How to get better at painting without painting anything (2015)
learning-to-see.co.uk
learning-to-see.co.uk
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 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 challenge is that it's actually less effective than intermixing of different kind of problems, at least according to learning science.
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.
You want different kind of problems in a problem set. It shouldn't be straight subtraction, but also additions, word problems, and so forth. This creates a level of desirable difficulty, which embeds knowledge more deeply than something that is very easy to do by rote.
The science must be missing some inputs because the current theory is lacking.
IIRC (see the above, it applies to random comments on the internet) drill work is more effective (but feels less effective to both teachers and students) if it's mixed up with different topics or question types, kind of like how doing a kata is better than doing exactly the same punch 10x (obviously katas are not ideal either, at least not as the only tool).
Really you need a bit of diversity, and IMO two of the big traps to fall into are overly homogenous drill work (which doesn't retain as well as mixed drills, but looks effective because anyone who doesn't eat their crayons can do it without thinking too hard) and one-off problems (do an assignment where you solve a heavily obfuscated problem once, then pretend that it's now something that students actually understand, when they've literally just answered one single question assuming they even did it themselves).
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 parents for help and they could answer all the questions without looking things up.
I looked up the exam paper[0] I sat, I'm pretty sure there's no way I'd get an A again if I sat it right now without studying for it. But I'm pretty sure my parents still woudl.
[0] https://www.advancedhighermaths.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/201...
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.
I am not telling you to do multiplying digit only 1 times. That would be silly. I would be telling you should mix up multiplying digits with other previously learned concepts, say 10 addition and 10 subtraction questions, and the rest can be 80 multiplying digit problems. I don't know the optimal intermixing ratio here, but it shouldn't be a straight 100 multiplying digit problems which all use the same algorithm to solve it.
Drilling and repetition is good, but there's the danger of having illusory mastery because it's already there in short term memory. Your goal is to encode those skills into long term memory.
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.
Do you have any articles or references that you'd personally recommend, in order to learn more?
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 techniques. Only one chapter is about why children, who like learning some things, don't like school.
Willingham publishes in academic journals and in journals for educators, so you can find other writings online. He tries to persuade teachers that so much of what the elite grad schools of education teach is intellectual fashion out of touch with actual cog sci findings, but all he cares about are the science experiments.
It's as useful for insights into practical intelligence as it is for theory-of-teaching.
> 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://ling-academy.com/ It's a bit of a mess. I found that its pretty hard to build a language app.
In the long run usage of a particular user, maybe the app should not highlight words that it knows you have encountered in previous videos many times or if the system knows you have mastered that word -- in case the system is testing user, did not notice if it does.
Btw. Not sure what is the difference between green and black colored words. (Don't know Spanish so hard to guess.)
Also there's some typos at the landing page, at least these: "Activley", "wont be"
Seems like a great concept, good luck :) (I don't find Duolingo that effective either.)
You see, the students who failed at the interleaved problems initially, were rocking it when I had them work through like 3 of these 20-similar problems worksheets before moving on to the 'pedagogically designed' problems.
And epistemically I think it makes a lot of sense to train basics and build upon that.
I think Math education could benefit a lot if we split the subject in two courses, 3h per week on drill (Arithmetics), 2h per week on the beautiful math (can also expose the student to axioms there, functions, mappings, etc, more complex problems and solving that with math, potentially with CAS support). Best separated with different teachers.
Fact is, most high school graduates will find it challenging in their lives to apply the 'rule of three'. During the covid pandemic we have seen that members of the executive branch have no understanding of exponential growth (bad during the pandemic, but I wonder how the fiscal policy is affected by that??).
Maybe we need to rethink mathematical education once again.
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.
It's not about whether it's boring or not when it comes to intermixing versus blocked practice.
It's that intermixing require more thought and thinking rather than just following steps by rote.
One reason this topic is hard to talk about, I think, is that, "what is best for my kid" and "what is the best strategy for a roomful kids from various backgrounds" are often not the same thing; in fact, they can be in direct opposition to one another. Educators think about the latter, naturally, but parents think primarily about the former.
Memorizing solutions isn't useful anymore. We have google to list out formulas. A deep understanding of problem solving is far more important and something you cant trivially search.
Downplaying it to 'dumb ones' is not helpful when they can solve polynomials without much trouble but are getting burned on concepts that should have been drilled down properly in middle school.
