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When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook. It’s no

When I studied Physics, I could sometimes take hours to digest a single page of a textbook or my lecture notes - providing that it was a good textbook. It’s not enough to just understand what is written. You have to understand why it is like described. Why it can’t be different - or could it? You need to build an intuition for both the physics and the math describing it. You have to push until it clicks. It’s hard work.

chongli 3y ago
Yes. This is the same for both math and programming. These skills take a lot of practice to develop. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you won’t learn how to do it if all you do is read the book. What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”
- cinntaile 3y ago
  The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    > most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems. Maybe that's the difference between people who are good at it and people who aren't. I found solving math problems (the ones you get in a practice course at a university) hugely rewarding. Finally figuring it out was so satisfying. Coincidentally, my endeavors playing an instrument were never particularly fruitful.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    >The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else. Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.
      - Tainnor 3y ago
        I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent. I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.
        beebeepka 3y ago
        Oh, understood the main point just fine. You are not wrong. Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.
- palata 3y ago
  To be fair, the "you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it" hides a very complex process. Some people "practice" by trying to play the same thing over and over, and it is equivalent to "hearing" vs "listening". Learning how to play an instrument (and also a particular piece of music) is a very complex process. Just like you need to learn the skills to "learn from a book", you need to learn the skills to "practice an instrument".
- Asraelite 3y ago
  I agree with your point but I think playing a musical instrument is a bad analogy because of one fundamental difference: In most intellectual fields, you can take your sweet time to remember what you learned so long as you remember it eventually. Music requires practice to recall everything in real time.
andai 3y ago
When learning new programming concepts, I would often have to learn them 5 or 10 times before they clicked. Once they clicked, they seemed completely obvious, and I couldn't imagine what it's like to not understand it. Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is trivial. He then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is indeed trivial.
- wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
  I used to require this, but after having spent many years programming this stopped being the case. I've reached the point where i can see a new abstraction and usually immediatly understand it, regardless of language.
  - MaxBarraclough 3y ago
    Has your career taken you across many different programming paradigms? A C programmer with no experience in concatenative or, especially, functional languages will have little chance of understanding code written in Forth or Haskell. They will have to start at the bottom of the learning curve. The differences between languages aren't just skin-deep. Same goes for the design patterns in those languages. Haskell's applicatives have no analog in C, for instance.
    - dehrmann 3y ago
      > Forth or Haskell You're not wrong, but those don't crack the top-10 of in-demand languages. Enough functional paradigms have also crept into more popular languages that you wouldn't be completely lost.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I remember this having been my experience with teaching myself to code as a kid. All I remember is initial endless frustration from having to re-read tutorials and documentation and still not understanding anything. Then at some point I can't remember, everything clicked into place and I can't understand why I didn't understand it before. Once I had those basics down, I haven't had that kind of struggle. I went through a similar phase with math, struggled with basic algebra for years, then at some point it all clicked into place and I unintentionally ended up skipping all high school algebra to get to early calculus. It makes it really hard when helping other people through those early concepts (like pointers), because "keep working and at some point it'll just click for you" isn't very convincing.
readingnews 3y ago
This is the "problem" today that I see in the classroom (I used to teach CS until recently)... learners today do not want to dedicate the time it takes to truly understand. Not all of them, but a LOT of them have the opinion that they just need to get through this damn algorithms class, get the damn piece of paper (diploma) so they can go out and start a job doing "real" programming. Those students, they do not get FAANG jobs, or make big money. The few that want to understand are much more like the articles description, and they end up five years on far ahead of their peers at work. Just my $0.02.
- watwut 3y ago
  I remember having schoolmates like that 20 years ago.
justanotherjoe 3y ago
I wish they'd always explain 'the initial seed' first. What was the initial thought or idea, that, when pursued and expanded on, resulted in the concept that im trying to learn right now? That sort of initial seed would give me so much information...
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
I simply can’t read the text book, at least without context. Doing the problem sets over and over again works better for me. Practice is the key, it might make sense to unsuccessfully attempt the problems before ready the chapter, since you would have more context for readying.
AlexAndScripts 3y ago
I find it beneficial to just keep asking why. Sure, the answer is sometimes "because universe", but asking why (not just how) over and over again helps me build my mental model. On that topic... Does anyone have any clue how and why magnetism works? I have a A Level Physics test next week :)
goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
math requires something different than memory, it requires understanding and fluency in its variety of symbolic languages, which can only built with intellectually engaged work.
- pas 3y ago
  math requires an absurd amount of memorized techniques/patterns ... maybe that's what you mean by fluency? of course these are rarely static (after all one can learn proofs of theorems without being able to solve any problem), hence the need for the "muscle memory" of how to apply these techniques to the particular patterns.
portpecos 3y ago
If someone were to create an animation of that physics page you described, do you think it might have shortened the time spent to digest that concept?
- Balgair 3y ago
  I never really got the difference between the dot and cross products until many years after graduation. And then I only got it because I managed to stumble upon a good video with somewhat decent animations. Like, 2-D, sure, seems easy enough. But once you go to 4-D, things get really hard to grok. Passionate science educators online have really filled in a lot of my education.

chongli 3y ago

Yes. This is the same for both math and programming. These skills take a lot of practice to develop. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you won’t learn how to do it if all you do is read the book. What’s strange to me is how people seem to resist this fact. Like it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it. But for math and physics at least they seem to think it’s somehow different? That they ought to be able to solve the problems just by picking up a pencil? And when they don’t get a decent grade on the exam they look over at the person who got 100 and say “that’s why! I can’t do it because I’m not a genius like they are!”

