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> We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner. I he

> We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner. I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. We can use your example of a child learning their first language. They will really understand it. But people are famously, hilariously terrible at teaching their native tongue. We know how to conjugate, and how to use verbs and adverbs and all the rest. But it’s all intuitive - we have no symbolic understanding of it. If that’s the case, we can’t explain it in words. Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase. You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. I believe a lot of real learning is actually like that. When I taught programming, I think I was a frustrating teacher. My students would ask things like “what’s the best way to structure this program?” And I would say “I don’t know. Let’s brainstorm a few ways then you should pick at least one and try writing it like that. Figure it out in code.” I think you become great at programming by licking all the programs you can find. Same with music and art and languages (go have conversations with native speakers). There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things.

azeirah 2y ago
Yes. Tacit knowledge is hard to teach.
- josephg 2y ago
  Right. And, I think, real expertise in any subject is choc full of tacit knowledge. Even - and especially - in areas where we have good symbolic representations. (Like music, math, programming and languages.)
  - thanksgiving 2y ago
    The problem with English is I don't actually know the rules. Something just feels "off" sometimes when someone makes grammatical mistakes. I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head. For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.
    - mplewis 2y ago
      Schools still teach multiplication tables to this day. They remain useful in a myriad of everyday situations.
    - Enk1du 2y ago
      I think this is a function of hours of practice. I remember the point when I started hearing the silent "h" in Spanish and also when I stopped understanding what native speakers were saying after 3 months because I'd progressed beyond the level where they felt they had to slow their speech down for me. Lots of plateaus in the learning curve.
edanm 2y ago
> Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase. You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.
- ralferoo 2y ago
  > [H]ow would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc. That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses. I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
All those really learning a foreign language get to the point, where they "chug it" and jump into the deep end, surrounding themselves with native speakers and going to that learning by context mode. Its the toughest phase, but works.
indigoabstract 2y ago
I quite liked your licking metaphor/symbolism. In fact, if I find out that something tastes good after licking it, I'll go even further. I swallow it. Ha ha. My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore. So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on. Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?
matwood 2y ago
> There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things. There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly. In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO. Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  Show me wax on wax off. Show me long stroke up and down. You come tomorrow same time. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=videos&ia=videos https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=v...
- zhengyi13 2y ago
  I appreciate the martial arts context. I share it, albeit in a different art. For our part, we spend varying amounts of time talking about concept/principle pieces of the puzzle, and demoing/drilling very specific techniques. We need (we think) both. Over time, the regular drilling makes recognition of context a great deal faster, and the conceptual pieces make improv at that point start to look creative or magical, but it's not - it's just all that drilling, and familiarity, and interconnected understanding in gestalt that enables "creativity".
darby_nine 2y ago
> I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship. It's just not compatible with the educational institutions people actually pay for. > I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. This is not contradictory. If your idea of teaching is just lecturing at people and occasionally verifying specific knowledge, obviously they're not going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.
- Jensson 2y ago
  > No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship Apprenticeship is hard, there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice, if it was easy people wouldn't be so picky who they want to teach.
  - darby_nine 2y ago
    > there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice Well, they're now only offered through unions, too. I suspect there's a great demand for such opportunities.
nickburns 2y ago
Love this metaphor. To truly learn we must have a lick for ourselves, pun not intended.
spacebacon 2y ago
Kinesthetic learners know exactly what you are talking about. Others may have no clue. Just a moment ago I identified which pill bottle I needed to open by shaking it. The sound prompted an image of the pill shape and density. This interconnectedness of sign systems and our human ability to read them can truly emerge in brilliant every day ways. I agree nothing replaces experience, especially for kinesthetic learners.

azeirah 2y ago

Yes. Tacit knowledge is hard to teach.

josephg 2y ago
Right. And, I think, real expertise in any subject is choc full of tacit knowledge. Even - and especially - in areas where we have good symbolic representations. (Like music, math, programming and languages.)
- thanksgiving 2y ago
  The problem with English is I don't actually know the rules. Something just feels "off" sometimes when someone makes grammatical mistakes. I doubt I will ever gain this feeling (for lack of a better word) with another language. I mean how could I? Everything sounds weird and "off" when you're a beginner, right? For example: el bano, el agua, la naranja, la sillas. You're constantly suppressing warning signs flashing in your head. For example, I remember being forced to memorize the multiplication tables. I doubt we do that in schools anymore. I feel like all that time could have been better spent learning something else.
  - mplewis 2y ago
    Schools still teach multiplication tables to this day. They remain useful in a myriad of everyday situations.
  - Enk1du 2y ago
    I think this is a function of hours of practice. I remember the point when I started hearing the silent "h" in Spanish and also when I stopped understanding what native speakers were saying after 3 months because I'd progressed beyond the level where they felt they had to slow their speech down for me. Lots of plateaus in the learning curve.

edanm 2y ago

> Here’s a weird fact: if you look around the room you’re in now, I bet you know what it would feel like on your tongue to lick everything you see. We probably learned that in the “put everything in your mouth” baby phase. You are an expert. But if you wanted to, how would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. This is such a weird and amazing analogy. Thank you for sharing it! I don't know if I've ever heard this concept explained in quite this way before.