They were saying that back in the day as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Johnny_Can%27t_Add
At a low level, you can point out all the patterns that are in multiplication tables, but they won’t be remembered until the student has internalized the facts.
At a higher level, teaching epsilon-delta proofs isn’t a good way to learn calculus. Memorizing the building blocks and the chain rule is.
Same with understanding anything else in life - you don't really understand anything until you get to the point you can, in your head, predict a specific outcome, test it, and be proven correct, repeatedly.
(At some point you may learn to gain robust understanding purely from simulating things in your head, deriving insight from lower-level principles. But this itself is a skill, a hard one, which few people master. It's not something a random kid, or adult, can do.)
If a person's approach to educating their kids is coercive ("jump through our hoops or you'll be working at McDonalds your entire life") or downright abusive ("you're a worthless child to us if you don't meet this grade") then the results can be catastrophic. For every success story, this kind of maltreatment will produce many people who give up on learning altogether or drive themselves headfirst into mental illness. I definitely think history will judge this period as a bit of a dark age in education, the fact that people who've long retired still report exam nightmares says a lot about the completely arbitrary and needless pressure we put our children under.
In my experience being "well-spoken" (ie having an accent that's fairly close to RP) and being quick at picking things up has served me far better than any qualifications I have, both in the tech industry and out of it.
I don't think drill is an effective method for early-stage learning, because you don't have the mental framework to hang the new knowledge off yet.
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
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.
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.
I don't think traditional drilling doesn't work at all, it's just super inefficient and boring.
That said, I also kind of feel that dialogue with other students isn't that useful.
I don't know about English in Taiwan, but if it's similar to Mainland China then then many of them started with learning English when they were 3 or so. The level of English you get from that is rather disappointing.
Not true at all in my experience. I met only a few people there speaking English or French and all where young and most studied in a language department at university. There's surely a big divide along age categories and probably a North/South divide as I sometimes read people on the internet claiming Taiwanese are somewhat good in English, while I haven't seen that at all where I went (mostly Southern part).
That being said I agree with the rest of your post. Anything trying to make learning Chinese fun is actually a waste of time, and rote memorization is extremely effective. In fact, it's one of the most effective way to learn vocabulary (Nation, 2001). I find it very sad that bad methods like Remembering the Kanji are hugely popular when they are in fact a waste of time. The amount of bad content on the internet is staggering. I think the biggest issue is that most people lost the willingness to put efforts in learning, and want everything immediately.
As for learning Chinese, it also helps speakers of Chinese are usually very keen on correcting mistakes and teaching things even when not asked.
Are you talking about this book? https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/learning-vocabulary-in-...
I haven't read the whole book, but quick skimming got me to this part:
> The highest vocabulary test scores were from the small number of learners reporting mnemonic techniques. The most commonly used strategies were effective but not as effective as the lesser used visualisation, mnemonic, oral rote rehearsal and retrieval strategies. Clearly, strategy training in memory-enhancing techniques could have useful effects.
I can't imagine learning Chinese characters without any form of mnemonics.
Username checks out :). Have you learned Chinese? I'm not convinced that my method is the best by a long shot, but I don't use mnemonics. I've tried memorizing other things with tricks like the memory palace, and either I don't know how to do it or my brain is busted, but I've never been able to create a "palace" much less store information I want to remember within it. I recently read about the mnemonic peg system and thought it might be useful if I could use radicals as "pegs." So far I just haven't been able to employ any of these tricks to my advantage.
My memorization routine (about 10 new words per day) is to write down a whole list ~30 words, writing the character and it's pronunciation (I use zhuyin). Sometimes I do this in class while we're going over the chapter's vocab. I set a timer for 5-8 minutes depending on how many new words there are, how "hard" some of them look at first glance, how many have unusual radicals I haven't used frequently, etc. Looking at just the pinyin or zhuyin I try to write them all down before the timer goes off. If I can't write a whole character, I at least try to write down some of the radicals, if nothing at all I just skip it and move on. Afterwards I grade myself and looking at the characters in my textbook again, I write a new list of just the words I couldn't write. I practice writing them several times until I feel like I have the hang of it. Then I test again. Repeat until I can write the whole list. After I can write them all, ideally, I would retest again after some time, sometimes I do. Unfortunately, I usually don't have enough time and I have just barely gotten them memorized before it's time for a chapter test and then a new load of vocab. Fortunately old words get rolled into new chapters and having to write essays and stuff gives me more practice after they've had a while to stew.
