Make Mistakes Faster -- Bad Advice?

We received a message today from a very proficient drummer who got that way by practicing very hard. He has found that for drumming if he goes as slow as he needs to, in order to do it right, that eventually he will do it real well and, in time, the speed will come!

He totally disagreed with our "Make Mistakes Faster" advice for students learning using HomeSchoolAdvantage.

I fully appreciate where he is coming from, but we are talking about practicing two different skills. Going slow with a musical instrument (or in many sports) is about trying to find the correct answer that is a function of your own personal muscle control, nerve speed, and cognitive control. In playing the drums, you go slow to find the correct answer to begin with, the correct answer cannot be told to you, you must discover it. Then you work to increase speed. You don't want to practice the wrong thing. We have no problem with that approach.

HomeSchoolAdvantage is not about playing a musical instrument or a sport, it is about academics. We are not practicing muscle control as a function of our own nerve speed and cognitive programming. HomeSchoolAdvantage is entirely about what is going on inside your head, specifically when the student is accumulating new facts. We can tell you the right answer to a fact, is does not have to be personally discovered.

HomeSchoolAdvantage as a system is the equivalent of fact flash cards, we prompt the students' memory to recall the facts, and then move on. If we use the drumming approach to teach the fact "7 + 5 = 12" we would be doing the student a terrible disservice. We would never advise you to ask the student during drilling on basic math skills to go slowly and "figure it out."

If the student has fingers, they will be able to figure it out.

The very purpose of going fast is to try to prevent them from figuring the answer out, it is a core fact, we want them to know it instantly. Our friend may believe he is having success with his drumming approach to academics because the student will be able to produce the correct answer, 12.

"Ah ha, you say. I knew Tom was wrong. Look, by giving them more time and going slowly they got the correct answer."

The problem is, and you only discover this by interviewing the students, is that you are teaching them to practice doing extra steps inside their head to get that answer. And practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. The same reason you only want to practice going slowly with drums is you want them to practice only the right things, not the wrong things. We want the same thing academically, the right thing is to instantly know (without additional thought) that 7 + 5 = 12.

If a student is encouraged to go really slow learning a fact like "7 + 5 = 12" it will probably work! Because they are able to answer it correctly by counting on their fingers or doing the equivalent of counting on their fingers mentally (counting points around the 5 or the 7). Their technique will work! You will be proven correct! At least you think you will. But in fact, they have simply developed bad cognitive habits that will follow them the rest of their lives. They will get the correct answer, but they will actually lose the ability to know that "7 + 5 = 12" instantly. Going slow answering "7 + 5 = 12" is like practicing incorrect drum technique. Perhaps we really agree with the drummer after all. We are interested in practicing "instant recall."

This is just one reason why I do not encourage students to follow the drummer's advice while learning new facts. There is another reason. A researcher who has studied these techniques for almost 30 years computationally has tracked tens of thousands of students learning millions and millions of facts. He publishes his results. He has found that a recall failure rate as high as 20% may be optimal for learning more material. Try to recall everything at or near 100% and your dramatically decrease the overall learning rate. My advice on how to learn more facts-- better and faster--is backed up by millions and millions of data points. The era of opinion in these matters is now over. Long live research. If the student's goal is to accumulate basic core knowledge then mistakes (forgetting) are to be encourage and not punished. Forgetting is the core of being human. Embrace it, do not resist it. Eventually the student will learn that "7 + 5 = 12." When they do, they will know it instantly and innately. Note, I am not talking about the concept of addition, I am talking about the fact "7 + 5 = 12."

The drummer's approach may be absolutely 100% correct for learning drums, and piano, and probably even baseball. We do not claim to be experts on these techniques, although we invite those experts to join the conversation. Those skills are fundamentally different from learning and remembering the multiplication tables, or any of tens of thousands of facts a student may wish to learn and instantly recall.

If you want to do everything slowly and perfectly the first time, our system is probably not for you. Although it probably could work. If you want to be able to recall instantly thousands and thousands of fact and be absolutely brilliant compared to most students graduating from High School today, then join us and learn. Oh, and make lots and lots of mistakes.