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> I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. > People will often think they und

by zsz 4y ago

> I’m totally convinced that a new idea or a new plan or a new technique is never really understood when you just explain it. > People will often think they understand, and they’ll say they understand, but then their actions show that it just ain’t so. Isn't this the very reason that homework assignments exist? When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead of Bs and Cs) in my various math classes, physics, chemistry, etc. had I simply bothered to do my homework properly--or, to put it differently, had I only properly applied the knowledge which I passively acquired by reading the associated textbook sections. Notably, I was always convinced that I "understood" everything I had read, only to find out otherwise when I tried to solve any of the problems. It was only after I actively applied the knowledge I had picked up, that my understanding transitioned from superficial (as in, understanding the underlying logic itself) to concrete (being able to apply the logic toward other problems). If you apply this to abstract and esoteric technical concepts, it is easy to see why someone might say they understand--and even believe that they do--while in reality only having a superficial understanding at best. The problem then becomes getting the other person to spend the effort to properly internalize the concepts being conveyed, before they have built up the requisite interest in the idea to be sufficiently motivated to carry out said effort. It's probably also true, however, that this may only apply to sufficiently esoteric and complex ideas in the first place.

deleted 4y ago
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inopinatus 4y ago
The irony here is that bypassing active learning early, means one only discovers how valuable it is much later in life. As per article above in which the hubris is its own comeuppance.
tricksforfree 4y ago
I've seen this time and time again when attempting to implement a centralized design system across a group of existing apps.
koyote 4y ago
> When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead of Bs and Cs) in my various math classes, physics, chemistry, etc. had I simply bothered to do my homework properly--or, to put it differently, had I only properly applied the knowledge which I passively acquired by reading the associated textbook sections. I took this realisation to the extreme and decided to completely deprioritise classes in favour of homework and doing the reading in my own time. I figured the cost-benefit, at least for me, was much higher if I spent an hour doing as opposed to an hour listening. This actually worked really well for me but that might also be because I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up. But even when the learning is 'one-to-one' I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand. I think you're right in that some of that might be the brain pretending that it understood when in fact it did not. Could it also be a social thing? Maybe because the other person expects you to understand and this causes your brain to try its best to believe that it understood when it did not.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  > I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up. This is a problem for everyone. People may not experience the struggle directly, but it's there. It's the inherent problem with any group class. > I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand. Tight loops of interaction will make this nearly impossible. What you'll have to watch out for instead is overwhelming students to the point of distress (speaking from experience).
  - a2800276 4y ago
    Not only is this a problem with everyone, it's also one of the "soft" skills you learn to deal with in school. It occurs in professional and social interactions as well and school prepares for dealing with it.
- fulltimeloser 4y ago
crdrost 4y ago
Yes. Well, examples. Good homework assignments give you some examples to sit in your head, not all homework assignments are good though. The way I like to tell people this is, you know that thing where you want to take your kids or your students and make sure that they don't have to go through the same pain that you did to learn what you had learned? That feeling? If you have ever had that feeling you must understand that it was horribly mistaken. The problem is precisely that learning and pain go hand-in-hand. We learn abstractions precisely because they relieve a sort of confusion, a sort of difficulty, they organize the pain that we have experienced and make it tidy and less painful. Even as kids abstractions like “this is what it means for the stove to be on” work this way, not that you have to get burned, maybe you just need to be yelled at, but it organizes that pain of being yelled at and tells you when are you getting yelled at and why. Not all learning is this way, for example memorization and repetition... but to a first approximation you have to get lost in the forest before the landmarks on the map are recognizable. Corollary: you CAN tell people things, but it might be more involved than just a casual conversation. Either you have to establish a shared context, tap into the pain/confusion that they already have... Or you have to get them interested enough that they will follow you down a rabbit hole of confusion and difficulty so that you can finally explain the thing.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I strongly agree with your main point that sometimes valuable learning is painful. I've found a lot of mathematics is painful beyond "this is frustrating and difficult," but in a more profound way. I would say though, about abstractions, I'm not sure hot stove is an abstraction. I think hot is an abstraction that allows you to apply the lesson you learned on the stove to the toaster and the coffee maker and all the other hot appliances you encounter.