If there is some One Easy Trick that I'm missing that would make my routine 10x more efficient, I hope someone can share it, because this routine is very tiresome and time consuming. I have played a bit with visualization, where I would close my eyes and imagine every stroke of a character without actually writing it. It works, but I need a really quiet environment for that.
Yes, and still am. Not really active anymore since I'm busy with other things. I don't read much, but I can read a book, albeit slow and with much difficulty. Writing I do even less, and handwriting I never really did apart from tests and filling in forms. Speaking and listening I do every day. After a while I just decided to not focus really much on handwriting because it easily takes the most effort for something I actually barely use.
I've played a bit with memory palaces for fun and found them to be effective, but really not for Chinese Characters. I mostly used my own flashcards with Anki. I used pictures and tone colored characters to help. That worked fine, but making the flashcards also took a lot of time so it wasn't really perfect either. Having many synonyms also complicates the whole ordeal. But overall spaced repetition really, really helps with managing lots of vocabulary. You can have a deck of several thousands of words without too many issues. If you find words hard to remember it's also OK to just delete them (Anki also helps with this by automatically labeling cards you often fail as leech).
The mnemonics I use are the "build in" ones in the characters, maybe you already do this by yourself and actively learning them won't change too much. Nearly all characters have some meaning and/or pronunciation component hidden in them which can help you remembering them, or guessing their meaning or sound when you first encounter them.
I don't really think about radicals since those are just arbitrarily chosen components used only for paper dictionaries (and who wants to use those in the age of smartphones...). Some random examples of interesting components: 疒, is a character that is not used anymore (I think) but it means disease and if any character has this component you can be very sure it's some kind of disease.
月 is a tricky one. It's moon and it often really doesn't make sense in words until you know that 肉 is often corrupted into 月. The 月 in 脑 doesn't mean moon but meat/flesh.
Some characters change depending on where they appear as components: 水/氵, 人/亻.
I like to use the Outlier Linguistic Dictionary on Pleco for looking up how characters are build up and see if it can help me remembering the character. I find little stories help me to remember words/characters. A character I forgot how to write and just looked up: 虹 (rainbow). It' made of the component snake/insect/worm because the ancient Chinese thought it looked like a snake in the sky. 工 is there for sound because gong/hong sound similar. Or 取 (take/get/fetch), it's literally a hand taking an ear.
I don't think mnemonics is the One Easy Trick that will make your routine 10x more efficient, but depending on how you learn now it could really boost your efficiency. If you're not using any form of spaced repetition yet I think that really could be it.
I use Pleco flashcards to do spaced repetition. Not sure how it compares to Anki, but it takes almost no effort to create new cards, and that’s good for me because I can easily get sucked into fiddling with tools instead of using them.
There are many ways to suck. We tend to think in folksy wisdom: simples rules, simplifications, generalities. Practice makes perfect. 10k hrs. Problem solving. Etc. Often, we bounce back and forward between one such slogan and another.
Folksy wisdom requires folk to be wise. You can't just distil it into a statement and run with that. A great instructor might be extremely focused on drill X or exercise Y. In reality, X or Y outside the greater context is not the same.
The 10k hrs "rule" is a good example. I reckon I'm closing in on 5k hrs of chess. I'm not very good. I could have probably improved more than I would be with just 500 hrs training on a team, with an instructor, game analysis, tactic training, competition, etc. 5k hrs of bullet while on the toilet is not that.
Now... I'm not saying that the book does claim that playing 10k hrs of ultra-casual chess while on the toilet leads to mastery. You need more context. Drill & Scrimmage, in this article's terms. "Deliberate practice" in Anders Ericsson's. Competition in other's terms.
No matter what though, I think that the actual formula is not expressible. There will be a way of sucking while still ostensibly following the formula. You need the subjective human element. A person, training themselves or others who is focused on the goal of improvement, with the methods used as tools.
A lot of canonical examples like sports, art or whatnot us an "art & science" adjacent terminology.
