Learning How To Learn
August 29, 2009
I’m guessing the reason most of us are here at university is to learn things. Increase your knowledge. Of course, some of you are here to get prestigious jobs, or drink a lot and get laid, but generally the desire to learn factors in there somewhere. So today I’m going to talk about my experience in trying to learn things, and maybe some of you will get something out of it. It isn’t just about academic studying though, it’s hopefully applicable to any type of skill you might want to pick up, a sport, an instrument, whatever.
I got my HSC at age 16 with a UAI of 98.35. I’m now in the 3rd year of an Electrical Engineering degree with a WAM of 84.7. This might give my opinion a little weight when I talk about how to do well in your studies.
It shouldn’t, though; marks do not, in general, correlate to knowledge and ability. I don’t consider marks to be too important. Reflective of this fact is that I thought for years that my UAI was 96, and told people that when they asked me. I didn’t realize it had actually been 98 until I looked up my Board Of Studies again just then. I literally didn’t care about it that much after I found I had got into my preferred course.
How Do You Learn?
Seeing as you’re reading this, you’ve probably reached tertiary studies, and hopefully over the course of your eduction you’ve experimented with listening to recordings and lectures, doing lots of practice questions, discussing things, drawing colourful diagrams, having study buddies, making rude acronyms, and a whole bunch of other things and have some idea of good ways for you learn and recall things.
Different people find different ways of studying more effective. A lot of people have had things to say about ‘learning styles’, and put forward various models from Gardner’s multiple intelligences to Fleming’s visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic (or hands-on) learners. In school an eager teacher probably tried to give you a test or assignment or something based on new and fashionable research. You can read about these things yourself, starting with Wikipedia.
Maybe you’re thinking all that stuff is silly, and writing down dot points as the lecturer speaks is fine for you. If so, great! But that’s far too boring for me. Or, maybe you have no idea how you learn and you just do the stuff you’re told to do. In that case maybe this could be of use.
I’m pretty certain that I’m a kinesthetic learner. I get the best understanding of something by doing example questions and actually practicing what I’m supposed to be learning. Once I’ve done that and feel I understand, I draw abstractions to put structure on what I’ve just learnt, and, if possible, link it to things I’ve learnt previously. I find lectures (which are geared towards auditory learners) to be generally rather useless, and if I actually attend any these days it’s the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, I go to all of my tutorials and labs, and put effort into them. It just works better for me. However, you are not me. You should work out what learning style works best for you, and apply it.
Mind Maps: Dot Points On A Combination Of Steroids And Acid
Pretty much any time I do notes these days I do it in the form of a mind map. I have one in front of me right now, filled with stuff about this essay.
You might think of these as those organized little diagrams with the subject in the middle and the keywords in bubbles and the neat arrows. There’s even programs that can do this for you. My favourite is FreeMind (google it, it’s a free download). But a good mind map is less organized and more intuitive. It’s all about distinguishing and connecting concepts.
Firstly, instead of writing information from top to bottom, spread it around the page. Maybe turn the page on its side. Associate different areas of the page with different areas of the subject. Then you can connect things using whatever notation you feel like, arrows, wires, winding sentences, little roads with cars. It should reflect how you feel about it, be all symbolic. Seriously. Also use colour and illustrations to distinguish things, perhaps to reflect a slightly different way of categorization.
Once you get really serious about this stuff you’ll need more than a page. I started using A3 paper for notes and got a whiteboard for my room.
The Truest Test Of Understanding
If you really want to try and learn something backwards and forwards, try and teach it to someone else. People have the highest recall rates for things that they’ve taught. Teaching is hard. You think you’ve put it in the simplest possible terms, and people will still be confused and giving you an I-don’t-get-it look. They’ll ask questions on minor things that turn out to be pretty major gaps in your own understanding.
Practice Practice Practice, Until You Go Crazy
In his book ‘Outliers’, Malcom Gladwell proposes that people who excel in their field have to put in about 10000 hours of effort before they begin to stand out. This ‘10000-hour rule’ has become a bit of urban folklore, which is how I know about without actually having read that book.
Everything is practice. Snooker, surfing, guitar, public speaking, martial arts, mathematics, whatever. Do more of it and you get better at it. Take this to extremes, and you will become amazing at it.
I like this quote from Eddie Van Halen, a real-life guitar hero. In an interview with Guitar World, when asked about how you go from learning your first chord to playing blistering tapping solos, he replied:
“Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he’d come back at 3am, I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years – I still do that.”
