Packing versus unpacking

I usually think of an instructor as someone who unpacks things, such as unpacking the meaning of an obscure word or explaining a difficult concept.

Last night I was trying to read some unbearably dry medical/legal material and thought about how an instructor might also pack things, wrapping dry material in some sort of story or illustration to make it more palatable.

I’ve often thought it would be nice to have someone explain this or that. I hadn’t really thought before that it would be nice to have someone make perfectly clear material more bearable to absorb, but I suppose that’s what a lot of instructors do. I was able to avoid courses that needed such an instructor, for which I am grateful, but I could imagine how a good instructor might make a memorization-based course tolerable.

Derive or memorize?

A lot of smart people have a rule not to memorize anything that they can derive on the spot. That’s a good rule, up to a point. But past that point it becomes a liability.

Most students err on the side of memorizing too much. For example, it’s common for students to memorize three versions of Ohms law:

  • V = IR
  • I = V/R
  • R = V/I.

Not only is this wasteful, tripling the number of facts to remember, it’s also error prone. When you memorize things without understanding them, you have no way to detect mistakes. Someone memorizing the list above might think “Is I = V/R or R/V?” but someone who knows what the terms mean will know that more resistance means less current, so the latter cannot be right.

I got through my first probability class in college without memorizing anything. I worked every problem from first principles, and that was OK. But later on I realized that even though I could derive things from scratch every time I needed them, doing so was slowing me down and keeping me from seeing larger patterns.

The probability example stands out in my mind because it was a conscious decision. I must have implicitly decided to remember things in other classes, but it wasn’t such a deliberate choice.

I’d say “Don’t memorize, derive” is a good rule of thumb. But once you start to say to yourself “Here we go again. I know I can derive this. I’ve done it a dozen times.” then maybe it’s time to memorize the result. To put it another way, don’t memorize to avoid understanding. Memorize after thoroughly understanding.

Related post: Just-in-case versus just-in-time

Telescopes, awk, and learning

Here’s a quote I think about often:

“It is faster to make a four-inch mirror and then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror.” — Bill McKeenan, Thompson’s law of telescopes

If your goal is to make a six-inch mirror, why make a four-inch mirror first? From a reductionist perspective this makes no sense. But when you take into account how people learn, it makes perfect sense. The bigger project is more likely to succeed after you learn more about mirror-making in the context of a smaller project.

Awk

I was thrilled to discover the awk programming language in college. Munging files with little awk scripts was at least ten times easier than writing C programs.

When I told a friend about awk, he said “Have you seen Perl? It’ll do everything awk does and a lot more.”

If you want to learn Perl, I expect it would be faster to learn awk and then Perl than to learn Perl. I think I would have been intimidated by Perl if I’d tried to learn it first. But thinking of Perl as a more powerful awk made me more willing to try it. Awk make my life easier, and Perl had the potential to make it even easier. I’m not sure whether learning Perl was a good idea—that’s a discussion for another time—but I did.

C

I also learned C before learning C++. That was beneficial for similar reasons, starting with the four-inch mirror version of C++ before going on to the six-inch version.

Many people have said that learning C before C++ is a bad idea, that it teaches bad habits, and that it would be better to learn (modern) C++ from the beginning. That depends on what the realistic alternative is. Maybe if you attempted to learn C++ first you’d be intimidated and give up. As with giving up on learning Perl, giving up on learning C++ might be a good idea. At the time, however, learning C++ was a good move. Knowing C++ served me well when I left academia.

Learning on your own

Teaching yourself something requires different tactics than learning something in a classroom. The four-inch mirror warmup is more important when you’re learning on your own.

If I were teaching a course on C++, I would not teach C first. The added structure of a classroom makes it easier to learn C++ directly. The instructor can pace students through the material so as to avoid the intimidation they might face if they were attempting to learn C++ alone. Students don’t become overwhelmed and give up because they have the accountability of homework assignments etc. Of course some students will give up, but more would give up without the structure of a class.

Top-down vs bottom-up

From a strictly logical perspective, it’s most efficient to learn the most abstract version of a theorem first. But this is bad pedagogy. The people who are excited about the efficiency of compressing math this way, e.g. Bourbaki, learned what they know more concretely and incrementally, and think in hindsight that the process could be shortened.