TLDR, you'll also find plenty of example of rampant suckage and plateaus using drill oriented methods of teaching.
this is just not true. blocked practice (i.e. practicing the same task repeatedly) is generally worse for long-term retention than mixed practice strategies where you vary the practice conditions or interleave different tasks in practice
e.g. if you go through 100 problems of 2 digit multiplication, you will probably have worse retention than if you went through 10 of those problems, then 10 division problems, then 5 word problems, then 10 3 digit multiplication problems, and so on, equating practice time
drilling _feels_ like a really effective way to learn because you do better at it and quickly develop muscle memory or mental shortcuts, but your performance on practice tasks is really not a good signal of your actual learning or retention.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275355435_Learning_...
My kids did lots and lots of drill. But no proofs.
I struggled with math until we started to do proofs. Then it came alive for me. I loved sets. My school also used a series of textbooks in which some of the problems had no answer, and you were supposed to write "no answer." Those problems were a special rare treat that motivated me to do all of the problems.
For most kids and their parents, math functions as some sort of diligence / obedience / IQ training that they hope will get them into a better college and job before it is forgotten.
Even the useful side of math -- the stuff supposedly taught in service to the science and engineering courses -- is taught with a computer nowhere in sight. Yet people who use math in those fields, including myself, always do it with the assistance of a computer, whether it's to help avoid dumb mistakes or to automate tasks involving large amounts of numbers. And the physics problems that can really be solved with purely symbolic math are few and far between, and rather contrived. It actually leads students to believe that the formulas are false when applied in the real world.
I don't think teaching computation would harm the handful of students who develop an interest in math as a liberal art. If they want to explore, they will, either on their own or with guidance. There's no reason why they can't be introduced to abstract math, and proofs, along the way.
Freshmen and Sophmore year all math classes had tens or hundreds of problems that get progressively harder and bring out every corner case e.g. take then derivative of x^2 then 2x^2 then x + 2x^2 then sqrt(x) + 2x^2 + 3x^3. Eventually you could derive the most archaic equations
Junior and Senior year Engineering homework is like 2 Epic questions with 10 parts that feed into eachother. I would have learned more and been more confident if they gave like 10-20 starter problems and then one final epic one at the end.
I feel like this is similar to the story of a pottery class having half the class make as many items as possible while the other half had to make just 1 perfect piece. The group that was targeting quantity actually produced better pieces then the group that was targeting 1 perfect piece
edit: typo
This comment has engendered a lot of responses. Some arguing a position on personal experience and others arguing the supposed science of learning. A different and perhaps useful way to look at this is to consider how outcomes differ between large groups of schools around the world following different strategies for teaching math.
The Program for International Student Assessment does world wide testing of 15 year olds in mathematics (and other subjects as well). The evidence suggests that whatever the US is doing isn't working. The USA ranks 25th in 15 year olds' mathematical ability with overall scores far lower that many other countries.
Unfortunately, I can't read Mandarine, Japanese, Korean or Estonian so most of the effective text books (based on the PISA student scores) are inscrutable to me. However, Singapore's students have always scored near the top in math (second place in the most recent tests) and their text books are in available in English.
I used Singapore math books to help my daughter improve her math after her school switched to Everyday Mathematics, a typical US math program developed at the University of Chicago. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't good.
The Singapore Math books are quite small and printed in black in white. They introduce the concepts with diagrams, etc. and have a set of easy introductory exercises to make sure the students understand the concepts. The books then have harder problems using the concepts and include word problems. The focus is on learning and practicing the techniques of mathematics. In Singapore Math, there is rote learning going on; in Everyday Math there is a kind of impressionistic emphasis where alternative approaches are encouraged, unusual methods of computation are introduced, inefficient solutions are treated as just as valuable as better approaches, and calculators replace fluency with basic operations.
I've read the research paper the Everyday Math web site uses to justify the principles underlying the program. It's garbage and not any sort of science of learning. It even cites Knuth's Art of Computer Programming: Searching and Sorting as justification for introducing multiple non-standard ways to perform subtraction, multiplication, and division to elementary school children. This is completely ridiculous.
And that's my caveat for this as advice on painting. If a person doesn't already have a history of painting, by which I mean starting and completing paintings as paintings, no amount of drill is going turn them into a painter. The willingness to execute paintings has to be there.
Or as Harry Truman opined. “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentotte.”
3 things an artist make:
1. Finishing and finishing often. You should not be making the same thing all the time, but you should be consciously iterating in any direction you like as long as you are still finishing. Great painters, writers, musicians, are constantly making stuff, you only see the polished stuff that ends up through the filter.
