Unbundling What We Know And Have Learnt Well
Edition #046
Introduction
Welcome to The ContraMind Code.
The ContraMind Code provides you with a system of principles, signals, and ideas to aid you in your pursuit of excellence.
The Newsletter shares the source code, through quick snapshots, for a systems thinking approach to be the best in what you do.
The Code helps you reboot and reimagine your thinking by learning from the best and enables you to draw a blueprint on what it takes to get extraordinary things done. Please share your valuable thoughts and comments and start a conversation.
Take a journey to www.contraminds.com. Listen and watch some great minds talking to us about their journey of discovery of what went into making them craftsmen of their profession to drive peak performance.
Why Don’t We Use the Math We Learn in School?
by Scott Young
This is always something all of us must have gone through. Scott Young, Author, Programmer, and Entrepreneur, brings out a lovely perspective on the plausible reasons and some suggestions for finding ways to make maths relevant and valuable in daily life.
Here is a quick snapshot of some key takeaways:
Most People don’t learn math well enough to use it: One of the significant barriers to using a skill in real life is automaticity. You tend to find the least-effort solution to your problem. If struggling through a math problem is hard for you, you’ll find a different way to solve it that doesn’t rely on math.
Most People Don’t Know How to Translate Real-Life Situations into Math Problems: This seems most apparent in the case of applying algebra. Students struggle with algebra, but they particularly struggle with word problems. Yet, the equivalent real-life problems are typically much harder than word problems.
Math Isn’t That Useful for Everyday Problems: People who are good at math point out that it’s useful and the only way to get correct answers to quantitative problems. People who are bad at math tend to discount math’s relevance to everyday life.
How do we make Math useful in life? It would be best if you had a combination of automatic skill, problem identification and interpretation, and sustaining real-world usage. Anything less and knowledge learned fails to leave the classroom.
Zena Hitz: Liberal Arts Thinking
by North Star Podcast
Zena Hitz, Author of Lost in Thought, is in conversation with David Perell, writer and podcaster and runs a writing school called Write of Passage.
Here is a quick summary:
Your education is not only about getting a high-paying job. It is not about allowing other people to dictate or control the work that is in most demand in society. It must help people discover what they like or want to pursue.
Liberal Arts education prepares you to be a lifelong learner. An excellent education should help you do that.
Late 18th Century/early 19th Century, the labour movement happened in US and UK when the Mechanics’ Institute came into being- Known as institutes, and also called Schools Of Arts(especially in the Australian colonies), were educational establishments originally formed to provide adult education, particularly in technical subjects, to working men in Victorian-era Britain and its colonies.
When we are in a default social mode, it makes us benchmark our social markers vis-a-vis others. This needs to be re-looked.
We should consider books like food, digest them and cultivate our imagination.
Learning to write comes from reading.
Thinking and writing are very closely connected.
To teach well, we need to pursue our own intellectual interests.
Learning cannot be done by scale and need to be rescaled. Learning happens better thro’ personal mentoring.
Learning by Doing
by James Bessen
James Bessen, an economist and technologist who serves as Executive Director of the Technology & Policy Research Initiative at Boston University, discusses the challenge of getting new skills as technology transforms different industries.
Here are some key takeaways:
It’s scarce skills, not scarce jobs.
New technology requires new skills but wages remain stagnant.
The ones with average skills and the ones with top skills create wage inequality.
Work-study, apprenticeship and certification are critical for reskilling and learning.
Unbundling what we know and have learnt well
When we take a step back and look at what we have expertise in and how well we have learnt them over the years, one common thing is that there is a need for intrinsic interest in that topic or subject. When we go a step deeper into how we built interest, it happened by observing and doing things over time with a certain ‘conscious act of doing’ and also being supervised by good tutors or teachers who taught or inspired us. The third step is continuously applying what was learnt and applying it repeatedly to do it better.
One interesting point was made by Zena Hitz, who says that learning cannot happen at scale in the future, as it happens today( as our educational systems were built for the Industrial Age), but learning will produce better results only through personal mentoring. The Karate or Piano class example was a great analogy where intrinsic interest, the act of doing it, and personal mentoring are all intertwined, which helps the person learn better.
One thing that can be seen while learning arts and music is that at the early or beginner stage, the act of playing it every day and personal mentoring plays a massive role in building intrinsic interest, and then the act of doing/playing, practising, and personal mentoring takes over. Learning is never complete, as there is nothing called graduation or a degree (which gives a sense of putting a full stop to learning), as every performance is an act of learning again.
When we look back at learning math, understanding real-life problems first and then applying the relevant mathematical concepts or theories behind them makes a fundamental difference. Similarly, the apprentice method of learning, which is mostly by doing, is another excellent example that reinforces this form of learning as the best way to learn.
So, in this age of technology, AI etc., the power of craft will come back into vogue as it was in the 19th century. Mass-produced engineers and doctors won’t make it to the top. It’s like music composers of the 21st century, where they have all the electronic musical instruments around them, but the composition, contextual understanding and orchestration are what make the difference.
Finally, responsibility and accountability for skilling must lie with the persons themselves. From history, it will be great to learn how skill types shifted with industrialisation and automation. If we were typesetters in the 19th century, just entering the workforce when the industry was going through a transformation, what skills would we have had to learn to succeed or, put it bluntly, survive? Cut back to the current era of technology, as coding becomes a commodity, like a music composer - composition( defining the frameworks) and orchestration will become essential skills for IT professionals. Similarly, for accounting professionals, integration & insights from financial services backbones/platforms become more critical than book-keeping skills. If we were doctors, interpretation & diagnostic skills would become essential as digital diagnosis takes over.
Finally, there is a lot to learn from liberal arts thinking, where you are taught to be a life-long learner as it prepares you for a profession by helping you think first and not do a job. When you combine liberal arts thinking with technical thinking, it has the potential to create magic.
Some of the lessons we learnt from this week’s mission:
Learning happens best through automatic skill, problem identification and interpretation, and sustaining real-world usage.
We should consider books like food, digest them and cultivate our imagination. An excellent education should help you be a life-long learner.
It’s scarce skills, not scarce jobs, which can make a big difference.