That’s what it takes people. An hour of Guitar Hero at your mates place every month doesn’t cut it.
And this is universal. In his biography ‘Occupation Skateboarding’, Tony Hawk describes how he would spend all day at the skatepark, waiting at the gate for it to open in the morning and keep going until they kicked him out at dusk. Now he has no less than seven video games named after him (And with practice, I managed to finish 5 of those).
Are You Having Fun Yet
Enjoying what you are doing is very important. Obviously there are many unpleasant things that need doing at various times, but if you can find something to enjoy (even if it’s just the feeling of victory when you finally get it done) it can make it less of an uphill struggle and more of a downhill glide.
From personal experience I think that, as well as the 10000-hour point, there’s another point before that where what you are practicing actually starts to become fun. This is probably actually the more important point, as once you get to it you actually begin enjoy all this practicing, you have a mastery over what you’re doing, and it actually becomes really easy to do heaps of it. I actually enjoy doing some of my assignments now. This probably makes me a sick sick person.
This ‘fun’ point (I have no idea how many hours it takes) has the biggest impact on things with a steep learning curve, like surfing. Now, surfing is probably on of the hardest sports you can take up. Skateboarding is also close. But the learning curves of all the other sports I’ve tried, skiing, golf, football, cricket, whatever, are all pretty tame in comparison. It takes a couple of years of much dedication before you can actually go out in any surf conditions and get waves, surf well and have fun. Well it did for me…maybe I’m just a crap surfer. (If you don’t listen to me, listen to Arj Barker. Look up ‘arj barker surfing’ on YouTube). But after a while you realise that you’re not worrying about it any more and simply going out and having a good time.
The Big Picture Is Important
Knowledge is hierarchical. Know where you are in that hierarchy allows you to orient yourself and not feel lost about a subject. For a course at uni, start right at the top with the name. It’s a particular area of study. Then you look at it and say “Well, really, it covers this, this and this”, finding a few sub-areas. Then look at each of these sub-areas in term and do the same thing, until you get right down to the level of actual examples. Mind maps go really well with this. Breaking down a task or a subject in this top down manner when I start studying gives me a huge confidence boost.
But So Are The Little Things
The opposite to top-down is bottom-up. Sometimes when something is really imposing, you really have no idea how to start. The trick here is to start small and do something that you know how to do; something trivial. Then slowly build up from there. This is a bit like the old computer programmer’s saying “First make it run; next make it run right; finally, make it fast”. Firstly you make your program do something, anything at all, have it just start and exit. Then, you slowly add features until it does everything you want it to do. Finally, you can go over what you’ve done and optimize it.
So which one of top-down and bottom-up is right? This is personal preference. They compliment each other. You can use both. I like to use a top-down approach for general studying; when I have a specific project or goal, I like to do things from the bottom up.
Creativity
All this partitioning and classifying and extending is really creative activity, and this brings us to creativity itself, a very big topic. I won’t pretend I can properly discuss it in this essay, or teach you how to do it.
Creativity is about generating new and good ideas. To generate ideas, you have to look at the things you know. No one has truly original ideas. As David Hume says, they’re always inspired as a combination or projection of things you already know. I feel a significant part of this is analogy; drawing similarities between two things that you thought were completely different, and then trying to take advantage of how they are like each other.
So now you’re off generating all these crazy ideas by combining the things you know about a subject; how do you pick the good ones? Often this can be unconscious, as in a flash of inspiration. Other times it’s a conscious, driven iteration through several related things, each slightly better than the last. It’s a question of quality, beauty, power, generality, style. Henri Poincare and Robert Pirsig have a lot of interesting things to say about this; look them up.
Hitting The Flow And Getting In The Zone
You know when you’re doing things right. You’ve got the right information at your fingertips, you’ve got the right tools, the right environment, you’re comfortable, you’re feeling creative and you’re taking a risk, having a go. It’s not so much that you’ve got no distractions, it’s that you seem to be able to ignore them so easily. It’s the perfect combination all the stuff I’ve been talking about in this essay. You, my friend, are in the zone, and an hour in this state will be more productive than the rest of the week. A guy called Csikszentmihalyi (fuck, what a name) studied this phenomenon under the term ‘flow’, it seems to be actually visible in the brain.
