It’s only been 6 days, and I think I’ve cracked the code to Project Thinking Out Loud. I’ve discovered the key to creating – which I may or may not have ripped off of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. I read it a long time ago, so who knows. But even though I’m sure this idea isn’t original, I’ve finally realized how powerful and true it is.
20hrs to Competence – How I Learned to Do Vector Portraits
I saw this TED Talk by Josh Kaufman a while back called The First 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything. The takeaway was basically that it only takes 20 hours to become reasonably good at something. Pick a specific skill you want to be good at. Put 20 hours into it. See what happens.
I did just that over the past week without realizing it. I spent between 20-25hrs on this portrait of Newt Scamander from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Take a look.
Do tests accurately measure mastery?
This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.
This is actually a difficult question to answer in a sharp yes or no. It depends on what kind of test is given and what the point of the test is. In this article, we’re going to talk about multiple-choice tests, fill-in-the-blank style tests, free response style tests, oral presentations, and portfolio-style projects, and see what each of these styles of testing is actually good for.
Multiple choice tests
They’re incredibly quick to grade and comparatively quick to take. Multiple choice tests make up the majority of tests that we take in formal education.
There are two main problems with multiple choice tests though. The first is that they’re easy to “crack”. You don’t have to necessarily know the answer to the question if you can recognize what isn’t the answer. The second issue is that multiple choice tests only determine whether you know a set of facts. There’s no room for interpretation or concession, all questions demand a single, clear, black and white answer.
It seems contrary to the very of purpose of education, though, that we test whether or not our students know exclusively facts. We want critical thinkers, right? We want people who ask questions and give thoughtful answers. The world is full of shades of gray that we want everyone to be able to observe and respect.
So the only thing that multiple choice tests can assess mastery of is clear, black and white facts. And yet because you can “crack” multiple choice tests, it doesn’t even do this very well.
Multiple choice tests might take a lot less time than other tests (both for the student and the teacher), but I think we can agree that they’re terrible assessments of mastery.
Diversity: The Thing I Love Most About Language Learning
This post is a part of my Personal Development Project for May 2016.
I’m a polyglot. That is, I speak a couple foreign languages. I’m not perfect, but I speak Russian, Portuguese, and a livable amount of Polish in addition to English. I’ve spent lots of hours studying other languages like Japanese, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Nigerian Pidgin too just for fun.
My goal in my personal language learning is just puzzle solving. Plain and simple. Languages are like puzzles to me. I choose a language to learn with the intent to pick it apart and see how it works. If I remember enough to order dinner when I go to a Thai restaurant or if I solidify my knowledge enough to maintain a discussion on the Ukrainian civil war with a stranger on the train, that’s cool. If not, I don’t really care.
Truth be told, the thing I love about language learning the most isn’t even the language learning itself. Most of all, I love the diversity of the language learning and polyglot community that exists because so many people happen to share my weird hobby. The diversity of the community has made language learning invaluable for me.
I’ll bet that when I say the word “diversity”, you think of race or ethnicity or nationality or maybe socio-economic class. This is usually the context in which we hear this word. But I think that it’s hard to really understand what diversity is when we always look at it in these contexts. The word loses its power (if it has any) because it’s vague and impersonal and charged.
So I’m actually not going to talk about diversity in any of these contexts at all. I’m going to talk about it in a way that’s more real and meaningful to me in my life. I’m going to share five polyglots who I think represent the diversity of the language learning community. They’re diverse in their skills, their depth of knowledge, their breadth of knowledge, their approach to learning, their field of learning, and their goals. And these areas of diversity are what has made language learning so meaningful to me.