The discussion on intelligence reminded me of learning math as a child.
As a child I remember being forced to learn math tables. I found this particularly difficult because nobody was willing to justify why the axioms found on these table were true. If you can’t justify their veracity then why should I waste my time learning them? I respond extremely poorly to being forced to do something that I perceive as arbitrary. This is most certainly the case with math, but was equally applicable to grammar, spelling, and religion. As a consequent I never learned math, grammar, spelling, or religion in the way children who were unfortunate enough to have parents that forced them to learn this stuff perfectly. Those students got A’s and I learned what I thought was important. It’s my honest belief that the vast majority of those students that score better than me on the GRE do so primarily because their parents forced them to learn those arbitrary rules.
My parents never bothered to instill the value of pedantry and as a result I illicit mockery and derision because I write awkward sentences, misspell and mispronounce words, and make basic math errors. Making matter worse is my sanguine attitude regarding these errors. I finally found the justification
for these arbitrary rules; they exist simply as a mean to an end. Good grammar, spelling, and pronunciation enable you to communicate more effectively while good math skills enable you to convert the world into something easier to manipulate. These are not metaphysical justifications,
or as many including Bettina would term ‘absolute’, but practical ones, and for this reason are subjugated to the greater purpose of communication. The mere act of correcting my spelling, pronunciation, grammar or equations implies meaning has been conveyed. Thus, my nonchalant attitude when you correct, what I consider to be petty, details.
I’m loathing late July because I have to move all my stuff across several states to the city of Pittsburgh. I hate hate hate work and moving is a solid block of concentrated work. Similarly, I find the effort required to memorize arbitrary rules to be work. Therefore I mostly avoided learning those rules. I suspect most people who scored better than me on tests particularly as children did so primarily because the aversive experience of work was offset by the parents reaction to the outcome be it good or bad. Of course I was also beat out by those able to learn rules quickly but they have to expend much less energy reducing the amount of work required to memorize those rules.
I found the only way to manage the aversive experience of work is to have purpose. With a sense of purpose most work is transformed into something amusing. There are some kinds of work that when combined with purpose become outright enjoyable. Thus math is infinitely more interesting when I realized its purpose was to characterize the world in a more malleable form. Proper spelling and sentence construction has no real purpose, but in the context of writing clear and lucid passages it becomes purposeful as I problem solve to find the best sentence construction and meaning to clearly emulate the concepts I want to convey.
While i spent most of my life espousing the principle of purpose I didn’t explicitly apply it to my academics into about a year into college. By that time I lacked the proper inculcation needed to give rapid and reflexive answers to math, grammar and spelling elements on an exam. Instead, by searching for purpose I was able to see connections between concepts not just in a section but through the whole course, or it’s field of study, and sometimes even between fields of study. Unsurprisingly, professors that tested conceptual understanding over reflexive responding invariably resulted in my highest marks. Courses were strong emphasis was placed on reflexive responding put me at significant disadvantage to students conditioned for non-critical reflexive thinking.
Courses that emphasize speed as an important component to proving your knowledge favor students that employ tricks to those that favor conceptual understanding. This is usually the case because these courses invariably use multiple choice as the testing format to check for conceptual understanding. Of all the testing formats , multiple choice is most amenable to using tricks to acquire a high score without knowledge. For a further analysis pick up any GRE test book and just marvel at the amount of tricks they provide for deducing the correct answer without ever actually having to know the answer. Often times one can eliminate half the answers with these tricks while on some questions all the wrong answers can be eliminated. If you are unaware of these supercilious tricks you would have to go the slow way, that is deriving the answer through conceptual understanding for which there is a hefty time penalty.
Almost all children will find the work of learning tedious. Children with demanding parents will find ways to avoid the tedium by employing tricks that will yield high score with less work. As they proceed through their academic life they will develop and refine an impressive array of tricks and tools. By the time they finish college theses tricks are ripe for the challenge of a test that is specifically designed to test for a student’s set of tricks and not conceptual understanding.
People like me avoid the work of learning mostly by not doing it. However, when the time came to become serious about academics we find the best way to manage the work of learning was to transform it into something enjoyable by giving it purpose. The purpose of academic work is found in the concepts that underly the current work. By understanding how the current work connects to the underlying concept and how these concepts connect with each other to form the epistemology of any field of study places the current work into the context of an elaborate and interesting story. Academic work in this context is not work but an amusing exercise in problem solving as one discovers how concepts are interconnected. To accomplish this transformation one must do the additional work of finding a purpose in what they study an additional cost that puts off most other students.
The problem then is that students that actively find purpose in academics have no need to discover the sets of tricks that ‘prove’ they have conceptual knowledge without learning the concepts. Instead of tricks they just, you know, learn the concepts. When it comes time for them to take the GRE, they are at a significant disadvantage having failed to learn the tricks needed to identify the quickest way to solve a problem regardless of demonstrating a understanding of the concept. Is there any question as to why I fucking hate the GRE?