It does save time to present things at some level of generality. However, the number of steps you can go up the abstraction ladder at a time varies by person. Some people might need to go one rung at a time, some could go two at a time or maybe three, but everyone has a limit. And you can take bigger steps when you have a teacher, or even better a tutor, to guide you and to rescue you if you try to take too big of a step.

You typically understand something better, and are more able to apply it, when you learn it bottom-up. People think they can specialize more easily than they can generalize, but the opposite is usually true. It’s easier to generalize from a few specific examples than to realize that a particular problem is an instance of a general pattern.

I’ve noticed this personally, and I’ve noticed it in other people. On Twitter, for example, I sometimes post a general and a concrete version of a theorem, and the more concrete version gets more engagement. The response to a general theorem may be “Ho hum. Everybody knows that.” but the response to a particular application may be “Wow, I never thought of that!” even when the latter is a trivial consequence of the former.

Related posts

I think I’ll pass

The other day I saw an article about some math test and thought “I bet I’d blow that away now.”

Anyone who has spent a career using some skill ought to blow away an exam intended for people who have been learning that skill for a semester.

However, after thinking about it more, I’m pretty sure I’d pass the test in question, but I’m not at all sure I’d ace it. Academic exams often test unimportant material that is in the short term memory of both the instructor and the students.

From Timbuktu to …

When I was in middle school, I remember a question that read

It is a long way from ________ to ________.

I made up two locations that were far apart but my answer was graded as wrong.

My teacher was looking for a direct quote from a photo caption in our textbook that said it was a long way from Timbuktu to some place I can’t remember.

That stuck in my mind as the canonical example of a question that doesn’t test subject matter knowledge but tests the incidental minutia of the course itself [1]. A geography professor would stand no better chance of giving the expected answer than I did.

The three reasons …

Almost any time you see a question asking for “the 3 reasons” for something or “the 5 consequences” of this or that, it’s likely a Timbuktu question. In open-world contexts [2], I’m suspicious whenever I see “the” followed by a specific number.

In some contexts you can make exhaustive lists—it makes sense to talk about the 3 branches of the US government or the 5 Platonic solids, but it doesn’t make sense to talk about the 4 causes of World War I. Surely historians could come up with more than 4 causes, and there’s probably no consensus regarding what the 4 most important causes are.

There’s a phrase teaching to the test for when the goal is not to teach the subject per se but to prepare the students to pass a standardized test related to the subject. The phenomena discussed here is sort of the opposite, testing to the teaching.

When you ask students for the 4 causes of WWI, you’re asking for the 4 causes given in lecture or the 4 causes in the text book. You’re not testing knowledge of WWI per se but knowledge of the course materials.

Related posts

[1] Now that I’m in middle age rather than middle school, I could say that the real question was not geography but psychology. The task was to reverse-engineer from an ambiguous question what someone was thinking. That is an extremely valuable skill, but not one I possessed in middle school.

[2] A closed world is one in which the rules are explicitly known, finite, and exhaustive. Chess is a closed world. Sales is not. Academia often puts a box around some part of an open world so it can think of it as a closed world.

There’s more going on here

At a new faculty orientation, a professor encouraged us rookies to teach intro courses and to keep coming back to teach them periodically. I didn’t fully appreciate what he said at the time, though I remembered it, even though I left academia a couple years later.

Now I think I have an idea what he was referring to. There’s a LOT of stuff swept under the rug, out of necessity, when teaching intro courses. The students think they’re starting at the beginning, and maybe junior faculty think the same thing, but they’re really starting in medias res.

For example, Michael Spivak’s Physics for Mathematicians makes explicit many of the implicit assumptions in a freshman mechanics class. Hardly anyone could learn physics if they had to start with Spivak. Instead, you do enough homework problems that you intuitively get a feel for things you can’t articulate and don’t fully understand. But it’s satisfying to read Spivak later and feel justified in thinking that things didn’t quite add up.

When you learn to read English, you’re told a lot of half-truths or quarter-truths. You’re told, for example, that English has 10 vowel sounds, when in reality it has more. Depending on how you count them, there are more than 20 vowel sounds in English. A child learning to read shouldn’t be burdened with a college-level course in phonetics, so it’s appropriate not to be too candid about the complexities of language at first.

