Category: Learning

With the abundance of learning materials available in various forms (books, online tutorials, course notes, etc.) the question of whether a human teacher is necessary for learning any particular subject comes up more and more often. I encounter this in the engineering courses that I teach, and in photography, kendo and calligraphy that I learn.

I think that elementary aspects of many (if not all) activities can be learned independently (from books, etc.), but at some (relatively high) level, the social aspects become important. To be more precise, I think that a teacher can make a substantial difference at the very beginning of the learning process, by teaching the fundamentals in a “correct” way, and at a relatively advanced stage, after some “homework” or internal processing has been done by the student, by providing feedback and calibrating the newly developed approaches, skills and techniques (and sometimes, the underlying values and motivations).

I wrote earlier about the importance of teaching, i.e. of being a teacher, but recently thought about the role of the teacher from the student’s perspective, after watching a documentary called “Monk With A Camera” about Nicholas Vreeland, a photographer, who became a Buddhist monk, but kept shooting photos. I find it insightful that at all stages he actively sought a teacher – first by applying, though his mother’s connections, to work for a famous fashion photographer and then by learning from some of the most illustrious Buddhist teachers.

When practicing a skill, at some point, an effect that is opposite to diminishing returns starts to show. The new skill begins to benefit other aspects of activity, even those that are seemingly unrelated to the original practice.

In photography, an example of this would be building a portfolio that attracts new work, which in turn enhances the portfolio even further. In other areas, examples of reaching the inflection point include learning the basics of a foreign language, which enables one to read books, connect with people, etc., or reaching a certain level of physical fitness, which enables a whole new range of activities: sports, work, travel, etc.. Malcolm Gladwell described a similar phenomenon of viral spread of ideas in his book “The Tipping Point.”

There is an interesting analogy between reaching the critical level of mastery of a skill and physical phenomena in fluid mechanics, which I teach to students. Particularly, separation of a boundary layer under the influence of an adverse pressure gradient happens after an inflection point (in a mathematical sense) in the local velocity profile occurs.

Just like in nature, though, predicting when the inflection occurs (in the case of skill development, how much practice is required before exponential changes start to happen) is most difficult. When we are just starting, the only comfort we can take is that the critical transition will happen for sure – this seems to be the law of nature.