  - maCDzP 4y ago
    If you wouldn’t mind, could you elaborate your point about mathematical being painful?
    - jrumbut 4y ago
weinzierl 4y ago
> Isn't this the very reason that homework assignments exist? Absolutely. It is also why I will never understand why it is considered a virtue (especially in the maths and physics community) to set assignments without exemplary solution. I'm not asking to give this exemplary solution to students right away, but it should definitely exist and be given when students have shown honest effort and especially to weaker students that are struggling. Instead the "left as an exercise to the reader" mentality is celebrated when in reality - in my opinion - it is almost always just a convenient excuse for the laziness of the professor at the expense of their students.
- tormeh 4y ago
  IMO mathy homework should always come with the correct end result to the questions. It allows the student to get instant feedback on whether they’re right or wrong. They’ll still have to work out the derivation of the answer.
  - kaashif 4y ago
    That works fine for some kinds of questions, but not for questions like "prove this group is cyclic" or "prove this function is holomorphic" - in those cases there is no answer separate from the derivation. And those questions tend to be the hardest and most prone to bullshittery by students. Many times in exams I made up proofs that made no sense and hoped no-one would notice. Often when given the end result of a computation students just make up some nonsense integral or something and pretend they evaluated it, even if they didn't. Not having the answer immediately at least forces an honest attempt. Let's not kid ourselves, we were all students at one time and we know students are lazy.
- Aune 4y ago
  I have seen plenty of miss-use of solutions of the following though: 1. Struggle with exercise. 2. Check proposed solution. 3. Thinking that your understanding of the proposed solution constitutes an ability to solve it yourself. This is analogous to the original problem, where you assume the ability to follow reasoning translates to being able to reproduce it. The main use of exercises without solutions is to try and force students to go to their teachers and interact, so that someone can try to pinpoint what exactly the missunderstanding is. This can probably be better done with assigned homework. However grading can be time consuming, so trying to filter so that only those that have problem with specific exercises come to see you is one way to try and get some time economy going. Also yeah. This is better in course specific work sheets than in books, since books should be self contained enough to be usable without the guidence of TAs or professors.
scotty79 4y ago
Hear and forget. See and remember. Do and understand.
alex-moon 4y ago
Yes and also https://build-your-own.org/ https://build-your-own.org/ I had a boss years ago who would encourage me, whenever I was interested in e.g. a new library or framework, to go and reinvent the wheel in my spare time i.e. build it myself from scratch first to understand what the problems it solves actually are. I've never built my own anything quite as low level as the build-your-own.org projects, but doing things like implementing a PHP web server with a class loader without any frameworks, or a JS templating system which stores the state of the UI in a big ol' object and updates the DOM automatically, has given me the deeper understanding of these things that I've later needed to debug weird issues and find creative fixes.
FrontierPsych 4y ago
Yes, 100%. A friend of mine was going to graduate, and had one required class that she had to take. She had dropped it twice before because she said it was too difficult for her. If she didn't pass, she couldn't take the class again, or maybe for a year, not sure exactly. Well, at the start of the semester at the first mid-term, she failed the first one. At that point, I decided to step in. I made her read every single chapter, completely, and understand most of it, before going to class, where the teacher went over everything and she could ask the one or two very incisive and important questions that she honestly didn't understand in the book. I also "made" her do an extra credit paper (meaning I really just put the screws to her to do it, no mercy. For her own good - ie not graduating and failing out with one semester to go.) As you might expect, she got perfect scores on her next two mid-term tests, and her report she also had an A+. Reading to understand and working hard at it, you will understand. And reading it before each class, in order to ask the one or two or four honest questions that you have to fill in the honest few things you just can't understand. And actually, with the internet, for almost all things, you can look up multiple sources on the topic and read them all - because each author has a different perspective and when you see the concept from many different perspectives, you really do understand deeply. I got pretty much all C's, but then started doing this and then got all A's. Plus I leared memory mnemonics - Tony Buzon - for perfect memory. Learning mnemonics required a lot of work, but so worth it I would make it a required topic to teach starting in 1st grade, and every grade after that. Just like everyone should be required to take probability and statistics classes starting in 7th grade to 12th grade. Just those two.
ianai 4y ago
At my undergrad you had to do the homework and attend all the lectures to get a C+/B-. As/Bs were the realm of studying the class beforehand or, preferably, having taken it once before the time.

