When I was young, I read The Richest Man in Babylon, which said to under-spend your income and invest the difference. Lo and behold, I did this and it worked. I got the idea to add a mental compound interest too, so I decided I would sell myself the best hour of the day to improving my own mind, and the world could buy the rest of the time. It sounds selfish, but it worked.
Learn in different locations. Mixing related skills in one study session makes them easier to learn. Spread your study sessions and testing/reviews over time for best retention. Highly-focused immersion is not always better than a more eclectic approach. I think the overarching theme here is that making it easier for yourself isn’t always the wisest thing. If you give the brain some variety it will do remarkable job of pulling things together.
Maybe one of the single best things a person can do for themselves is to shift from their default self-worth goals (seeking to prove self-worth and to avoid proof of worthlessness) to learning goals.
Law school was a word I kept lodged at the back of my mouth, like a cyanide tablet, just in case.
Q:
“How do you remember Amherst? What are the experiences—in and out of the classroom—that shape those memories? Similarly, what aspects of your Amherst education served you best? And what are the things about Amherst that, in hindsight, disappoint you?”
A:
“I don’t know that many would remember me at all… I was cripplingly shy at Amherst. I wasn’t in a fraternity and didn’t go to parties and didn’t have much to do with the life of the College. I had a few very close friends and that was it. I studied all the time. I mean literally all the time…
So ‘the things about Amherst that, in hindsight, disappoint [me]’ are things not about Amherst but about who I was when I was there. I let almost no one know me, and I lost the chance to know and learn from most of my peers. It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.”
— David Foster Wallace interviewed by Amherst magazine
“A tip is likeĶwhat? A little scrap of a map.”
“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” —Stravinsky
At The Public School anyone can propose a course, anyone can sign up for courses, and if there’s enough money to fund it, the course is offered (flowchart). How hard is that? Take a look at the current offerings, or if you have expertise, the classes that need teachers. [via lined & unlined]
A wiki with a list of academic blogs divided by field. I love the category for “Professions and Useful Arts.”
10 Things I Have Learned, Milton Glaser’s life lessons.
While working on a little research paper a couple weeks ago, I came across cloze procedure. A cloze test is used to measure the difficulty of a text. In a cloze test, you take a text and replace every fifth word with a blank space. The reader, who has never seen the passage before, reads it and fills in the blanks. It’s kind of like mad libs, but the goal is to choose the correct words instead of just having fun with it.
What’s cool about cloze tests is what they can tell you about learning. By comparing how well readers complete the passage vs. how well they answer questions given a complete text, you can find where the optimal difficulty is. It turns out that there is an optimal difficulty level if you’re looking to maximize information gain. Right around a 35-40% cloze success rate is best if you’ve got an instructor available when needed, and around 50-60% if you’re learning independently.
You tend to acquire the most information with texts at those particular difficulty levels. You bring enough context and prior knowledge, but just enough to get a handle on the new stuff. What’s crazy, if I can stretch it a bit, is that the most efficient learning takes place when you’re stumbling roughly 40-60% of the time.
So it kind of woke me up to thinking, if the goal is to learn and grow, how can I pick and choose the best experiences? I don’t mean it in a snobby sense—“that is below me”—but in the sense of growth and challenge—“this is difficult and worth it.” If you’ve got perfectionism issues (like I do sometimes), sometimes you get stuck doing things you’re great at, because you’re great and being great feels good. But there’s no growth there. So the cloze thing comes into play. Try something where you know you’ll only be partially successful. See what happens.
NYT article about the Dummies series of books: “We donÄôt use future tense, we donÄôt use passive voice, we donÄôt have long chapters. A 26-page chapter is getting pretty long.” Well, at least check out the cartoon at the head of the article.
–Here’s the story of a guy that deposits a fake check from a scam company–and comes out $95093.35 better. [via grs]
—Photos from a tornado chaser. Supercells, lightning, twisters, even aurora borealis. It’s all there.
—Scientific American weighs in on expertise and experts. It’s not all genetics:
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert–in chess, music and a host of other subjects–sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in [that] kind of effortful study…?
–And the New Yorker reflects on the arguments about that massive project of non-experts [micro-experts?], Wikipedia.
Mark Larson 
