Deliberate Practice: How Education Fails to Produce Expertise
4th May 2011
There are some good thoughts here, but unfortunately they’re served on a bed of crap.
Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.
And applies only to very narrow, very advanced endeavors, not to the sort of comprehensive synoptic study that constitutes the bulk of education outside of a Ph.D. program (or equivalent).
In the grade-school years, deliberate practice is already hard to find. My strongest memory from fifth-grade mathematics is pages and pages of tedious three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication problems. Day after day! It is, alas, the kind of rote practice that I have done for chess: simply playing lots of games.
And, unless you’re a child prodigy, it’s out of place. Three-digit multiplication problems may be tedious, but they certainly impart an ability to do multiplication problems quickly and easily.
In college as in grade school, where is the time for deliberate practice?
Perhaps during the times when lesser lights are doing keggers and mixers. Most college students have sufficient free time to do a deep dive into any particular subject found particularly attractive. They just don’t do it. That’s not the fault of the education system as a system, except insofar as it fails to select for motivation in addition to intelligence.
May 4th, 2011 at 19:48
“In college as in grade school, where is the time for deliberate practice?”
I recall the computer centers being deserted during football games.
May 5th, 2011 at 11:57
I hate to be the one to point out that many of those folks in the fraternities and sororities that spent college time as one giant kegger often end up making a LOT more money than those of us poor shmucks that spent nights and weekends in the laboratory.
Yes, it’s definitely easier to get a job if Daddy owns the company. But the world also operates on a “who-you-know not what-you-know” basis. Bosses hire people they like (which is nearly always people just like the boss.) What you learn outside of class during that part of your life has profound influence on your future.
Universities are not staffed with people interested in sending well-prepared young people out into the world. That only happens in movies (and not even in movies these days.) Chemistry classes are geared towards students who want to pursue post-grad degrees. Laboratory work (which pretty obviously is what chemists DO) is fading into oblivion.
When I took calculus (yeah, it was a new idea back then), the math dept. used a book written by Xerox that was 100% math theory. By the time I graduated, the engineering, physics, and chemistry depts. had forced the math folks to switch to a book that had actual appliation of calculus in it. Grades among those non-math majors went up and students began to understand the application to their own discipline. (I know this because I took calc. so many times people thought I WAS a math major.) You can read all the books on swimming that you want, but you can’t learn to swim until you get into the damned pool.
May 5th, 2011 at 12:29
I’ve gotten a D in calculus four times: once in an undergraduate Math course, once in an undergraduate Economics course, once in a graduate Computer Science course, and once in a graduate Business course.
Still don’t know how the damned stuff works. Can’t say that I’ve missed it, either.
May 5th, 2011 at 13:25
I’m sure somebody finds calculus useful. I never have. The sum total of what I remember is: The integral of 1/cabin dcabin equals log cabin. I understand math majors find that hilarious. Happily, they rarely breed.