clair073

Keep your "nose to the grindstone" is the advice we often give as an essential ingredient of learning difficult tasks. An old joke captures the problem with the old bromide for success, "Keep your eye on the ball, your ear to the ground, your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel: Now try to work in that position." Over the years of teaching, I have seen many highly conscientious students work like demons in their study yet don't seem to learn as much as they should for all the effort they put in. Typically, it is because they don't study smart. And sometimes the problem is created by the teachers' method of instruction. In an earlier post, I described a learning strategy wherein a student should spend repeated short (say 10-15 minutes) of intense study followed immediately by a comparable rest period of "brain-dead" activity where they don't engage with a new learning task. The idea is that memory of the just-learned material ...

Genius is defined by creativity. Albert Einstein is often regarded as the epitome of genius. Nobody seems to understand his genius other than to say that it bubbled up like uncorked champagne. But the story of his work paints a different picture. His discovery of Special Relativity, for example, came as a stepwise series of small insights spread over many years of incubation. Einstein used systematic ways of thinking to unleash his creativity. His success was not magic. There was method to his genius. First, Einstein relied heavily on thinking with visual images rather than words. Many famous scientists claim that their best thinking occurs in the form of visual images, even at the level of fantasy. Words and language, according to Einstein, had no role in his creative thought and math was used mainly to express the ideas quantitatively. Einstein, for example, in one of his fantasies visualized himself riding on a beam of light, holding a mirror in front of him. Since the light and the...