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How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

learning-to-see.co.uk

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Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#151

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

SiVal wrote: post #44
interesting22 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very interesting and I'd like to share info about this with my wife, as we're approaching this challenge right now. Do you have any articles or references that you'd personally recommend, in order to learn more?

Do yourself a big favor and read the book "Why Don't Students Like School?" by Prof. Daniel T. Willingham. He's a prof of psych at the University of Virginia specializing in the application of cog sci and neuro sci to K-12 education. I don't know who chose the title, but it doesn't describe the book, which is really a collection of articles about the results of experiments comparing various learning & teaching techni…

Huge upvotes for this. The book isn't just about learning, it's about how our minds really work - as opposed to how we think they work.

It's as useful for insights into practical intelligence as it is for theory-of-teaching.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#152

Post by ChoGGi »

extrememacaroni wrote: post #108
Jakob wrote: post #16

> Repeatedly doing it right I have a funny story about that: When my sister struggled with Math at school, I let her solve equations she struggled with. Unbeknownst to her, every test equation I gave her was identical to the previous one, but she didn’t notice because she focussed only on solving it. After repeating this more than five times, she was astonished that all results were equal. Between the 5th to 10th tim…

The sister's name? Albert Einstein.

*Alberta

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#153

Post by natmaka »

blindmute wrote: post #140
natmaka wrote: post #49

This is not generic, it is not adequate for all disciplines. Painting establishes a relation between the painter and static entities (subject, colors...). They interact in many ways, however the painter is the main 'motor' and 'will'. Basketball is different because a player interacts with his teammates and opponents, he isn't the sole will at play. However I can see how experience may lead a coach to reckon that som…

The person who drills 90% of the time and spars 10% will pretty much always beat the reverse person. Sparring is for practicing skills under real conditions. If you don't have those skills, there's nothing to practice in the ring other than flailing about and getting hit.

> The person who drills 90% of the time and spars 10% will pretty much always beat the reverse person

IMO this is true for beginners, then more and more the other way around.

> Sparring is for practicing skills under real conditions. If you don't have those skills, there's nothing to practice

I agree, and wrote "sparring becomes more and more determinant as technical flaws become more rare".

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#154

Post by gotorazor »

doix wrote: post #88
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not the only one, I see the same. Kids without math drills have problems in storing crucial bits of information in long-term memory and consequently fare worse at solving simple arithmetic problems than myself when I was much younger. I'm not talking about complex things but basic arithmetic, like multiplying digits, adding fractions or, more importantly, dealing with ratios. Drills give you a considerable a…

I have another peice of anecdata with my parents/grandparents. They grew up in the USSR and went through school there, drilling (according to them) was extremely common. They can still remember some peoms verbatim over 70 years later (in my grandfathers case). And they still remember/understand pretty much all the math they were taught. When I was doing my Advanced Highers (final exams in Scotland) I was asking my pa…

I had a bit of schooling in that kind of educational system (Asia) before continuing schooling in North America. I'd say that you there is no free lunch. You're always giving up something for something else.

I had a job 10 years ago doing in-person training at a company trying to digitize their paper-based office for the first time. They were in a commodity distribution business, so while the math isn't hard, there is a lot of day-to-day arithmetic (conversion between unit of measure and price/unit vs total price) for all the employees from the warehouse guy to the sales staff.

The system introduced a change in their workflow. Before in their old manual paper system, people just kind of put things on a truck and figure out later how much got shipped and how much to invoice a customer. The whole can be very hand-wavy. There was no live inventory system either.

Digitization meant that sales have to write sales orders that had precise units to be sold. Based on inventory, they know how much they will actually ship and they know that down to the dollar. Everybody suddenly had to start being aware of the math involved in their work.

It was kind of funny to see a bunch of blue-collar, ex-con, high school dropouts learning faster than all the college-education office workers. The college-educated guys were too drill-orientated and approached the work like the math worksheets that everybody is talking about. The ex-cons had a working relationship with the numbers on the screen and the things that are hanging off their forklifts. Many of the white-collar clerks had been getting by memorizing formulas. They had no idea what any of those formulas mean.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#155

Post by blindmute »

brudgers wrote: post #149
blindmute wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is however skill and technique that in large part makes someone a good artist. Like it or not, art is a physically skilled medium.

There is no such thing as good and bad artists. That’s what makes the decision terrifying.

There definitely is such thing, and claiming otherwise is a weird, very recent trend.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#156

Post by blindmute »

natmaka wrote: post #153
blindmute wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who drills 90% of the time and spars 10% will pretty much always beat the reverse person. Sparring is for practicing skills under real conditions. If you don't have those skills, there's nothing to practice in the ring other than flailing about and getting hit.

> The person who drills 90% of the time and spars 10% will pretty much always beat the reverse person IMO this is true for beginners, then more and more the other way around. > Sparring is for practicing skills under real conditions. If you don't have those skills, there's nothing to practice I agree, and wrote "sparring becomes more and more determinant as technical flaws become more rare".

