> “Humans learn from examples, not from “core concepts”
Nitpicking maybe but I disagree with tfa on this point; not all humans work this way. Those of us who might actually prefer the general -> specific direction are already largely ignored in k12 and may only begin to thrive in higher education. Since we’re already kind of underserved, there’s no need to also deny that we exist!
I recently learned to ride with a stick, on a trip with my girlfriend and her dad. My gf just told me what to do, when to press the clutch and when to let go of it. This didn't help me at all; I didn't understand the nuances of what to do when, which things to do completely simultaneously and which to one just right after another. And then her dad chimed in, briefly explaining to me what the clutch actually does, and how does the connection between wheels and engine affect both of them. I instantly got it and didn't have to even hear instructions what to do in any particular situation. About 20 minutes later I was able to drive a car from a hand brake on a backwards slope, which is supposed to be one of the hardest things to do with a stick.
Understanding how something works from first principles is much more useful for some people, and I think that there's a lot of "some people" among the software engineers.
I need both. Truly learning for me is learning core concepts, but examples are “known correct” cases I can test that understanding against. If something in the example is surprising, I know my model isn’t complete yet (or the example is wrong lol)
I also find “known incorrect” examples to be useful, for analogous reasons.
But the worst is when there is no good and thorough description of the conceptual model and of how the concrete examples relate to it, because then the system remains a black box you can’t properly reason about, regardless of how many hands-on tutorials and cookbook examples you’ve seen.
Yes! Both are valuable, and sometimes you need to iterate between and within each. Like if the conceptual components are mutually recursive (A is defined in terms of B, B in terms of A (SOLR anybody?)), skimming the docs can give you a "pencil sketch" level model, examples can flesh out the relationships between components, and re-visiting the docs with extra context can provide a more precise model.
Maybe I'm dimmer than the average techie, but I need both. Much of my current job is frustrating because it's a big company and every new task I encounter is presented with only an example of how the previous person did it. Instead of, "This is what we're trying to achieve, this is how the thing works, this is how we do it," all that ever gets exposed to ICs is the "this is how we do it" part. This makes it impossible to reason about, adjust, and troubleshoot when even the slightest deviation is required. Yes, there is often SOME documentation tasks which are performed very often, but it's often outdated or incomplete. But it's not in a wiki, so not just anyone can updated at any time, there's a whole obnoxious process for updating the docs, which is why they never get updated.
Now that I think of it, this reminds me quite a bit of my time in the military...
The thing is that you can derive the “this is how to do it” from the first two, but not the other way around. While it’s very helpful to have all three, the first two are essential while the last one is not.
I'm with you on this. My learning style is to read the reference manual cover to cover (metaphorically now). I can recall numerous instances of wanting to get into a new thing and finding the vast majority of recommended introductions to be the polar opposite of what I was looking for.
I'm going through this now as I decided to spend some time today learning the Drizzle ORM. The first things I found were all "here are half a dozen examples of queries", and I started getting frustrated: why are you using that syntax and not something else? What are the other options? I closed those and I'm much happier doing it my way: reading every page of the documentation before doing anything else.
Query-language docs are a great example of this, especially proprietary ones. 3000 examples, many with blog post baggage and other distracting discussion, and when you try to find a description of the grammar, crickets.
I only started thriving in school once I started practicing theory construction in my head.
Hypothesis->test->refine
I’m not sure I could still do it in realtime today. It takes a lot of cycles to do this and reading or pausing videos to process is more my speed now.
I’ve ended up spot tutoring a lot of people who still don’t get it. Having a theory of the system lets you answer their questions where a classmate would not be able to because they’re barely past rote.
This is something I'm starting to pick up and use from a mentoring and onboarding perspective. By now, I fairly openly wonder if someone needs conceptual or architectural clarification, technique on handling a thing, or a solution right there. And when we should have a follow-up call in the first two cases.
And having both thoughts and material available for a specific -> general, as well as a general -> specific path around is very good, because in more complex topics, it helps to be able to do both. Let them get a grip on some concrete things, then bring in the abstract ideas. Or let them learn the abstract concepts and show them how they can do concrete things with it.
Hopefully some teachers are actively looking for which approach students need, like you are.
I always found the focus on say audio vs visual learning styles to be strange because for me, abstract vs concrete is much more important.
Showing a collection of examples to illustrate an abstraction is fundamentally kind of bizarre to me, especially when the abstraction is short and easy to state. Because really, the concrete examples might have many things in common and I won’t be sure which ones the teacher wishes to indicate.
This problem is more obvious with math/code maybe, but I see the same issues with teaching / learning things like philosophy and history. Examples very often just obscure the lesson for me, especially when they come first. Just hit me with the abstraction and generalities first so I can orient, then I can understand which part of the concrete examples I’m supposed to consider.
I need an example and an explanation of what problem is being solved.
Pages of dense text with lots of jargon, like a recent K8s course I've been doing are just something I find utterly useless for learning unless it involves a good amount of accompanying hands-on learning.
Yeah, it might be me. I learned microcontrollers by learning assembly, gdb, as, ld, then gradually switched to C, wrote my own "library", then slowly learned about vendor library and gradually replaced by code with proper approach.
Can't imagine learning this stuff from the vendor code examples. I wouldn't understand a thing.
This approach works for me, but only when documentation is extensive. When vendor suggests "copy this example and tinker with code until it works the way you want", this approach just throws me off and I absolutely lose any will to learn. Examples are very important, but not as starting point.
This also stood out to me as obviously wrong in the article. Since time immemorial, we have taught math by teaching the core concepts and building on them incrementally. Since people do successfully learn how to do math, this directly disproves the author's claim that people don't learn that way.
It may be that people successfully learn something entirely new to them from studying core principles not thanks to such an approach, but despite it. Some would say the approach unnecessarily limits the amount of people who would otherwise easily grasp the topic.
Math is usually introduced by way of examples (counting apples and such), and it could be that using those more would make more complicated topics more accessible.
I wish I had ever seen math taught that way. Usually I'd is taught as "here's a bunch of example problems. Solve all the problems and hopefully intuition will magically result"
> Since time immemorial, we have taught math by teaching the core concepts and building on them incrementally.
This is just false. Some of the earliest examples we have of what appears to be writing used in teaching contexts, it's heavily focused on repetition of examples.
Nitpicking maybe but I disagree with tfa on this point; not all humans work this way. Those of us who might actually prefer the general -> specific direction are already largely ignored in k12 and may only begin to thrive in higher education. Since we’re already kind of underserved, there’s no need to also deny that we exist!