ralferoo 2y ago
> [H]ow would you teach that? I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. Actually, I don't agree with that. If I look around the room I'm in now, there are a LOT of different objects, and I can imagine what they'd feel like on my tongue, even though I've never physically licked the vast majority of those types of objects. To give a couple of examples: a partly used candle, the "lighting" side of a matchbox, guitar strings, lightbulbs, new bike inner tube. The reason I can imagine how they would feel, despite never having actually licked them, is that in our early years we're just exploring the world and building a mental model. We stop licking everything quite early when we figure out the class of things that's generally food, but by that point we've learned how to correlate the sense of feelings we get from our tongue with the sense of feelings we get from our fingers, because we also touch all those items a lot with our fingers. With enough examples, we become pretty good at pattern matching across senses, so e.g. I can look at an object, from the shadows see that it's bumpy, and have a pretty good idea what it'd feel like if I rubbed it with my fingertips or even licked it, or if it's glass, plastic, metal, fabric, I'd know it'd produce different feelings ranging from differences in friction, thermal conductivity, etc. That's quite a lot of text, but the TLDR is that we don't need to lick everything to have a pretty good idea of how it'd feel on the tongue, just enough to have a general idea of the properties of different classes of materials. Given that most babies stop licking/chewing everything before they've reached nursery age, it's clear that for objects we encounter in later life it's not the licking per-se that matters for this "skill", but whether we've learned to associate the senses. I guess taste is a bit different, but my default would just be to assume that most objects are tasteless unless they also have an odour.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

All those really learning a foreign language get to the point, where they "chug it" and jump into the deep end, surrounding themselves with native speakers and going to that learning by context mode. Its the toughest phase, but works.

indigoabstract 2y ago

I quite liked your licking metaphor/symbolism. In fact, if I find out that something tastes good after licking it, I'll go even further. I swallow it. Ha ha. My intuition is that creativity is a more of a feeling one has, rather than the result of some teaching method or cultural background. It seems very closely related to one's interests and also the novelty effect. Just think about the first time you experienced something, like a great song or your first love. The mind is just bubbling with thoughts. How can that feeling be experienced again with the same object like it was the first time? It can't. It's never the same as the first time. Even if we can mentally forget, the subconscious somehow remembers it's had that experience, so it isn't fresh anymore. So, yes, you need to make connections between existing things to come up with something new, but once the fascination with a thing dissipates and it becomes familiar, any further creativity in that area quickly dies off. Our interest just moves on. Perhaps the really creative people are just the ones who have this ability to see familiar things with ever fresh eyes?

matwood 2y ago

> There is only so much the best teacher can teach. Sometimes you just have to walk around licking things. There's being taught and then there's exploring and practice. It's the exploring and practice that is often missing today, IMO because we all want everything to happen so quickly. In my sport of choice, jiujitsu, there's been a shift happening in teaching. Traditionally the teacher would show a move or two then have the class drill the move. The shift now is more conceptual where the teacher might say the goal is get chest to chest and then have the students operate at 20% figuring it out on their own. While there are some pretty vocal camps on both sides, I think having both methods is the best to learn from. Being taught a solution to a problem a student discovered on their own during discovery is when learning really takes hold IMO. Finally, the best way to really learn that I have found is to teach something.

ahazred8ta 2y ago
Show me wax on wax off. Show me long stroke up and down. You come tomorrow same time. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=videos&ia=videos https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22show+me+wax+on+wax+off%22&iax=v...
zhengyi13 2y ago
I appreciate the martial arts context. I share it, albeit in a different art. For our part, we spend varying amounts of time talking about concept/principle pieces of the puzzle, and demoing/drilling very specific techniques. We need (we think) both. Over time, the regular drilling makes recognition of context a great deal faster, and the conceptual pieces make improv at that point start to look creative or magical, but it's not - it's just all that drilling, and familiarity, and interconnected understanding in gestalt that enables "creativity".

darby_nine 2y ago

> I hear you; but teaching deep expertise is really hard. No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship. It's just not compatible with the educational institutions people actually pay for. > I think the learner would just have to go lick a lot of things for themself. This is not contradictory. If your idea of teaching is just lecturing at people and occasionally verifying specific knowledge, obviously they're not going to learn very much. Your job as a teacher is to facilitate a growth curve of increasingly more difficult and unwieldy problems to solve.

Jensson 2y ago
> No it's not; this is the point of apprenticeship Apprenticeship is hard, there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice, if it was easy people wouldn't be so picky who they want to teach.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  > there is a reason people don't accept just any apprentice Well, they're now only offered through unions, too. I suspect there's a great demand for such opportunities.

nickburns 2y ago

Love this metaphor. To truly learn we must have a lick for ourselves, pun not intended.

spacebacon 2y ago

Kinesthetic learners know exactly what you are talking about. Others may have no clue. Just a moment ago I identified which pill bottle I needed to open by shaking it. The sound prompted an image of the pill shape and density. This interconnectedness of sign systems and our human ability to read them can truly emerge in brilliant every day ways. I agree nothing replaces experience, especially for kinesthetic learners.