What To Take Home (or, the tl;dr version)
Here, finally, is some sort of conclusion. Remember that memorizing and learning are two different things. Don’t study conclusions, study the arguments that lead to them. Know the difference between good work and bad work, so you know what to aim for, and when you’re doing it wrong. If you can cultivate a genuine interest and understanding in something, enjoy it, and get in the flow, then you’ll have no trouble with any exams. Finally, the next time you look at something and think “There’s no way I could do that”, stop it. If another person can do it, so can you. You just haven’t learnt how to yet.
edit 23/09: Tharunka is publishing a cut-down version. I’d complain about the cutting but I was actually pretty impressed with the editing.
Webcomic Reading List
July 31, 2009
Here’s a list of all the webcomics I’ve seriously read at some point. I follow most of these. Often I’ll let a heavily story-based comic for a month and catch up all at once, it can be less frustrating. Categories are meant as guidelines only. Ratings are obviously subjective, and progress from ‘epic’, to ‘great’, ‘good’, to ‘o.k’. ‘YMMV’ indicates varying quality. My sense of humour is probably different to yours. Also check out the ‘links’ page for each of these comics (many link to each other), and sites like Webcomics Nation, The Webcomic List, and Comixpedia.
Tech/engineering nerdy
One-strip gag/WTF
Computer game/sci fi nerdy
Fantastical
We’re young and have problems
What Happens In Thredbo, Stays In Thredbo
July 21, 2009
DRAFT VERSION. HOPEFULLY MORE PHOTOS COMING
To be honest, I liked the old marketing slogan better.
So after my dramatic rekindling of interest in skiing last year, I had to get another trip going this winter. I was like, it’s 500km to Thredbo, we have a car full of gear, the Triple J Hottest 100 on the radio, it’s the flattest driest country on earth, and we’re going skiing: HIT IT.
The crew.
Unfortunately, Murphy’s law was once again experimentally verified. Firstly, I forgot the keys to the flat, leading to a detour of several hours in the wrong direction to pick them up from my house. Secondly, we somehow missed the Federal Highway turnoff to Canberra and ended up in Yass, leading to another detour of several hours. But we got there in the end.
We even managed the traditional rest stop at Sutton Forest McDonalds. Seeing as it was the first weekend of the school holidays it was massively crowded, and the smell of swine flu was in the air. I couldn’t wait to get out of there actually.
After shopping and ski rental we limped into Thredbo and somehow managed to unload and park. Throughout the trip we managed to consistently get spots in the first overnight carpark (When I told my dad this he was extremely impressed as he hasn’t managed to get a car park that close to the flat in years. So yeah, parking fu)
What About The Snow
Me, relaxing in the snow.
The first day was a proper blizzard up the top of the mountain and we had a bit of fun feeling around the mountain in zero visibility. The first run in particular sticks in my mind. I was a bit dazed by all the focused rushing around that morning, to get ready in time for the first lift. For some reason the run directly under the main chairlift (the Kosciuszko express) was still untracked. I skied down to the turnoff quickly and started waving my poles frantically at the others but they missed me. So I turned around and started blasted down, just laying big fast turns in the few cm of fresh snow. I was the only one on the run, and then sun came out briefly and all these people on the chairlift started hooting. It was an incredible first run. Later that day me and the other Sam explored the Bushranger under the Snowgums chairlift a bit.
The second day, we got about 20cm overnight and it was bright, sunny, and windless. Perfect. The Kosci express first lift was delayed by about half an hour due to the towers freezing or some such nonsense. Everyone else went over to Snowgums but we decided to wait. In return we got a great first run down the Bluff, although the lower parts of the mountain were all tracked out. We explored around Karel’s and found a little mini snow-pillow line through the trees on the ridge above Funnel Web, which I’m definitely filing away in ‘good spots’. We then skied down into Swaggie’s and negotiated the trees in the lower section.
On the final day of the trip it was quite windy, and they finally opened Sponar’s T-bar, at which I jumped with joy and skied great windblown powder on both sides for a couple of hours and also jumped off Sponar’s Rock. There was windblown snow all over the upper mountain actually, it was a great day.
If You Don’t Fall Over A Few Times, You’re Not Really Trying Hard Enough
I had a couple of binding releases and fall-into-the-hills, but no proper stacks, until I went down through this gloopy chopped up snow on that steep hill between Anton’s and Sponar’s. I must have hit a bump funny when I was leaning too far backwards, and both skis released. One flew off down the hill, but the other buried itself tail-first into the snow, all the way up to the binding. Somehow I got the nose of the buried ski stuck up my jacket, leaving me hanging from the ski and quite unable to move. It was hilarious. In hindsight, it could have done some serious damage, although I was more worried about my jacket at the time.
