Posted by Mrs Ives on 4:19 Sep 15
In Reply to: P.S. There are children who just *know* things instinctively... posted by Rebecca in VA
" My son was composing pieces on his tiny violin at the age of three that were just beautiful. He can still sit down at the piano now at age 16 and make up gorgeous, imaginative pieces. He doesn't know how he does it -- the music just comes to him. "
I think that some of the confusion comes from not differentiating between practice and drilling. Drilling is going over a single set of facts repeatedly, practice is going over varied and increasingly difficult concepts in order to increase knowledge as illustrated in Rebecca's other post about math. The point is that once a kid knows a fact, drilling is a waste of time. The next step should be to actually use the information.
The overall point should also not be glossed over, and that is that it has yet to be proven that there is a good reason to hold back learning in one aspect of a subject until some subjective level of skill is attained in that subject. The underlying assumptions seem to be that: someone actually knows what concepts are absolutely necessary before learning can occur at higher levels, and that learning cannot occur in parallel. Two examples are math and science. There are numerous examples of students on this board who understand very complex ideas long before they have more than a smattering of the underlying arithmetic. There is also a popular theory that one cannot study high school level science until a particular level of math is achieved. However, this presupposes that one must understand how a theory was developed in order to learn anything at all about a field, and that's nonsense. For most of us that would mean that we could never learn about space flight, weather patterns, the speed of light, or why getting fat can lead to high blood pressure and diabetes since these subjects require a math and science background beyond the current ablilites of most of us. My point is that it is not only possible, but desirable to learn a subject at many levels simultaneously. Asychronous learning provides motivation to aquire the foundational skills while also revealing the true level of understanding.