(I am dead serious on this. Even if the most musical sound your cello ever makes is you hitting it with hammers, so long as you learned something from me about how your own body/mind learns, I consider our lessons a rousing success.)
Yesterday’s post described universal patterns of thought.
In today’s post, I’ll answer a few questions.
“...Yes, but doesn’t classroom teaching show that all minds are different?”
The mind/body universality I have just described, as revealed to me by many years of one-on-one cello teaching, is of a higher order:
Human minds approach NON-KNOWING, ignorance, in a fundamentally similar way, despite their many and obvious individual differences.
The universal shape of this learning process is simple enough:
Individual minds approach ignorance by sifting through their own vast, uniquely individual collection of talents and acquired experiences, in an attempt to find personalized relevance.
This inward search for relevance is by necessity a process of iterative false starts.
Half-relevant concepts, useful half-analogies, other good results that might perhaps apply to the topic-to-be-learned... all of it is fair game.
Anything, anything at all, that might be useful to narrow down the new concept, gets thrown at the wall until something sticks.
Then, once the target range is acquired, the mind locks on, optimizes, narrows down, and zeroes in.
But the targeting process itself DOES NOT CHANGE. “Narrowing down” is no different from questing outward! It's just that the target has gotten much, much smaller.
The mind/body, abstract-physicality-hybrid of cello teaching, as I teach it, offers a unique physiological window into the hidden universality of this mental process.
“…Got an actual example?”
Imagine a Roomba crashing into walls to determine the shape of the room it is vacuuming,
or a new student asking off-the-wall, not-even-wrong questions to determine what EXACTLY might be meant by the idea of a "limit" in calculus,
or a novice trying to grasp how a knight moves in chess.
The iterative splattercone of questions is the same in each case! It always takes the same essential shape. It is just a difficult shape to describe in words.
“…Why bother describing it then?”
Because abstract universals are power.
Abstract the chaotic learning process far enough, and hidden universals emerge, rising above (and perhaps even orthogonal to) the wild natural variance of individual style and content.
And that turns out to be an enormously insightful observation, because it generalizes so very well:
Individual content may steer, but the universal process drives.
Simple heuristics save cognitive power, unleashing your potential for doing other things, right?
Heuristics are power too.
“…How does this idea help me?”
Knowledge, too, is power.
It doesn’t matter how different your starting lines are. Once you understand the PROCESS of how you learn, you can learn anything. All you need is time.
Better yet, once you understand the UNIVERSALITY of the learning process, together with its significance, you can teach others how to learn as well.
That’s the prize.
That’s how we fix everything.
As a one-on-one cello teacher, I have long used "cello playing" as a vehicle to train my cello students in recognizing how their own body/minds learn, so that later they can harness the power of their own marvelous mental machinery with greater confidence, even in other knowledge domains.
The quality of the cello playing itself is incidental!
(I am dead serious on this. Even if the most musical sound your cello ever makes is you hitting it with hammers, so long as you learned something from me about how your own body/mind learns, I consider our lessons a rousing success.)
So get out there and try new things! Experiment joyfully. Make glorious mistakes! Watch yourself learn. Grow.
Maybe even practice your cello.
You can thank me later.