This weekend, I finished Joshua Foer’s recent book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. It’s a really enjoyable book with the author’s own training to compete in the U.S. Memory Championship serving as the main structural element. Lots about expertise and how memory and learning are intertwined. There were several things that made my teacher-brain perk up. Here’s a sample of things that made me think of student writers and student readers:
· Experts see the world differently. They notice things that non experts don't see; They home in on information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it.
· In "deliberate practice"- you deliberately develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous phase and in 'cognitive phase’ of skill acquisition. Amateur musicians spend practice times playing music, pros work thru tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces.
· "When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend... to improve we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes"
· Practice failing, says expertise expert K. Anders Ericsson... put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task You're trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. For example: Ben Franklin used to read essays by great thinkers and try to reconstruct the author's argument according to BFS own' logic, then check
Let me know if you want to borrow the book!
This weekend, I finished Joshua Foer’s recent book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. It’s a really enjoyable book with the author’s own training to compete in the U.S. Memory Championship serving as the main structural element. Lots about expertise and how memory and learning are intertwined. There were several things that made my teacher-brain perk up. Here’s a sample of things that made me think of student writers and student readers:
· Experts see the world differently. They notice things that non experts don't see; They home in on information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it.
· In "deliberate practice"- you deliberately develop strategies for keeping out of the autonomous phase and in 'cognitive phase’ of skill acquisition. Amateur musicians spend practice times playing music, pros work thru tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces.
· "When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend... to improve we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes"
· Practice failing, says expertise expert K. Anders Ericsson... put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task You're trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. For example: Ben Franklin used to read essays by great thinkers and try to reconstruct the author's argument according to BFS own' logic, then check
Let me know if you want to borrow the book!
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