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> (8) Counterintuitive: If you get completely stuck, move on! Learning often happens in non-linear ways. If you hit an insurmountable roadblock, just keep going. When you return in a few days/weeks, things will almost certainly be clearer. This is something our education system does a poor job at. My observation from watching a 3.5-year-old all the time is that bootstrapping most skills (e.g. riding a 2-wheeled scooter, solving simple logic puzzles, drawing, cutting with scissors, building structures out of construction toys) does not require frequent or extensive practice per se, but only practice spaced out in time, combined with a positive emotional outlook. The student can try something with limited success for a little while (maybe 15–30 minutes), go away for a few weeks, come try again and fail again, go away for another few weeks, etc., and after a few months there are sudden leaps in ability as the brain has apparently been churning away at the problem in the background without any obvious deliberate effort in between. I think we should be organizing education to expose concepts and tools early before people are “ready”, but not putting any particular pressure on repeated failure/struggle, and then trying again intermittently. Instead we try to organize instruction so that each idea, tool, or method is taught once, with students encountering something new for the first time and being expected to understand it through short-term brute effort and punished if they fail, and then often a concept or idea is subsequently left aside and not revisited. |
Very true, very true. But I have to give grades.
Sure there are things you can do, like quizzes they take as many times as they want and where you only take the final value. But then people don't complete the work. I can't pass them along to Calc II without knowing 70% of Calc I.
It's a tough question in psychology. I had hoped tech would help with it, but I've not had luck in that direction.