all uncommon with pianists who don't know about PPI. At the end of their practice sessions, they play through the piece at speed, with stress and mistakes. The next day, they come back and find that they play the piece worse than before.

So make sure the last thing during practice is your best. Use all the correct motions, and do it as relaxed as possible.

Taking a break

Another incredibly important technique for maximizing PPI is taking regular breaks. I've written about taking breaks before. I explained why it's important to take a short break every 10-20 minutes, and a long 20-minute break every 90 minutes. But I didn't share the whole story. Yes, breaks help you relax. Yes, breaks improve your concentration. Yes, breaks help you accomplish more. But there's more:

Breaks also help you learn. They help you a lot.

During a practice session you might learn a bunch of different skills. Let's go back to the tennis example. You might practice serving, running, forehand, backhand, playing close to the net and other skills. Let's say your last serve is half an hour before the end of your practice session. It will still count for your serve's PPI. As long as you took a break after practicing your serve.

I'm not sure why or how this works. I think it has something to do with the way brain stores tasks. It needs a break to move the task from working memory to PPI. It's like when you're sitting at a restaurant. You think of something really important and jot down a few notes on a napkin. But you'll then need to transfer the notes somewhere else, like your master to-do list, in order to take action on them later.

Your brain needs to do the same. When you take a break, it runs through its working memory, and deals with the tasks there. It discards the stuff it no longer needs - that's what makes you relaxed and refreshed after a break. It transfers other stuff to the subconscious, for dealing with long-term.

If you practice too long without taking a break, your working memory fills up. And since you're not taking time to transfer the useful stuff to your long-term subconscious, the new stuff has nowhere to go. It gets lost, and with it you lose valuable learning experiences.

How PPI relates to feedback

Both Post-Practice Improvement and Feedback are essential for learning. But feedback comes first, which is why I chose to talk about it first.

During practice, you're using feedback to improve your movements. But there's only a certain number of things you can focus on consciously. You'll need to transfer some of the more basic skills to your subconscious before you can focus on improving the smaller details. PPI does just that.

The great news is, feedback and PPI don't just add up. They multiply. The better you use each one of them, the more effective the other becomes.

Welcoming failure

"Want me to give you a recipe for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure."
- Thomas Watson, founder of IBM

What would it be like if you welcomed failure? Not just wasn't bothered by it, but actually welcomed it?

I've written before about learning from failure and then moving on. Every failure contains some valuable lessons, and it's a great thing if you learn to extract them.

But lately, I've seen that failure is more valuable than I used to think. In fact, it's so valuable, I've worked on increasing the amount of failure I experience. But I'll tell you more about that next time.

Stay tuned for the next article in Learning Mastery series. I'll share with you how to increase the amount of failure you enjoy (and why do it). I'll also talk about how fun relates to learning (spoiler: The two of them usually support each other. Usually.)

Until next saturday.

Plop.

Update: Now available: Learning Mastery 3 - Fail Early, Fail Often

Learning Mastery 1 - Feedback Is The Key

Today I've got a very special post for you. I'm going to help you become a genius.

And when I say genius, I don't mean someone who's great at one particular skill. I mean someone who can learn any new skill incredibly fast. Because I think that's what real genius is - being adaptable.

Feedback is the Key

"Feedback uber alles!"
- Me, speaking in a horribly fake German accent

"You don't get feedback. In soviet Russia, feedback gets YOU!!"
- A random unrelated quote

Good feedback is the key to learning. If you can figure out to how to get more feedback, more accurate feedback and the right kind of feedback, and then use it correctly, you'll go incredibly far in learning something new.

1. More feedback

Get an experienced friend to watch you. Maybe you want to learn snowboarding (something I learned recently). Let him tell you what you did right and what you can improve.

Also, get a video of yourself in action, if at all possible for the skill you're learning. I can't stress how much difference that makes. This tip alone will more than triple your learning rate. If filming yourself isn't feasible (you're learning something internal, like playing chess) try thinking aloud and recording yourself.

Also, don't be afraid to ask more experienced people for feedback. If they agree, excellent! If they say no, also great! You just learned to hear rejection without it bothering you. (that's an important life skill). It's win/win, so go for it.

2. More accurate feedback

Make sure your feedback is specific. Not just a generic "Well done." It's the details that matter. For example in tennis, the top players have a very specific wrist motion when serving. Learn that specific detail. For some reason, the smallest details often matter the most.

3. The right kind of feedback

"You screwed up. That was really bad. You'll never learn this." - that is not the right kind of feedback.

The right kind of feedback is specific and positive.

The place where I've seen people give the best feedback is Toastmasters speaking classes. It works roughly like this:

You give a speech. Then someone gets up to evaluate your speech in two minutes. The evaluation contains two main ingredients:

• 1. Positive feedback - ("You did a great job using those diagrams to emphasize your point.")
• 2. Points for improvement - ("Next time try varying your voice tone a bit more.")

And here's the vitally important bit - The positive feedback takes up about two thirds of the evaluation.

Positive feedback is soooo important, I can't stress it enough. It's great for your self-image. It keeps you motivated. It makes you perform much better.

For psychological reasons, the good stuff needs reinforcing. "What you focus on you get more of." (this is also the reason why saying thanks every day is so effective.) For the same reasons, every time you think of the thing you're learning (like snowboarding), think of the times you did well. See yourself doing well, hear it, feel it. Play the positive feedback in your mind over and over.

Positive feedback is the most important aspect in learning something new. It's why I put feedback as the first part of the Learning Mastery series. The effects are nothing short of stunning.

Things to watch out for with feedback

Now that you know how great feedback is, you might be tempted to start giving it to others left and right. Don't. Giving people unsolicited feedback can seriously hurt them. And I'm not talking about hurting their ego by pointing out things they did wrong. I'm talking about something much worse. If you give others lots of positive feedback they didn't ask for (even "well done"), you will hurt their motivation.

There are obscure psychological reasons behind this, and they're too complex for this article. I might explain them some other day. For now, just remember:

- Do not give others unsolicited feedback.

You can say something nice if a person does something really special (for example signing well at karaoke). But keep the praise honest, and scarce.

Another way to turn to the dark side is becoming obsessed with feedback. When you start valuing feedback more than learning, you're in serious trouble.

I used to play Reversi at an online site. My rating (a way of measuring skill, the higher the better) was about 1650. I was trying to improve to reach 1700. I focused on it for days without success. Then I stopped focusing on my rating. I sort of forgot about it, and instead focused on learning. Two days later, I checked my rating. It was almost 1800.

"The archer who keeps his eyes on the prize will miss the target."

Remember - feedback is there to help you learn. You might find yourself under pressure to put feedback (the prize) above learning. Always ask yourself if it's worth it.

Summary

Next time you're learning something, get as much feedback as you can (if possible, use a video camera). Then focus mostly on what you did well. Notice one or two things you could try to do differently next time.

Long days and pleasant nights.

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Stay tuned for the next article in the Learning Mastery series. I will share with you, among other things, a way to time your learning to greatly accelerate your improvement - based on scientific experiments involving brain imaging technology.

Update: Now available: Learning Mastery 2 - Post-Practice Improvement