It would have been easier for me to teach statistics when I was fresh out of college rather than teaching a few courses while I was working at MD Anderson. As a fresh graduate I could have taught out of a standard textbook in good conscience. By the time I did teach statistics classes, I was aware of how much material was not completely true or not practical.

I was thinking this morning about how there’s much more going on in a simple change of coordinates than is apparent at first. Tensor calculus is essentially the science of changing coordinates. It points out hidden structure, and creates conventions for making calculations manageable and for reducing errors. That’s not to say tensor calculus is easy but rather to say that changes of coordinates are hard.

Related post: Coming full circle

Variable-speed learning

When I was in college, one of the professors seemed to lecture at a sort of quadratic pace, maybe even an exponential pace.

He would proceed very slowly at the beginning of the semester, so slowly that you didn’t see how he could possibly cover the course material by the end. But his pace would gradually increase to the point that he was going very quickly at the end. And yet the pace increased so smoothly that you were hardly aware of it. By understanding the first material thoroughly, you were able to go through the latter material quickly.

If you’ve got 15 weeks to cover 15 chapters, don’t assume the optimal pace is to cover one chapter every week.

I often read technical books the way the professor mentioned above lectured. The density of completely new ideas typically decreases as a book progresses. If your reading pace is proportional to the density of new ideas, you’ll start slow and speed up.

The preface may be the most important part of the book. Some books I’ve only read the preface and felt like I got a lot out of the book.

The last couple chapters of technical books can often be ignored. It’s common for authors to squeeze in something about their research at the end of a book, even if its out of character with the rest of the book.

Off by one character

There was a discussion on Twitter today about a mistake calculus students make:

\frac{d}{dx}e^x = x e^{x-1}

I pointed out that it’s only off by one character:

\frac{d}{de}e^x = x e^{x-1}

The first equation is simply wrong. The second is correct, but a gross violation of convention, using x as a constant and e as a variable.

 

It’s like this other thing except …

One of my complaints about math writing is that definitions are hardly ever subtractive, even if that’s how people think of them.

For example, a monoid is a group except without inverses. But that’s not how you’ll see it defined. Instead you’ll read that it’s a set with an associative binary operation and an identity element. A module is a vector space, except the scalars come from a ring instead of a field. But the definition from scratch is more than I want to write here. Any time you have a sub-widget or a pre-widget or a semi-widget, it’s probably best to define the widget first.

I understand the logical tidiness of saying what a thing is rather than what it is not. But it makes more pedagogical sense to describe the difference between a new concept and the most similar familiar concept. And the nearest familiar concept may have more structure rather than less.

Suppose you wanted to describe where a smaller city is by giving directions from larger, presumably more well known city, but you could only move east. Then instead of saying Ft. Worth is 30 miles west of Dallas, you’d have to say it’s 1,000 miles east of Phoenix.

Writers don’t have to chose between crisp logic and good pedagogy. They can do both. They can say, for example, that a pre-thingy is a thingy without some property, then say “That is, a pre-thingy satisfies the following axioms: …”

Student’s future, teacher’s past

“Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.” — Richard Hamming

I ran across the above quote from Hamming this morning. It made me wonder whether I tried to prepare students for my past when I used to teach college students.

How do you prepare a student for the future? Mostly by focusing on skills that will always be useful, even as times change: logic, clear communication, diligence, etc.

Negative forecasting is more reliable here than positive forecasting. It’s hard to predict what’s going to be in demand in the future (besides timeless skills), but it’s easier to predict what’s probably not going to be in demand. The latter aligns with Hamming’s exhortation not to prepare students for your past.

Group projects

The best teams have people with complementary skills, but similar work ethic. Academic assignments are the opposite. There’s not much variation in skills, in part because students haven’t yet developed specialized skills, and in part because students are in the same class because they have similar interests. The biggest variation is likely to be work ethic. It’s not uncommon for the hardest working person in a group to do 10x as much work as the laziest person in the group. The person doing most of the work learns that it’s best to avoid working with teams.

Working with people with complementary skills is a blast, but you’re unlike to experience that in an academic project. You might get some small degree specialization. Maybe one of the mechanical engineers on a project has more artistic ability than the other mechanical engineers, for example. But this is hardly like the experience of working with a team of people who are all great at different things.