I’ve always been able to learn quickly. Getting A’s and A+’s with little studying before tests wasn’t a challenge for me throughout school. While in University, I’ve maintained an average that sits between A and A+. Despite this, I don’t spend more than the average person on homework. In fact, I might even spend less.
Once, I wrote an inter-provincial test (I’m Canadian) for chemistry. The only problem: I didn’t know I was supposed to write the test until a pencil and bubble sheet were sitting in front of me. On top of this, the test was on material I wasn’t familiar with and topics that were never covered in my class. I was given an hour and a half to write the exam. I left after forty minutes because I wanted to eat lunch. I won first place and received a check for $400. Self-learning has also occupied my time. I’ve taught myself several programming languages, business and writing skills and my bookshelf has hundreds of books I’ve readin just the past two years. I’ve also dabbled in graphic design, musical composition and anything I could get my hands on.
Learning has always come easily to me. Up until this point, I’d just be another smart kid. “Gifted” might fit as well, although there are people whose mental feats would put my small achievements to shame. I’d be just another kid who got a more favorable genetic cocktail, had pushy parents or some sort of glandular accident.
And if you read this far, you could probably slap on arrogant and boastful. Until recently I probably would have agreed with you. But then something strange happened. I began to notice something different about myself and people even smarter than me. It wasn’t just that smart people learned better or faster. They learned differently. Smarts requires a different strategy. Smart people had picked up different tactics,sometimes intentionally but usually completely without awareness of them. It was these different strategies that made the difference in understanding. That different strategy I called holistic learning. I call it holistic learning because it challenges you to view learning as a comprehensive whole, instead of a list of memorized facts. Smart people tend to make fewer distinctions between branches of knowledge and can easily relate one set of understandings to another.
By learning holistically, smart people are able to quickly integrate new information. More importantly, this information sticks. They actually “get” the concepts and see how the concepts relate to far more than just the problems given.
Once I was told a story that demonstrates this point perfectly: Once upon a time, a student was in a physics class. He had achieved an otherwise perfect score, but the marker had graded him poorly on one question. The question had asked him how he would measure the height of a building using a barometer. The student had written down, “Go to the top of the building. Drop the barometer and count the seconds until it smashes on the sidewalk below. Then use the formula foracceleration by gravity to determine the height of the building.”
Of course, having referenced a barometer, the tester expected the student to use air pressure as a tool for measuring height. Since this answer did not demonstrate that the student knew how to solve questions about air pressure, he couldn’t pass that portion of the test.
When the student brought up that his answer did solve the question being asked, the professor made a compromise. He said that he would let the student answer the question again with a different method. And if the student solved the problem again, he would award him the marks for the question.
Immediately the student responded that he would use the barometer to bang on the door of the landlord in the building. When the landlord answered the door, he would ask, “How tall is this building?”
At once, the professor saw what the student was doing. He asked him if he knew of any other methods to reach the answer. The student said that he did.He recommended tying a long string to the barometer and measuring the length of the string. Or swinging the string as a pendulum and inferring the height by the motion it created.
The professor decided to award the student the marks. As the story goes, the student was a young Niels Bohr, later becoming the famous physicist and discovering the nature of electrons inside atoms. This student didn’t just know how to get the answer. He also understood the entire
scope for which the problem existed. Instead of seeing the problem in the same terms
he had been taught, he could easily view it a number of ways. The goal of holistic learning is to replicate this process with the information you want to learn.
Marvin Minsky