2. Studying the great works in whatever your chosen field/style/genre. Know the "rules", the normal directions on the map, before you break them and decide on a shortcut or to buck convention all together. All great artists, even the enfant-terrible avant-garde artists, are extremely knowledgeable in art-history in their chosen field and can explain extremely precise opinions on the merits of one artist or movement. Most postures of naiveté are just that: posturing. Great artists know their stuff.
3. Surrounding yourself with other artists. You need people who will look at whatever you finish and tell you about it. Hopefully, these people should be as interested in good art as you, and as well versed or more well versed in art history as you. Engaging in communities of artists will make your imagination and creativity soar.
You absolutely need 1 and 2. You can get by without 3, but you will likely never achieve true greatness without it.
Everything else after that is luck.
1. Start often and finish often; do not be afraid to abandon something that is not working. Learning what is not working will come from starting and finishing more often over time, along with reflecting on the work you have done. This is where the benefits of #3 come into play. A good community will not only praise your work, they will tell when something isn't working or doesn't work.
The wasted hours are the hours that they are not working on the thing. One hundred hours is only a bit more than four days...and if you use both hands, barely more than two.
Once I had that done I could tackle stuff like “telling a story” which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Ask yourself what the shape of a finished larger thing is. How can you break it down into pieces about the same size as doing some of the drills you’re used to? What are the parts of it that require new kinds thinking and working? Make time to do that.
Take examples of stuff you want to be making and break it down. For instance I found it a useful comics-making exercise to take a short story by an artist I liked and write one sentence describing what happens on each page. That got me thinking about how much story could easily fit on one page.
But if you are a painter (or whatever) then don't always be in "performance" mode, because that limits improvement.
I am not a painter but I followed a pure drill approach to teach html/css/javascript to 12 of my operations/monitoring team members (11 males 1 female, aged 24-27) who lost their job during start of Covid.
None of them had any background in programming or engineering, 3 of them dropped out after two weeks.
All those who went through the drill got jobs as developers. 7 as react developers, 1 test automation and 1 script developer.
All I did was ensure the drill and motivate them not to give up. They were all from very poor families so the motivation part was easy - hope of a better life at the end of drill.
The mantra is, don’t fool yourself, type it, clock the hours and don’t miss the meeting.
I showed my grandma (98) a photo on an iPad. Her immediate reaction: “there’s no reason to paint realism anymore”. The method described in this article might work for realism in oils, but please don’t accept it as the exclusive way to create art.
Art is about understanding the tools you’re using to create (for example how paint mixes, moves, dries, interacts with a surface), then choosing which tools to use and how to use those tools to convey an experience to an audience. Art is about experimentation, exploration, communication. Art is about studying & talking with other artists to learn how they work, the processes they use, how they solve problems; sometimes copying them and then extending beyond.
My point of view on this developed as I studied art in high school, through AP art, and then minored in fine art in college alongside my engineering degree. Plus many hours painting with my grandma and my mom.
The method in this article applies universally to any art, music, any creative endeavor, and frankly even non-creative endeavors.
It can be reduced to this: take time to practice, improve, and eventually excel at specific skills/techniques that comprise your craft, with no regard for any sort of big picture during this focused practice.
Everything else makes sense to me, but isn't this a bit narrow? It implies that all art is the search for some higher truth, and that it can only be achieved as a communal effort. This academic, analytical approach would seem to fit your personal art career and that of many artists important to at history. But surely there is still artistic truth in the individual practising and experimenting for themselves, outside any scene or context. There are also examples of people doing this who are considered important to art.
I don’t know who said this quote originally, but in the piano world, one says “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”
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.”
That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.
[1] https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20
This is so true. I learn piano myself and I'm a trackmania gamer for years. Learning a piano piece (some bars or full length for easy pieces) is quite the same as learning a track layout in trackmania. You have to go through the whole, regardless of the speed to see at least where it leads you. And if you just restart after the slightest error, you will perfect just the begin of the track yet you will struggle every time once you reach the unknown parts.
Musicians don't always "make" music - that's not what it's all about. Musicians may only need to "play" music.
With representational painting, the most important thing is to have a good sketch underneath, then have a coherent value design, and finally, have a good color design and brushwork. If you didn't nail the perspective or proportion, everything else is trash. Similarly, if you didn't nail your values, then no amount of color or brushwork will save you.