Always Take The Weather With You
Let’s go back to the bad weather on the first day for a bit. I have a rather masochistic view of weather down the snow. The way I see it, in Australia at least, is that ‘good’ weather is the filthiest, windiest, lowest-visibility blizzard I can find without the lifts going on hold, as this produces the good snow and a complete lack of crowds. The full ‘bad is good and good is bad’ tvtrope, as in ‘awww, the wind’s dropped off and the sun’s come out, damn’.
I blame this on desensitisation from a young age. I remember a ski school lesson when I was young, I must have been like 9 or 10, and the instructor dragging all us kids up Sponar’s T-bar on a day of bad weather. The group left a trail of crying fallen children all the way up the steep, bumpy T-bar track. But those of us who made it to the top had an even harder time. I remember jamming my skis into the grooves of an icy snowcat tread track and hugging the ground to prevent myself being blown away, and being unable to hear my own wailing over the wind. At the time I thought I would be scarred for life but in hindsight it was a great experience.
Actually, seeing as I pull off my hood and yell “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT!?” into the driving snow as the wildly swinging chairs of the Kosci Express inch their way over the windiest part of Bluff, I probably am scarred for life.
How To Do Rail Slides
A few times during the trip we headed over to Merrits and I had a go skiing some rails and boxes. I’ve never had a problem riding straight over boxes, but wasn’t able to do the proper sideways slide. I tried it a couple of times in NZ last year and always just fell backwards. I think I had a few ingrained bad habits from the skateboarding I did when I was younger – when you go to do a 50-50 grind (which has the same foot position as a skiing rail slide), there’s a lot of friction, and you have to lean back a bit to actually start the grind. On a terrain park box however, there’s very little friction, and if you lean back you just slide out and fall over. Leaning back is also a natural instinct born of fear, and is generally counter-productive many sports and especially in skiing. After much mind-skiing and thinking over summer, I decided that the way to counter my leaning back was to raise my trailing arm (I’m goofy foot, so that’s my left arm) to force me to lean forward. I also decided I needed to keep my stance on the rail lower and wider, to get a better centre of balance. And of course, you can never relax to much when doing technical extreme sport. To my surprise this all worked perfectly on the first attempt, and I only fell once out of about 10 attempts throughout the trip, landing the rest. I found it’s much much easier to come off the rail switch, even on single tip skis – it’s just very awkward to reverse your direction of rotation on the rail and twist so you land facing forward, although I did manage this a couple of times.
Whoa, My Heels Are Lifting
We had a day off and had a go at hiking to Dead Horse Gap up the valley, but were turned back halfway there by deep snow. I never really thought I’d have to say that about walking in Australia. Me and Matt were unprepared and only had sneakers. A few days later the other Sam made it all the way in his hiking boots; he reckoned the trail was nearly invisible under deep snowdrifts by the end.
I also spent a day cross-country skiing over in Perisher Valley. Cross-country (properly called Nordic skiing, or ‘XC’ if you’re in the scene) certainly isn’t the high-speed rush of downhill skiing. The other Sam claims it combines the worst parts of hiking and downhill skiing. I do find it enjoyable, but you definitely need to go in with more of a hiking or bushwalking mindset. It’s an excellent way to see the mountains in winter. You don’t need to worry about sticking to trails, everything’s covered in snow – just park the car, plonk the skis down in front and off you go. You can hire the gear for $50, spend nothing on a lift ticket, and have a great day out gliding around in a t-shirt and sunglasses.
The Ancient Rivalry
Matt and Jess on the Kosciuszko Road, in front of The Perisher
We didn’t going downhill skiing in Perisher, which I would have enjoyed just for the variety. I have participated in some spirited Thredbo-Perisher flamewars over the years and have now decided to give up: feel free to believe Perisher is better, and if you want to ski over there, all the more freshies and groomers at Thredbo for me1.
To summarize the debate, Thredbo has a bigger vertical drop and much longer runs, serviced from a couple of big high-speed chairlifts, but is plagued by crappy snow at the bottom. Before snowmaking it was nicknamed ‘Mudbo’ and it still has a habit of turning your new skis into old scratched rockhoppers at an alarming rate.
