3 ms·

It surely didn't happen spontaneously. It may have in your recollection, but the fact that it took 11 years means that you accumulated 11 years of neuromuscula

It surely didn't happen spontaneously. It may have in your recollection, but the fact that it took 11 years means that you accumulated 11 years of neuromuscular training first.

PaulHoule 4y ago
… and I got that neuromuscular experience despite school, not because of school. I reject the word training here because I think teachers give themselves way too much credit, a lot of what they do is "makework" that wastes time and doesn't develop any real abilities. Homeschoolers find again and again that they can get way above grade level in a fraction of the school day because the school day is mostly about waiting in line, watching the teacher discipline other kids, and such. I did not find art class agonizing the way I found handwriting but my impression then was that there was some small group of kids, maybe 5-10%, mostly girls, who did much better than the rest of us and my belief is those same people do better quality work of that sort than the rest of us now. Some of those activities like art and music are activities that only some people are going to really benefit from. I learned to touch type, I think, because I really wanted to and because I found working with computers to be meaningful. Had I been exposed to music in a way that engaged me I might have gotten something out of it but instead I got endless drilling with the recorder that hurt my hands and nobody told me how to reliably make more than three notes, something I figured out only decades later after I’d gotten a PhD in nonlinear mechanics enough to understand the sound generation process. What I know about physical training is that pain (for the most part: the “burn” in weight training is helpful but twinges of pain from your tendons aren’t) is the enemy of progress and that all you get from painful training is no progress, more pain and muscular inhibition. Worse, the experience of pain causes you to get better at feeling pain. Time and time again I learned the only way to make progress was to eliminate the pain first, once I did that I’d go from years of no progress to rapid progress from day to day. Who knows how many cases of chronic pain today date back to kids in school being told to disregard pain and soldier onward through unproductive and wasteful activities?

It surely didn't happen spontaneously. It may have in your recollection, but the fact that it took 11 years means that you accumulated 11 years of neuromuscular training first.

PaulHoule 4y ago

… and I got that neuromuscular experience despite school, not because of school. I reject the word training here because I think teachers give themselves way too much credit, a lot of what they do is "makework" that wastes time and doesn't develop any real abilities. Homeschoolers find again and again that they can get way above grade level in a fraction of the school day because the school day is mostly about waiting in line, watching the teacher discipline other kids, and such. I did not find art class agonizing the way I found handwriting but my impression then was that there was some small group of kids, maybe 5-10%, mostly girls, who did much better than the rest of us and my belief is those same people do better quality work of that sort than the rest of us now. Some of those activities like art and music are activities that only some people are going to really benefit from. I learned to touch type, I think, because I really wanted to and because I found working with computers to be meaningful. Had I been exposed to music in a way that engaged me I might have gotten something out of it but instead I got endless drilling with the recorder that hurt my hands and nobody told me how to reliably make more than three notes, something I figured out only decades later after I’d gotten a PhD in nonlinear mechanics enough to understand the sound generation process. What I know about physical training is that pain (for the most part: the “burn” in weight training is helpful but twinges of pain from your tendons aren’t) is the enemy of progress and that all you get from painful training is no progress, more pain and muscular inhibition. Worse, the experience of pain causes you to get better at feeling pain. Time and time again I learned the only way to make progress was to eliminate the pain first, once I did that I’d go from years of no progress to rapid progress from day to day. Who knows how many cases of chronic pain today date back to kids in school being told to disregard pain and soldier onward through unproductive and wasteful activities?