Kind of true, but for pros, sparring is also a drill. Normally a sparring session focuses on a specific thing they'd like to work on, because they've mastered everything they can outside of the ring. They aren't doing a full "performance" during sparring.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#157

Post by kebman »

kiba wrote: post #22
TrispusAttucks wrote: post #5

> But drill isn’t popular. It’s widely seen as boring. Worse, there’s a body of opinion, especially in education, that considers it an ineffective way to practice. That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills. This resonated with me as I watch my kids go through school. Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and…

Math used to be taught with more drill style. Now with common core every single problem is an epic quest of 10 frames and double pluses. It seems so ridiculous. I'd rather them crush a worksheet of 20 problems that practices a single skill then 2 problems that try to include everything from reading to drawing just for a simple subtraction problem. The problem with these 20 problems of basically the same identical cha…

> You and I may prefer 20 problems that practice straight subtraction, but that's not what the science says is actually the most effective learning strategy.

Hi, I'm an pedagogue and a licensed teacher. Another way to phrase that, is that humans tend to find repetitive tasks overwhelming and boring. Got a load of dishes you have to do? I bet most people feel right at home in that gnawing urge to postpone that mundane and monotonous task. I mean how many times haven't you sat there with a really dull chore and started daydreaming until someone snapped you out of it?

The fact is, humans need variety, but more importantly we need a sense of agency. You kinda lose that when you're forced to do something repetitive over and over, and so naturally it's not a very effective way to learn or teach.

If you're faced with repeating something 20 times, even with slight variations; first off it's overwhelming, and second if you feel that it's forced on you, then you lose agency. In other words, you're no longer the owner of the task. In turn that means you're no longer in control, so why would you slave away for that "evil" tutor over there? This is why repetition isn't very effective pedagogically speaking, because worst case it can even create antipathy towards you or the task you're trying to teach.

On the other hand, it's exactly repeating something over and over that makes you master it, though... But how can you master a thing when it's too bloody boring to learn in the first place? Enter motivational strategies! And tactics to heighten morale.

This is explains why you may prefer solving 20 problems that practice straight subtraction, because you're already motivated for it, and then it's easy. But when you're dealing with an entire class of pupils, you have to make sure as many of them as possible feel the same way about those tasks, or they'll fall behind. And so, at the most basic level, teachers need to vary their approach to a topic in order to effectively teach it. This means finding new ways, new angles, to look at a problem, and make sure you get some variety in between, so the thing doesn't become boring. Meanwhile, if you already know that your pupils are very motivated, you can get away with more straight repetition.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#158

Post by brudgers »

blindmute wrote: post #155
brudgers wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as good and bad artists. That’s what makes the decision terrifying.

There definitely is such thing, and claiming otherwise is a weird, very recent trend.

Van Gogh is why there aren’t. There are establishment artists and folk artists and lots of oblique trajectories off that axis but that’s not good and bad.

Or as Harry Truman opined. “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentotte.”

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#159

Post by nobody_nothing »

yesenadam wrote: post #11

I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art. Actually, I like them more than his paintings, a lot more. Strange article, as if he didn't notice the black and white works are art too.[0] He never stopped practising art, making art. [0] Well, not so strange in this world where ink drawings generally/often/usually/popularly aren't considered Art in the…

> I don't think those pictures are "drill, not scrimmage", in that they are themselves perfectly good works of art.

I agree that they're nice, but the author's ultimate desire was to make paintings, not ink drawings, and therein lies the distinction between drill and scrimmage (I think). For him, the ink drawings acted as drills in service of the desired ultimate product (the paintings).

For someone trying to get better at ink drawings, on the other hand, those ink drawings would count as scrimmage -- and I imagine the author would argue they should drill the sub-skills that make a great ink drawer (pen work, composition, perspective, shading, etc) separately from the ink drawings themselves.

The artifacts produced by those drills may be beautiful, but they're still "drills" because they represent only a subset of the skills the author was ultimately after.

Re: How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)

#160

Post by grecy »

smw wrote: post #124
grecy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But drill isn’t popular. It’s widely seen as boring. Worse, there’s a body of opinion, especially in education, that considers it an ineffective way to practice. That’s a shame, because it’s the most effective way to build your skills. When you sign up to become a snowboard instructor in Canada they basically say "You should already be able to snowboard. We're not going to teach you that. We're going to teach you h…

Any chance you know of a decent video showing how to teach someone to snowboard? (or ski?) I'd love to understand the best way to do that.

I've never seen a video that actually lays it out.

The course to be a level 1 instructor (the lowest level) is three days intensive.

Level 2 is four days.

Level 3 is a five day course, plus separate two day exams (on and off snow).

Level 4 (highest level).. well, I'm not there yet, it takes most people three years to do all the training and pass all the tests.

For virtually everyone you have to snowboard/ski full time (100+ day seasons) working on your technique and teaching at least every day for about ten years to pass level four.

The teaching isn't something you can learn from a couple of hour video.

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