Perisher, on the other hand is higher, and generally has better snow cover, and more skiable area over several smaller mountains. However, the lift system is haphazard at best, with annoyingly short T-bars all over the place. At worst, it’s deep vein thrombosis inducing, what with the ancient slow rickety double chairlifts servicing Mount Perisher and Pretty Valley. Seriously, one run on Olympic, one of the better runs, requires three T-bars (Happy Valley, Sun Valley, and Olympic). Yes you can just ski the top two but I developed this strange habit at Thredbo of skiing all the way from the top to the bottom of a mountain. Don’t get me started on the T-bar at Guthega that creates that ridiculous bottleneck. But Perisher does have interesting terrain, the Blue Cow and the Perisher itself are good skiing mountains, and I really need to explore Double Trouble one of these days.
Also, the half pipe in Front Valley is much better than Thredbo’s. I swear Thredbo doesn’t even bother to make half pipes most the time, except for that horrifically inaccessible one they sometime do above the Cruiser chairlift.
Skiing Ability
We had two first-timers on the trip, Jess and Matt. This is probably a good number to bring, we figured they would keep each other company on the beginner slopes. And it did work out pretty well.
Jess was skiing fine by the end of the trip, doing good-looking snowplough and stem christie turns on Merrits, but she was simply too scared to really push her boundaries and progress. She just needs to do it more to gain some confidence. She needs to watch, say, the women’s division of the World Heli Challenge. There are some insane female freeride skiers, they are in no way the weaker sex, it’s just that a lot of girls seem to have mental barriers which is a shame.
Matt was skiing Friday Flat and the Crackenback Traverse/Village Trail/Sundowner on the first day (!), Merrits, the Basin, and Antons on the second day, not falling off a single T-bar (!!), and the Supertrail from the top by the third day (!!!). He fell over a lot, of course, but that really is an insane progression. Well done dude.
So the final day rolled around and I decided I had to ski the Golf Course Bowl to get the monkey off my back, as it’s really the only part of Thredbo I’ve never explored. The lift operator at Karel’s told me it was open, but when I got out there it turned out it was closed; I had a moment of weakness and ducked under the rope. So I basically skied an experts-only run, which I’d never skied before, by myself, when it was closed, neatly ticking off the boxes of every single bloody stupid retarded thing you can do when skiing. Seriously what was I thinking2. The top part wasn’t so bad, but it gets gnarlier the further down you go. I was expecting a rope or obvious trail marking the exit, like in the Powderbowl on the other side of the resort, but there isn’t: just more and more bushes and trees, as it funnels steeper and narrower into the creek, over thinner and thinner snow cover, until the traverse out becomes practically impossible.
And then, after spending hours in the terrain park, and the just-described foolishness, and not getting a single scratch, some out-of-control snowplowing idiot (propelled by a mixture of karma and irony) runs straight into me out the front of the Eagle’s Nest restaurant and takes a big chunk out of my ski and bruises my hip. That’s ski resorts for you.
Speaking of which, one rather worrying trend in my behaviour over the past 6 months or so is that, more and more, I slip into elitism when I’m talking about or participating in something that I’m relatively good at and behave like arrogant a-hole. For example, with surfing, which I’m really not that good at, I’m like, “Localism is bad, and we should be nice to beginners and let everyone enjoy the ocean in their own way”. Whereas with skiing, which I’ve been doing with my family since i was 5, I’m like “LEARN TO SKI YOU KOOKS, GET THE HELL OFFA MY SLOPES” and letting all my friends know what poor skiers they are and generally being incredibly rude to people. I’ve had to ban myself from using the word ‘kook’ when above 1000m in altitude. The solution is probably a really big slice of humble pie from someone who skis better than me, but this seems to be hard to come by (aaah, see I’m doing it again!).
The Trip Back
Was…ragged. It always seems to go past quickly, and yet somehow drag on while you’re travelling. We did well with the packing though, it all fit without trouble. I dislike stopping really, especially at dodgy cafes for lunch. I just want to get the hell home.
Once we got to Sydney we drove around for an hour getting Sam Bladwell home. He is officially banned from navigating ever again. He forgot to tell Matt about several critical turnoffs, including the one to his own damn street. Classic.
Anyway, that’s probably enough for now. I’m suffering from ski withdrawal and have been editing skiwiki.com to try and get over it. I am definitely going to try and make it down again this season…and as for next season, I’m gunna come with some alpine bindings to rip the hell out of the Thredbo slackcountry.
If you liked this, you might also like reading about some of my previous skiing adventures.