by zsz 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

inopinatus 4y ago

The irony here is that bypassing active learning early, means one only discovers how valuable it is much later in life. As per article above in which the hubris is its own comeuppance.

tricksforfree 4y ago

I've seen this time and time again when attempting to implement a centralized design system across a group of existing apps.

koyote 4y ago

> When I was in college, it took me two years to realize that I could have easily gotten As and Bs (instead of Bs and Cs) in my various math classes, physics, chemistry, etc. had I simply bothered to do my homework properly--or, to put it differently, had I only properly applied the knowledge which I passively acquired by reading the associated textbook sections. I took this realisation to the extreme and decided to completely deprioritise classes in favour of homework and doing the reading in my own time. I figured the cost-benefit, at least for me, was much higher if I spent an hour doing as opposed to an hour listening. This actually worked really well for me but that might also be because I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up. But even when the learning is 'one-to-one' I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand. I think you're right in that some of that might be the brain pretending that it understood when in fact it did not. Could it also be a social thing? Maybe because the other person expects you to understand and this causes your brain to try its best to believe that it understood when it did not.

travisjungroth 4y ago
> I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up. This is a problem for everyone. People may not experience the struggle directly, but it's there. It's the inherent problem with any group class. > I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand. Tight loops of interaction will make this nearly impossible. What you'll have to watch out for instead is overwhelming students to the point of distress (speaking from experience).
- a2800276 4y ago
  Not only is this a problem with everyone, it's also one of the "soft" skills you learn to deal with in school. It occurs in professional and social interactions as well and school prepares for dealing with it.
fulltimeloser 4y ago

crdrost 4y ago

Yes. Well, examples. Good homework assignments give you some examples to sit in your head, not all homework assignments are good though. The way I like to tell people this is, you know that thing where you want to take your kids or your students and make sure that they don't have to go through the same pain that you did to learn what you had learned? That feeling? If you have ever had that feeling you must understand that it was horribly mistaken. The problem is precisely that learning and pain go hand-in-hand. We learn abstractions precisely because they relieve a sort of confusion, a sort of difficulty, they organize the pain that we have experienced and make it tidy and less painful. Even as kids abstractions like “this is what it means for the stove to be on” work this way, not that you have to get burned, maybe you just need to be yelled at, but it organizes that pain of being yelled at and tells you when are you getting yelled at and why. Not all learning is this way, for example memorization and repetition... but to a first approximation you have to get lost in the forest before the landmarks on the map are recognizable. Corollary: you CAN tell people things, but it might be more involved than just a casual conversation. Either you have to establish a shared context, tap into the pain/confusion that they already have... Or you have to get them interested enough that they will follow you down a rabbit hole of confusion and difficulty so that you can finally explain the thing.

jrumbut 4y ago
I strongly agree with your main point that sometimes valuable learning is painful. I've found a lot of mathematics is painful beyond "this is frustrating and difficult," but in a more profound way. I would say though, about abstractions, I'm not sure hot stove is an abstraction. I think hot is an abstraction that allows you to apply the lesson you learned on the stove to the toaster and the coffee maker and all the other hot appliances you encounter.
- maCDzP 4y ago
  If you wouldn’t mind, could you elaborate your point about mathematical being painful?
  - jrumbut 4y ago

weinzierl 4y ago

> Isn't this the very reason that homework assignments exist? Absolutely. It is also why I will never understand why it is considered a virtue (especially in the maths and physics community) to set assignments without exemplary solution. I'm not asking to give this exemplary solution to students right away, but it should definitely exist and be given when students have shown honest effort and especially to weaker students that are struggling. Instead the "left as an exercise to the reader" mentality is celebrated when in reality - in my opinion - it is almost always just a convenient excuse for the laziness of the professor at the expense of their students.

