101 - Vince, the Learner 📚
Hey there, !
A collection of thoughts on learning and education in the life of Vince.
"Lu-Tze sighed. ‘Y’know, most of what you get taught is lies. It has to be. Sometimes if you get the truth all at once,you can’t understand it.'" - Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
1.
I've been learning things all my life.
From a very young age, a bratty 3 years old, I was learning my timetables and phonetics from a local chapter of Kumon, learning Cantonese from a Saturday school, and learning how to play the violin on a mini cardboard replica because I was too small for even the smallest of violins (I'm extremely disappointed that I don't have this any more).
I got really good at anything that required rote memorisation. Maths was perfect for this - and I can't count the number of exercise books I completed, or tapes I listened to in the car, or random times tables that my mum would spring on me at a dinner. Science was easy - if you knew algebra and ratios, you could manage through pretty much 80% of the classes. Learning Chinese characters just required repetition over and over again of the same strokes, in the same order, in the same space on the page (which, I guess is kinda like the English alphabet?).
My escape was reading, and subsequently, creative writing (can you tell?). I loved reading and as I think I mentioned before, was banned from whistling in the library because I was such a great whistler. I told Mum I was going to be an author one day!
I had tons of ideas as a young kid with a boundless imagination - many of which have been lost to time and exist nowadays as l'espirit de l'escalier - those great comebacks and scenarios you simulate after the conversation is over where you win.
If only my brain worked better in the moment.
2.
I've been learning things all my life.
There was this really long 18 year period where I got really good at learning from books, becoming extremely good at taking dead words from colourful books and regurgitating them in myriad ways on less colourful exams.
I got so good at it that, ever since year 12, I've been tutoring kids in Maths, Chem and English - helping to optimise their learning since I became an expert at it.
It's quite fun! I love the feeling of getting someone to the moment of 'Aha!' - the key insight that unlocks a new part of the world for them - weaving their own little rope into the broader knowledge of the human race.
It's even more fun when you have to try and relate, as a 28 year old (who still mentally thinks he's 21), with a 17 year old kid (who mentally thinks they're 21), going through the stresses of VCE as if it actually means something.
Caring about your SACs? "Hell Week"?! Pah - you haven't even experienced the crushing weight of accidentally clicking 'Reply All' to a company-wide email and then trying to recall it and then it doesn't work because Outlook SUCKS. Or the ennui of sitting at uni for 5 hours between classes because you had a tute in the morning at 8am and then one at 2pm because your uni course is shithouse at scheduling.
Oof to the rough road ahead...
3.
I've been learning things all my life.
I got so damn good at learning from books that I forgot what it means to learn through action.
I went to Montessori as a kid, and my mum proudly tells the story of us cutting vegetables with a Real Knife, learning how to make knots, doing up buttons, packing up after ourselves; everything that was essentially 'learning through doing'.
And then I went to school for 18 years and stopped doing a lot of that fun stuff.
I can't speak for education these days (other than the glimpses I get through my students) but I don't think that the balance between practical and 'book' learning is right. There's so much to learn in the world, and I get to summarise it into 6 subjects I take for VCE? And then funnelled into 1 (or 2) degrees at university?
Surely not.
At school, I didn't get to do anything like Food Tech, or Metalwork, or anything like that. I just got really good at playing chess and doing math exams and writing essays.
Those aren't bad things, necessarily, because it's training your brain to think in a specific way. How to follow rules. How to interpret language. How to think ahead and plan.
But without any anchor to the real world, these classes become drills without the game. Practice without performance. Mise without the meal.
You get to learn how to factorise y = x^2 + 4*x + 4, but you don't understand why it's good to know how to repeatedly think in more abstract ways. You get to dubiously analyse the meaning behind texts without being able to understand if the purpose is to actually uncover what the author was thinking, or maybe that there are multiple perspectives in the world that we all see from.
A rant for another day...
4.
I've been learning things all my life.
