What does it take to master a skill? Think of a violinist, or a champion tennis player or a painter. Think of an artist, or a nurse, or a teacher. An individual may exhibit talent but mastery requires several other elements.
Practice: There are no shortcuts. Any skill must be practiced to gain proficiency and, ultimately, to maintain it. Athletes train. Writers write. Musicians and doctors practice.Technique: While there may be more than one way to skin a cat, there are usually best practices in acquiring a skill. The advantage of good technique is that improvement is continually possible. Amateurs often gain a certain amount of proficiency for playing a game like golf or tennis, enough to enjoy it and to be competitive at a certain level. But they plateau out. Professionalism is possible only for those with excellent technique.
There are character traits that are also part of the mix.
Discipline: This means that feelings don't count. You adhere to a schedule regardless of how you feel. You show up, period.Diligence: You pay attention to best practices and don't cut corners.Patience: It takes time.Tolerance for failure: People who cannot tolerate failure in themselves never achieve much.
In the history of the human race, hard-won skills appear and disappear. Most ancient Greeks knew the configurations of the night sky. Not only was it important for navigation but it was the inspiration for the myths and fables of the culture. When this country was first settled, most educated men knew how to survey and measure land. Now only civil engineers practice that lost art. In today's society one doesn't have to know how to iron shirts, create meals from raw foods, stoke fires or split logs to keep warm. Modern life is creating a society of hot-house plants. In the interest of comfort, convenience and beauty, we are losing our ability to survive in the wild.
Image via Wikipedia
And the pace at which once-considered-essential skills are becoming obsolete is accelerating. Not so long ago, when I went to the green grocer in my NYC neighborhood, the clerk wrote the price of each item in a long column on a brown paper bag and did the addition at breathtaking speed as ran his pencil down the column. Today, many checkout cashiers become confused and panicked if you hand them extra money so that your change is a convenient round amount. Cursive handwriting is no longer taught in many schools. And texting seems to be replacing some other kinds of social interactions, although I'm not sure which ones.
At the risk of appearing to be the stereotypic old fogy who's wondering "What is this world coming to?" I have some questions about the valuable new essential skills (computer literacy, for example) that may be replacing more traditional ones. I just don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So here are some questions for you to ponder:
-- Nerds and geeks are typically thought of as people who are so into their own thing (like math or science) that they never develop adequate social skills to enjoy the company of others. Will computer games lead to an increase in the geek/nerd population?
-- Social skills are hard-won from a lifetime of interacting with others. What will be the effect of texting in children and adolescents on the development of people skills? On the development of writing skills?
-- The Internet makes the creation of cut-and-paste term papers a tempting short-cut for fulfilling homework assignments. (Take my word for it; writing well is definitely hard-won.) Ubiquitous cell phones have led to rampant cheating on tests in schools. How can educators cope with the changing student culture in view of these temptations? Is any sense of honor becoming moribund? Will technology erode the character traits I itemized above, which lead to hard-won skills? Or will they be applied to mastery of new skills? (I recently learned that a champion texter does 130 words per minute.) Am I worried over nothing?
Please comment!
Leave a comment