tormeh 4y ago
IMO mathy homework should always come with the correct end result to the questions. It allows the student to get instant feedback on whether they’re right or wrong. They’ll still have to work out the derivation of the answer.
- kaashif 4y ago
  That works fine for some kinds of questions, but not for questions like "prove this group is cyclic" or "prove this function is holomorphic" - in those cases there is no answer separate from the derivation. And those questions tend to be the hardest and most prone to bullshittery by students. Many times in exams I made up proofs that made no sense and hoped no-one would notice. Often when given the end result of a computation students just make up some nonsense integral or something and pretend they evaluated it, even if they didn't. Not having the answer immediately at least forces an honest attempt. Let's not kid ourselves, we were all students at one time and we know students are lazy.
Aune 4y ago
I have seen plenty of miss-use of solutions of the following though: 1. Struggle with exercise. 2. Check proposed solution. 3. Thinking that your understanding of the proposed solution constitutes an ability to solve it yourself. This is analogous to the original problem, where you assume the ability to follow reasoning translates to being able to reproduce it. The main use of exercises without solutions is to try and force students to go to their teachers and interact, so that someone can try to pinpoint what exactly the missunderstanding is. This can probably be better done with assigned homework. However grading can be time consuming, so trying to filter so that only those that have problem with specific exercises come to see you is one way to try and get some time economy going. Also yeah. This is better in course specific work sheets than in books, since books should be self contained enough to be usable without the guidence of TAs or professors.

scotty79 4y ago

Hear and forget. See and remember. Do and understand.

alex-moon 4y ago

Yes and also https://build-your-own.org/ https://build-your-own.org/ I had a boss years ago who would encourage me, whenever I was interested in e.g. a new library or framework, to go and reinvent the wheel in my spare time i.e. build it myself from scratch first to understand what the problems it solves actually are. I've never built my own anything quite as low level as the build-your-own.org projects, but doing things like implementing a PHP web server with a class loader without any frameworks, or a JS templating system which stores the state of the UI in a big ol' object and updates the DOM automatically, has given me the deeper understanding of these things that I've later needed to debug weird issues and find creative fixes.

FrontierPsych 4y ago

Yes, 100%. A friend of mine was going to graduate, and had one required class that she had to take. She had dropped it twice before because she said it was too difficult for her. If she didn't pass, she couldn't take the class again, or maybe for a year, not sure exactly. Well, at the start of the semester at the first mid-term, she failed the first one. At that point, I decided to step in. I made her read every single chapter, completely, and understand most of it, before going to class, where the teacher went over everything and she could ask the one or two very incisive and important questions that she honestly didn't understand in the book. I also "made" her do an extra credit paper (meaning I really just put the screws to her to do it, no mercy. For her own good - ie not graduating and failing out with one semester to go.) As you might expect, she got perfect scores on her next two mid-term tests, and her report she also had an A+. Reading to understand and working hard at it, you will understand. And reading it before each class, in order to ask the one or two or four honest questions that you have to fill in the honest few things you just can't understand. And actually, with the internet, for almost all things, you can look up multiple sources on the topic and read them all - because each author has a different perspective and when you see the concept from many different perspectives, you really do understand deeply. I got pretty much all C's, but then started doing this and then got all A's. Plus I leared memory mnemonics - Tony Buzon - for perfect memory. Learning mnemonics required a lot of work, but so worth it I would make it a required topic to teach starting in 1st grade, and every grade after that. Just like everyone should be required to take probability and statistics classes starting in 7th grade to 12th grade. Just those two.

ianai 4y ago

At my undergrad you had to do the homework and attend all the lectures to get a C+/B-. As/Bs were the realm of studying the class beforehand or, preferably, having taken it once before the time.