• John de Overa
    490
    From today's Guardian:

    1. To engage in learning for learning’s sake, we should not put pressure on ourselves with audacious goals. Instead, start small.
    2. To learn from mistakes, we should not mindlessly repeat the same actions over and over. Instead, we want to be more focused and analytical by reflecting on what we did right and what we did wrong. Psychologists call this “deliberate practice”.
    3. We should make sure our practice is varied, rather than doing the exact same thing again and again. Mixing up how we practise our new behaviour forces the learned patterns in our brains to become more flexible, allowing us to cope better when new and unexpected challenges arise.
    4. And lastly, we should try our best to learn from other novices, rather than comparing ourselves solely with experts. It also helps to teach the skills we are learning to other novices. This is because we learn best when we know we have to pass the knowledge on.

    As a late starter myself, that all seems like good advice.

    Which reminds of this BBC CrowdScience podcast on the subject of learning as an adult:

    Why is learning stuff harder as you get older?
  • PeterScott
    76
    Yes that sound familiar: from the article

    ... actively avoided trying anything new that [they] feared [they] might not be competent at. This was certainly a pattern at work, and it was also a trend in [the] choice of hobbies and other life experiences

    I just hate others telling me what-to-do, and particularly the stress of not-being-good at something new. I agree with a fellow-ringer's teeshirt "I Don't Want To. I Don't Have To. You Can't Make Me. I'm Retired " So I'm a lost cause at swimming or ballroom dancing - things I ought to have found time to learn when I was young. Sigh.

    The message must be to avoid unnecessary stress for a learner, or expose them to lots-of-people-looking-on. Another reason that the five-minutes bellhandling in the practice-pause may be counter-productive, and re-emphasises the benefits of two of three students learning together.
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