| HN Mirror

Thank you for responding. My experience is different. A friend of mine shared an anecdote of his daughter not differentiating between two of something and three of something. Her grandfather, visiting from far away, is a child psychologist and after a short while with her and the right methods she reliably did so. The methods themselves weren't magic or highly tuned. They were actually a selection from a recipe book of techniques he had developed over decades of experience. It struck me that this must be trainable.

My experience with most things that appear to require holistic knowledge is that techniques do work. It's why education is scalable: you cannot reliably identify hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of modeling learners reliably. Teacher training programs do improve outcomes by training teachers on techniques.

Identifying the right techniques that work across humans is obviously very hard, but we have found quite a few. We know that 'phonics' works better for reading than 'guess the word', as an example.

People do behave mechanically in many ways. The game of basketball is not mechanical, but the training that makes the best players has many mechanical aspects. My wife is an artist and her work isn't mechanical, but gaining mastery over painting has a massive amount of mechanical work. My experience is that almost all things that appear to require some kind of gestalt comprehension have sub-components that can be mechanized.

In any case, The Intentional Teacher mentions quite a few. An obvious one from the first few pages is that children have more complex play in a sufficiently small space which they can fully model. It may seem obvious, but also obvious is the counter-version of "children have more complex play when they have unlimited space and a large number of novel things to work with". But only one of these obvious things is true. Hence, I'm looking for more such "rules of learning" so to speak.