I think this is a different process, though. My sense is that increased wisdom transfers very well to improvement in go. What is making me better is a better ability to prioritise, make judgments and tradeoffs, and manage risk, learned from the real world. This is nice but orthogonal to the techniques for improvement on a single skill.
During the period I first started playing, I did a little exercise where I looked at the advice people give on how to get stronger. What I found was that while you'll hear all kinds of stuff thrown around, when you look specifically at what the very strongest players (go professionals) say, you get a super consistent answer: (1) do as much tsumego as you can stomach, and (2) play as many teaching games as you can with the strongest players you can find.
This directly translates to drill and scrimmage!
In a weird twist, I often find myself knowing more and being more confident about previous (work related) projects after I'm out of them, once I can look at things with hindsight and think about them. And I realize how much I actually know about the domain, to the point where I think "I should go back to that project now" (even if it wouldn't actually work for me like that).
I think when COVID is over and people really go back to practicing their favourite sport, many will experience this.
So, anyone do code katas and like/recommend them? If so, what does it teach you? Do you do the same problem over and over, or tackle different problems?
When it comes to teaching it, the biggest hurdle is that you need to build a lot of small, unique exercises. This is still drilling, just now focusing on making the techniques flexible to different problems. I use the analogy of drilling technique in martial arts, but you could consider that training with a different partner to understand how the technique works with a new body type. The trick I've found useful is to collect a number of textbooks to review when thinking up practice ideas. If the textbook is good, it typically has "real world" examples modeled with the topic - for example, one I built the other day looked at creating bigrams from a list of words.
There's a SaaS that let's you do this https://typing.io/
Either way, yes, practicing code writing without solving coding problems does help learn CS concepts. I conceptualize it as some of the issues with CS/coding comes from "analysis paralysis" where you don't know what to do and even though you were told "use a loop", you don't really know what that means or are still struggling to know how to implement a loop. Drilling these lower level practices helps reduce that by saying "let's not worry about problem solving for a second, let's just focus on you getting comfortable with implementation". Then, there is less hesitation because the student knows "use a loop" means write out the syntax for the loop, THEN figure out what you want to loop.
And from my own work and Edwards, students enjoy these types of practices. They seem trivial to us experts, but they are appreciated by novices.
Leetcode solutions seem to be regularly "golfed" into being unreadable and intractable. Don't practice that!
At least in my experience, well-defined and functionally isolated coding challenges rarely happen at work, though.
Another skill you'll need to hone is listening to your userbase/business partners and translating what they're saying into actual specifications.
Doing this adequately is a prerequisite to success.
Doing this well (hearing what they need, separating the "need" from the "how", and being imaginative in what a clean implementation would look like) can both reduce what work is needed now, and set up future success to be more likely.
AMEN!
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 times of solving that identical equation, she became very good at it.
Afterwards, I showed her that all equations were identical. She aced the school test the following day.
Albert Einstein.
I could image making an Anki deck of colors and using that to drill color values as this author suggests could be really useful.
> Here’s a few of the things that came off my easel since I got back to painting again:
This might be informative if he showed us some old painting from before he "changed his brain" so we can see the differences. But he didn't, so we are left wondering.
[0] Well, not so strange in this world where ink drawings generally/often/usually/popularly aren't considered Art in the way oil paintings are. Imagine if piano music wasn't considered real music, not like orchestral music!
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.
Understanding requires time to play and explore something. It enables slow but powerful problem solving into new territory.
But fluency requires practice. And it’s benefit is quick and accurate automatic responses, freeing up the brain to tackle novel things much faster.
Together they work really well. and the repetition in obtaining fluency can also push understanding deep into stable memory where it will remain accessible years later.
I have seen a lot of education where only one side was emphasized. When kids are pushed for time, neither side gets done well.
I don’t think anyone learning anything should move on to more difficult tasks until they both really understand and become fluent at the prerequisites.
But that would take education off it’s cohort centered time schedules. That system is so ingrained in most of our non-online education systems.
Many novice artists get too hung up on doing "exercises", because they're easy, straightforward, and comfortable (compared to doing the real thing). They waste a lot of time without improving all that much, because repeating exercises out of context can quickly become mindless, people tend to lose sight of the real purpose (making good drawings/paintings), and instead keep drawing boxes to "practice" perspective or get better at drawing straight lines.
