This reminds me of a thing that gestalt psychologists call “re-centering”, which in your metaphor could be described as having a lot of free-floating information monomers that suddenly snap together (which in slow motion might be that first the base forms spontaneously, and then everything else snaps to the base). The difference is that according to them, this happens repeatedly… when you get more information, and it turns out that the original structure was not optimal, so at some moment it snaps again into a new shape. (A “paradigm shift”.)
Then there is a teaching style called constructivism (though this name was also abused to mean different things) which is concerned with getting the base structure built as soon as possible. And then getting the next steps right, too. Emphasis on having correct mental models, over memorizing facts. -- One of the controversies is whether this is even necessary to do. Some people insist that it is a waste of time; if you give people enough information monomers, at some moment it will snap to the right structure (and if it won’t, well, sucks to be you; it worked okay for them). Other people say that this attitude is why so many kids hate school, especially math (long inferential chains), but if you keep building the structure right all the time, it becomes much less frustrating experience.
So I like the metaphor, with the exception that it is not a simple cylinder, but a more complicated structure, that can get wrong (and get fixed) multiple times.
This reminds me of a thing that gestalt psychologists call “re-centering”, which in your metaphor could be described as having a lot of free-floating information monomers that suddenly snap together (which in slow motion might be that first the base forms spontaneously, and then everything else snaps to the base). The difference is that according to them, this happens repeatedly… when you get more information, and it turns out that the original structure was not optimal, so at some moment it snaps again into a new shape. (A “paradigm shift”.)
Then there is a teaching style called constructivism (though this name was also abused to mean different things) which is concerned with getting the base structure built as soon as possible. And then getting the next steps right, too. Emphasis on having correct mental models, over memorizing facts. -- One of the controversies is whether this is even necessary to do. Some people insist that it is a waste of time; if you give people enough information monomers, at some moment it will snap to the right structure (and if it won’t, well, sucks to be you; it worked okay for them). Other people say that this attitude is why so many kids hate school, especially math (long inferential chains), but if you keep building the structure right all the time, it becomes much less frustrating experience.
So I like the metaphor, with the exception that it is not a simple cylinder, but a more complicated structure, that can get wrong (and get fixed) multiple times.