cinntaile 3y ago
The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not. The reward is built-in. This is a bit harder for maths/physics once you're past the trivial stuff and most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  > most people don't find it rewarding to solve physics/maths problems. Maybe that's the difference between people who are good at it and people who aren't. I found solving math problems (the ones you get in a practice course at a university) hugely rewarding. Finally figuring it out was so satisfying. Coincidentally, my endeavors playing an instrument were never particularly fruitful.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  >The feedback is a lot faster when playing an instrument, you hear if it sounds good or not The feedback is only fast if you're already skilled. It's pretty common for new students to have no proper sense of what sounds good (particularly since it's familiar to them), such that they struggle to figure out what they need to improve. Similar to digital artists flipping the image often to make it easier to identify issues by making the image somewhat unfamiliar to them, forcing their brain to actually look at the image rather than just using its previous idealized mental representation of what the image looked like.
beebeepka 3y ago
Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else. Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.
    - Tainnor 3y ago
      I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent. I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        Oh, understood the main point just fine. You are not wrong. Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.
palata 3y ago
To be fair, the "you need to practice an instrument to be able to play music on it" hides a very complex process. Some people "practice" by trying to play the same thing over and over, and it is equivalent to "hearing" vs "listening". Learning how to play an instrument (and also a particular piece of music) is a very complex process. Just like you need to learn the skills to "learn from a book", you need to learn the skills to "practice an instrument".
Asraelite 3y ago
I agree with your point but I think playing a musical instrument is a bad analogy because of one fundamental difference: In most intellectual fields, you can take your sweet time to remember what you learned so long as you remember it eventually. Music requires practice to recall everything in real time.

andai 3y ago

When learning new programming concepts, I would often have to learn them 5 or 10 times before they clicked. Once they clicked, they seemed completely obvious, and I couldn't imagine what it's like to not understand it. Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is trivial. He then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is indeed trivial.

wegfawefgawefg 3y ago
I used to require this, but after having spent many years programming this stopped being the case. I've reached the point where i can see a new abstraction and usually immediatly understand it, regardless of language.
- MaxBarraclough 3y ago
  Has your career taken you across many different programming paradigms? A C programmer with no experience in concatenative or, especially, functional languages will have little chance of understanding code written in Forth or Haskell. They will have to start at the bottom of the learning curve. The differences between languages aren't just skin-deep. Same goes for the design patterns in those languages. Haskell's applicatives have no analog in C, for instance.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    > Forth or Haskell You're not wrong, but those don't crack the top-10 of in-demand languages. Enough functional paradigms have also crept into more popular languages that you wouldn't be completely lost.
dotnet00 3y ago
I remember this having been my experience with teaching myself to code as a kid. All I remember is initial endless frustration from having to re-read tutorials and documentation and still not understanding anything. Then at some point I can't remember, everything clicked into place and I can't understand why I didn't understand it before. Once I had those basics down, I haven't had that kind of struggle. I went through a similar phase with math, struggled with basic algebra for years, then at some point it all clicked into place and I unintentionally ended up skipping all high school algebra to get to early calculus. It makes it really hard when helping other people through those early concepts (like pointers), because "keep working and at some point it'll just click for you" isn't very convincing.

readingnews 3y ago

This is the "problem" today that I see in the classroom (I used to teach CS until recently)... learners today do not want to dedicate the time it takes to truly understand. Not all of them, but a LOT of them have the opinion that they just need to get through this damn algorithms class, get the damn piece of paper (diploma) so they can go out and start a job doing "real" programming. Those students, they do not get FAANG jobs, or make big money. The few that want to understand are much more like the articles description, and they end up five years on far ahead of their peers at work. Just my $0.02.

watwut 3y ago
I remember having schoolmates like that 20 years ago.

justanotherjoe 3y ago

I wish they'd always explain 'the initial seed' first. What was the initial thought or idea, that, when pursued and expanded on, resulted in the concept that im trying to learn right now? That sort of initial seed would give me so much information...

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

I simply can’t read the text book, at least without context. Doing the problem sets over and over again works better for me. Practice is the key, it might make sense to unsuccessfully attempt the problems before ready the chapter, since you would have more context for readying.

AlexAndScripts 3y ago

I find it beneficial to just keep asking why. Sure, the answer is sometimes "because universe", but asking why (not just how) over and over again helps me build my mental model. On that topic... Does anyone have any clue how and why magnetism works? I have a A Level Physics test next week :)

goeiedaggoeie 3y ago

math requires something different than memory, it requires understanding and fluency in its variety of symbolic languages, which can only built with intellectually engaged work.

pas 3y ago
math requires an absurd amount of memorized techniques/patterns ... maybe that's what you mean by fluency? of course these are rarely static (after all one can learn proofs of theorems without being able to solve any problem), hence the need for the "muscle memory" of how to apply these techniques to the particular patterns.

portpecos 3y ago

If someone were to create an animation of that physics page you described, do you think it might have shortened the time spent to digest that concept?

Balgair 3y ago
I never really got the difference between the dot and cross products until many years after graduation. And then I only got it because I managed to stumble upon a good video with somewhat decent animations. Like, 2-D, sure, seems easy enough. But once you go to 4-D, things get really hard to grok. Passionate science educators online have really filled in a lot of my education.