I think what you need is a combination of what he's calling "scrimmage" and "drill".
To develop skills the fastest - try to do the thing that is as close to the specific real thing you want to do as possible. If you want to design characters - spend most of your time designing characters. You won't find a way to grow faster than by doing exactly what you want to get good at.
Then you can analyze your artwork, find the skills you're the weakest at, and deliberately practice them. But still, do it in the context of doing the real thing.
These acrobats were realizing dangerous performances, where mistakes must not happen even when doing the show thousands of times. And also it must have been possible to practice it right on the first time.
My answer to that is imagination, search for the proper mindset, and switching to it.
You have to try to imagine the thinking of someone who can do things naturally.
It's kinda like in "the pretender" TV-show. It's one layer of indirection added to the more traditional "imitate the master" practicing technique.
Some tasks are best handled when you have a specific internal representation.
Often when you start from scratch, you don't have the right one, and through experience, blood and sweat, you refine it until you discover the representation that works well for the task.
But when you have a representation that kind of work but is missing something, you get stuck in plateau which practice (both "scrimmage" and "drill") only reinforce.
For example, with our acrobats, are they visualizing the actions in their head they are about to do ? Do they see themselves in 3D as a first person character, or in third player view ? Are they feeling the movements in their head ? Can they do the movements without doing them ? Can they create mental variations of the movements ? How do they handle the motion blur that our novice eye experience ? How do they evaluate the risks ?
Acrobats often are born into; and people do things without knowing exactly how they do them. So you'll have to practice observation to understand (how, why, when,...) they do what they do.
While practice is still necessary, it becomes a mere reality check for the performances you have mentally imagined doing a thousand times.
I took pole dance classes for a while, for instance, and it was only after a lot of practice that I was allowed to start doing moves where I was upside down and hanging on to the pole with my thighs. And the beginning of that involved just lifting my ass over my head (after a lot of strengthening of my abdominal muscles) and wrapping my legs around the pole, and suffering through the pain of most of my weight suddenly being on two tender little strips of flesh in my inner thighs. Once they toughened up I could start doing more interesting things.
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 some individual ways (types of actions or reactions) are statistically better than other ones, either because their intrinsic rate of success is higher or because they benefit from teamwork, leading him to drill them in order to have them select the best ones and apply them properly. It may create a "team of robots" (sort of!) which may be crushed by an opponent team playing in a deliberately unusual (albeit not absurd) way, established to counter the particular automatic actions and reactions of the "robot team".
Individual sports are different because there is no teamwork. Combat sports are particularly interesting because you need to scrim (spar) not simply to verify the effects of drills but in order to learn what no drill can effectively teach you: a certain mental state, coping with stress, simultaneously integrating many dynamic blurry variables (related to time & space)...
Drill, barely spar and only use it to check what you gained from drills, then hop on a ring against a person who spared properly... and good luck to you (you will need it)!
I did it for about 3 months like this, with maybe, maybe a 30-45 minute spar session per week (and at this time, I was doing 3 trainings a day during week, 2 on saturdays).
Had my first fight around the 3-4 month mark and won it without much difficulty.
I see this now that I am learning padel tennis. Been playing for a year or so, but I hardly do any games, mainly practise/drills with my coach (4 times a week). Maybe 2 games a month. I started in September not even knowing how to play, to surpass most people in my trainings, since the drills make me play in games as I practise, since it was drilled so much, while 95%+ of the people do one movement in practise, then get to a game and change it all, reduce speed, or just hit it wrong because they end up 'practising' more the matches with wrong technique/no correction, vs the folks that repeat the same movement 1000 times with correction. In a few months I may even get my beginners coaching certificate.
As Bruce Lee said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Your first fight matchmaking may have been somewhat imperfect(?), or you are gifted :-)
I'm not an expert but observed that the best way to progress as a fighter, for most, is not by overwhelmingly drilling. Drills are necessary, and may be the main component, however to win bouts sparring becomes more and more determinant as technical flaws become more rare.
AFAIK B. Lee said "A fighter who trains without sparring is like a swimmer who hasn't immersed in the water" and "Remember, actual sparring is the ultimate, and the training is only a means toward this".
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".
Anyone have suggestions for writing drills?
