“With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.”
I once made $1000 from a desperate housemate during Undergrad, who had not written papers for his Epistemology course along with some other philosophy course. He met me at 10pm, the night before everything was due. Now, I did not understand Hume or half of what I wrote, but I literally bunched words according to meaning blocks and slapped them together with a consistent meaning ruleset with some reasonable logical jumps on that same ruleset. I was in the zone enough for him to get a low A and a high B.
Since then, I have been an educator myself and I try very hard to make that sort of keyword matching totally not possible as a final stopping place in my classes. However, it can be used along the way (see below).
And a note on the rest of your paper: Lately one thing I have been doing is “just finish the book.” Like, I was reading Quantum computing books and kept getting hung up on some points. So I went through A Student’s Guide to Vectors and Tensors to refresh my vector analysis. That was nice, however, it just didn’t get me all I needed to comprehend the Quantum stuff. What finally worked a lot better was just setting aside (in fact, shallow keyword matching) understanding of the points of quantum computing and just doing an entire book all the way to the last page. Now I am working another one (which is more programmer oriented) and kind of getting it. Again, I’m just chugging through the book, and mentally holding spaces for the things I still haven’t grokked.
Learning is weird. I kind of need to juggle ambiguity in a creative tension to construct the knowledge for myself Maybe this is a-la Vygotsky? I cannot say for sure because I didn’t finish the Vygotsky parts of the learning theory book. I got stuck re-reading and trying to really understand one or two concepts and never picked it up again after awhile. At the same time, I had enough to finish my paper and get an A. In fact, for my Instructional Design degree, I got nearly a 4.3 GPA in +/- grading. Yes, all of this really happened, including WRT Vygotsky, but as a result I don’t have enough knowledge base about Vygotsky’s theories to be certain one way or another if it’s ironic. I have a little suspicion it is based on my surface-level reading, and so I’m laughing nervously.
Anyway, everything you said was useful and cool. I am going to be thinking about this.
“With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed.”
I once made $1000 from a desperate housemate during Undergrad, who had not written papers for his Epistemology course along with some other philosophy course. He met me at 10pm, the night before everything was due. Now, I did not understand Hume or half of what I wrote, but I literally bunched words according to meaning blocks and slapped them together with a consistent meaning ruleset with some reasonable logical jumps on that same ruleset. I was in the zone enough for him to get a low A and a high B.
Since then, I have been an educator myself and I try very hard to make that sort of keyword matching totally not possible as a final stopping place in my classes. However, it can be used along the way (see below).
And a note on the rest of your paper: Lately one thing I have been doing is “just finish the book.” Like, I was reading Quantum computing books and kept getting hung up on some points. So I went through A Student’s Guide to Vectors and Tensors to refresh my vector analysis. That was nice, however, it just didn’t get me all I needed to comprehend the Quantum stuff. What finally worked a lot better was just setting aside (in fact, shallow keyword matching) understanding of the points of quantum computing and just doing an entire book all the way to the last page. Now I am working another one (which is more programmer oriented) and kind of getting it. Again, I’m just chugging through the book, and mentally holding spaces for the things I still haven’t grokked.
Learning is weird. I kind of need to juggle ambiguity in a creative tension to construct the knowledge for myself Maybe this is a-la Vygotsky? I cannot say for sure because I didn’t finish the Vygotsky parts of the learning theory book. I got stuck re-reading and trying to really understand one or two concepts and never picked it up again after awhile. At the same time, I had enough to finish my paper and get an A. In fact, for my Instructional Design degree, I got nearly a 4.3 GPA in +/- grading. Yes, all of this really happened, including WRT Vygotsky, but as a result I don’t have enough knowledge base about Vygotsky’s theories to be certain one way or another if it’s ironic. I have a little suspicion it is based on my surface-level reading, and so I’m laughing nervously.
Anyway, everything you said was useful and cool. I am going to be thinking about this.