I learned that university degrees and the Path were the way to succeed in life, because society has deemed that anything else is 'lesser' and the best people go to university. It's valued as the pinnacle of education, and we go into mountains of debt just to say we've got that piece of paper.
I didn't get this, very early on. I thought uni was an extension of school - you're just forced to learn in a much more narrow field. So I tried to keep my options as open as possible (yet still respectable by Asian parent standards) by choosing Engineering and Law.
A silly decision, in hindsight, though not one that I regret.
But I remember that throughout the degree, I was continuously fascinated by what others were learning. Linguistics. Psychology. Medicine. Marketing. Finance. Economics. Biology. Coding. There are so many modes, models and frameworks of thought that come from the expertise in different fields - how could you be content with just one? I spent my time learning about what others were learning about, and grew less interested with what I was supposed to be learning.
If only there was enough time in the world to learn it all.
5.
I've been learning things all my life.
There's so much online these days - MOOCs, MasterClass, articles, books - it's crazy the amount of content that exists these days.
A habit I've had since uni has been to read and consume content as widely and randomly as possible - there's so much interesting stuff to learn about, and though I'm not using it all in my daily life, so what? There's a trivia night out there waiting for me.
And yet...I do feel a twinge of regret sometimes. In my quest for information domination, I read a whole lot of useless stuff that I will never remember, or use, or build into my life. Especially because there's nothing concrete to use this information for, the rote memorisation and practice doesn't exist, so there's no reason for it (except, of course, to link it to you in this newsletter ;)).
It's the classic case of generalist and specialist: without the practice and well-worn neural pathways of an expert, how can a generalist bring things together in a cohesive way? And without the bigger picture and conext of what other people are doing, how can a specialist speak in other's languages to communicate their expertise effectively?
There are many arguments about the fact that we don't need to 'know' things per se, since we can just search for it in the ocean of content we drown in. We see this with the dearth of apprenticeships, of people caring less about the art of hawker stalls and more about the art of the Internet, of coding bootcamps that promise the world in 12 weeks.
I disagree, to an extent. Remembering and practicing skills makes it second nature, meaning that you can free up your brainspace for more interesting, brain-burny things. Without words, how do you write a novel? Without notes, how do you write a symphony?
Knowledge may be facts, but wisdom is applying them right.
6.
I've been learning things all my life...so what now?
I'm trying my very best to reactivate my 'learning by doing' pathways, and experience more intuitive learning rather than book learning. These include:
- Cooking - you just gotta keep doing it, over and over, 'til you understand the key aspects of it and can do it in your sleep
- Writing - which you've been seeing for the last, I don't know...100 posts or so?
- Renovations - in more recent news - I've bought a house! So I'm starting my journey in renovating it, and hopefully can continue giving you updates on this :)
There's so much to experience in the world, and through the artificial restrictions on travel I've learned that there actually is a whole lot of stuff that I want to do in the world.
Sure, a 'reader lives a thousand lives', but I need to get busy living my own.
Education had been easy.
Learning things had been harder.
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. - Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
I've been learning things all my life, and I'm still learning.
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Learning how to learn - pretty sure this a free course - I signed up for it and found it extremely interesting. Lots of interesting content about how to learn, deep focus, reduce procrastination and how to use your brain's default habits to your advantage.
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The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld - honestly becoming shameless about promoting more of Terry Pratchett's stuff until someone emails me saying they read him on my recommendation and they loved it. This is essentially the 'collected quotes of Discworld' (a few which I selected for this piece) so I don't recommend it for anyone except hardcore fans - and it really just makes me want to read more Discworld anyway!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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The vital art of talking to strangers - you get taught not to talk to strangers, but these are some of the most interesting interactions that can happen in life because they bring the most novelty to it. And that's what we need from a psychologically interesting life, no?
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Your life has already been designed (2010) - an oldie but a goodie; money and time is the major tradeoff we make in life and work, but why?
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
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How to get better at painting, without painting anything - isolate the key exercises in the chosen discipline, practice it well, and often. Relatively generalisable to other things in life (except those which are hard to break down in to isolatable exercises).