Take a novel, or something shorter, and type it up, thinking with each sentence, each page, why they wrote what they did, and what they left out.
Look into universities and approaches from Professors:
Jordan Peterson’s writing approach is based a lot on drill: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.co...
Umberto Eco’s "How to write a Thesis"
Take a passage from a book you think is written well. For each sentence, ask yourself what, in your own terminology, the sentence is doing - what's the function of the sentence. For example, "a person reacts bodily" or "a decision is made involving time".
Then write your own passage for an entirely different story, wherein each sentence accomplishes the same function as what you encoded from the other passage.
For example, I did this to begin a children's story, taking my template from the first page of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.
THE READER by Bernhard Schlink
When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. As the old year darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't start to improve until the new year...
LULLABYE by P Aaron Mitchell
When the moon first appeared my little Zienna hid from it. The moon waited to see her for about 18 minutes, which is a long time for the moon. The moon felt for her with its beams but she just hummed to herself in the molasses jar. When the moon looked the other way she climbed out...
Maybe the relationship isn't obvious to anyone else, and that's okay. It's still good practice - you force yourself to tell your own story in a cadence that matches (at least to you) that of a strong writer.
When writing a doc, look for similar doc and not just copy their high level structure, but at the paragraph structure in the same way the parent poster has mentioned.
1. Copy something you like. Take a sentence/paragraph/page/scene and just retype it in. This sounds crazy, but pushing the words not only into your brain but back out through your fingers gives your brain a different avenue into them.
2. Object writing. Learned this one from Pat Pattison's writing better lyrics, but most of the techniques are generally applicable. You take an object/idea, and for 5-10 minutes write about it using all 6 senses (the standard five plus motion). The more you do this the more your writing will shift (at least in my experience).
3. Journaling. Morning pages (3 pages at the very start of your day) is a common one for writers, learning to take the filter off and just write. A lot of crap might come out, and you'll just write about the day before or your concerns about the day ahead a lot, but the act of putting the words down will help you shift your writing.
4. This one isn't a drill but I wanted to include it: explore other types of writing. If you are interested in academic writing, try making short stories or poems. Exploring entirely different uses of words will help you build new, because intent shapes the way the brain uses the words, and learning to unlock different pathways can have surprising results.
Drill by frequently publishing work to that audience so you can get feedback and iterate. Build up larger works over time.
You do a thing long enough and it sticks in your head in some surprising ways. Though I wonder how much the constant churn of this year’s hot language and framework gets in the way of that for programmers. I’m glad I went into art instead.
For any given person those algorithms problems might or might not have been the most helpful thing to sink effort into. I know a lot of artists struggle with issues that are best addressed by scrimmage-type practice, not drilling. "It’s the most effective way to build your skills" is totally defensible for specific skills, not overall success. A lot of artists misidentify what the skills are they need to improve. Executing on whole pieces forces you to reckon with your weak points, not just iterate endlessly on the skill you think would be cool to be super good at.
> Constantly performing without ever practising is how amateurs approach things in other fields. Amateur golfers never drill, they just play. And being an amateur is fine. Painting for a hobby is fine.
This is honestly not true IME. Maybe realist oil painting draws a different sort than the more illustrative creators I know of -- but I know so many people who sketch constantly but never step beyond into more polished works because they're terrified of their weak points.
Finally, "repeated mistakes" as a distinction between performance and practice is just straw man nonsense. Wanting to improve efficiently involves continuous iteration on what you're doing, no matter what methods you're going about. Find me someone who agrees with the idea that it's better to execute on whole works and that this constitutes accepting repeating your mistakes, or defend with some data the idea that drilling necessarily involves more reevaluation of your progress (hint: I've known pianists ruin their tendons with technical exercises done wrong).
There are very few activities for which scrimmage improves you faster than drill. Whether it's sports, art, chess, video games, cooking, or anything else, doing the actual activity is a relatively poor way to improve at it.
1. To perform for its own sake.
2. To drill the specific skill of live performance.
If you don't want to do either of those things, it is not an efficient way to improve. You must perform to hone the skill of performance, but you should not perform to practice other skills.
Caveat: sometimes you can't drill multiple skills together and performance is the only context where you can. However, performing with that in mind is very different to performing generally.
I was taught the difference between practice and play with a different phrase, "perfect practice makes perfect." I've applied that to every part of my life, because it's true.