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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)

#71

Post by varjag »

SilverRed wrote: post #40
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taught math with the drill style. Being forced on a daily basis into repeatedly solving problems you struggle with, trapped with no ability to escape, by people with power over you (eg. parents), having your worth judged based on your ability to solve problems forced upon you, and once you learn a skill your parents find a new weakness to torment you with, is traumatic.

Seems like a pretty poor way to really understand math anyway. If you memorize some formula you may learn how to do a specific problem faster but if you teach kids to understand how the formula was built from first principals, not only can they solve the problem, but they understand how to build the solution from scratch rather than pulling a premade solution from the memory bank. Memorizing solutions isn't useful an…

Right now there are students who have trouble opening up algebraic expressions or forget to cancel negatives in multiplication while doing exercises on advanced concepts. All for lack of practice.

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

#72

Post by thwave »

nefitty wrote: post #10
reikonomusha wrote: post #2

All of this advice is equally true with practicing a musical instrument. You will not get better if you just play songs/pieces fully over and over. You can, and often do, get worse. And it’s hard , because making music is what it’s all about. I don’t know who said this quote originally, but in the piano world, one says “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”

In middle school, my orchestra teacher taught “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.” It’s a lot easier to perfect atomic-level techniques than an entire composition. She also taught us not to “stop and start over” when we made mistakes. I think that is sort of like “don’t try to optimize early, get the code working then refactor later.”

My piano teacher used to say "It's not a video-game, you don't go back to the beginning of the level every time you lose."

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

#73

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

diordiderot wrote: post #62
ipaddr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are combining too many things. Focusing on 20 simple with increasing difficult problems builds visual memory, pattern matching which is lacking with a few compounds problems. The science must be missing some inputs because the current theory is lacking.

"The science is wrong because I disagree" - ipaddr

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 advantage here.

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

#74

Post by harry8 »

diordiderot wrote: post #62
ipaddr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are combining too many things. Focusing on 20 simple with increasing difficult problems builds visual memory, pattern matching which is lacking with a few compounds problems. The science must be missing some inputs because the current theory is lacking.

"The science is wrong because I disagree" - ipaddr

I'm not seeing any research linked. It will have to be pretty convincingly done too because we've seen a metric ship load of issues in psych research of late.

I don't have an opinion on the issue at hand. "Because the science says" With nothing in support makes me really suspicious. It really starts looking like "Because $authority says so you may not question" Which is the opposite of what scientific inquiry is meant to be.

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

#75

Post by nextaccountic »

foxes wrote: post #26
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taught math with the drill style. Being forced on a daily basis into repeatedly solving problems you struggle with, trapped with no ability to escape, by people with power over you (eg. parents), having your worth judged based on your ability to solve problems forced upon you, and once you learn a skill your parents find a new weakness to torment you with, is traumatic.

That is not a problem with the drill style per say but toxic teachers and parents. You can make someone drill without tormenting them for failing. I think doing drills is good if done in a supportive setting, but it is also and should not be the only way to teach.

Do you know any kid that signed up for math drills? It's nearly always imposed by parents or teachers.

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

#76

Post by grecy »

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…

> 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 how to teach".

As you move up the levels, you spend more and more time on pedagogy (teaching other teachers).

Virtually all of it is drills - breaking down a small skill into an exercise or challenge or "do this 100 times before you get to the bottom" - then you "put it all back together" and ride.

I can teach someone in half a day what took me a month to teach myself when I learned with no instruction. Drills are an awesome way to teach & learn

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

#77

Post by dataviz1000 »

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…

Along the same lines, Alfred North Whitehead had a very similar approach to education and learning as a whole saying it is cyclic with one important stage being precision analogous to the idea of practice with a later stage of generalization analogous to the idea of performance.

> Whitehead conceives of the student’s educational process of self-development as an organic and cyclic process in which each cycle consists of three stages: first the stage of romance, then the stage of precision, and finally, the stage of generalization. The first stage is all about “free exploration, initiated by wonder”, the second about the disciplined “acquirement of technique and detailed knowledge”, and the third about “the free application of what has been learned” [0]

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/#PhilEduc

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

#78

Post by eloisius »

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…

Resonates with me too. I'm studying Chinese full-time and the classroom format is extremely drill-heavy. Here's a sentence, now say it this other way, using this new grammar device that we just learned. Here's another, and another, and another. After that we _mostly_ rote memorize characters (mostly, because they do have fragments of meaning that you can reason about sometimes). We drill on reading and writing characters daily. There is little to no "creative" homework or classroom activities like writing a dialog and acting it out in front of the class, as we did in Spanish class when I was in high school in the States.

At first I was afraid that this learning style would be ineffective. Foreigners here often malign the Taiwanese education system as full of rote memorization, drills, and testing. Yet, the average Taiwanese can put together functional English sentences. A great many of them can speak fluently, even if they've never gone to an English speaking country. That's a lot more than you can say for the Spanish-speaking abilities of non-Hispanic Americans.

Drilling like this let's me build confidence, memory muscle, and trains you to quickly pattern match and respond without giving the logical part of your brain time to get in the way and start translating slowly. It actually works outside the classroom too, I'm repeatedly surprised how natural words or grammar I drilled in class feel when it comes up in daily life. I cannot imagine the American style of incorporating a bunch of other activities into the exercise would help at all.

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

#79

Post by bigbillheck »

varjag wrote: post #71
SilverRed wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a pretty poor way to really understand math anyway. If you memorize some formula you may learn how to do a specific problem faster but if you teach kids to understand how the formula was built from first principals, not only can they solve the problem, but they understand how to build the solution from scratch rather than pulling a premade solution from the memory bank. Memorizing solutions isn't useful an…

Right now there are students who have trouble opening up algebraic expressions or forget to cancel negatives in multiplication while doing exercises on advanced concepts. All for lack of practice.

Those kinds of kids were common 10, 20, 50, 100, and more years ago.

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

#80

Post by Zababa »

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…

When I was in school we usually had at first some drill exercises, and then at the end some bigger problems. I think it was a nice balance, and the problems acted a bit like a reward.
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