November 2008

The Jiu Jitsu Theory of Education

by Vlad Dolezal on November 30, 2008

Image courtesy of ADD Photography

Woohoo! I found it!

An education system that works! As you might know, I’m a big fan of rebuilding the education system. What we have now does a dozen things reasonably well… but helping students learn isn’t one of them. Thankfully, I recently came across a model of teaching that REALLY works!

My Jiu Jitsu club.

I joined up at the beginning of October. And now, after two months, I figured out what they do so well. And a lot of the things could be transferred to traditional education!

Peer-to-peer teaching

The sessions are formally taught by our sensei, a brown belt (grade 7). But sometimes we split into groups and several are taught by lower grades, like purple belts (grade 4). Also, when we split into pairs to practice new techniques, the grades might go around and help us white belts (grade 0) understand the technique. And when we practice the techniques, sometimes I understand it better than the white belt I’m training with, and sometimes my partner understands it better. So we correct each other, or explain things to each other.

From the moment you start, you will be taught by many different people. Also, as you progress through your grades, you will teach others increasingly often. There’s constantly lots of back-and-forth teaching going on between people. You get to see what kinds of explanations help you learn, and what kinds don’t. You also explain stuff to others, which helps you practice explaining better. And you understand the techniques better through teaching.

Which brings me to the next point.

You are REQUIRED to teach to progress through your grades

Ever since orange belt (grade 2), you are required to teach bits and pieces in the sessions to progress towards your next belt. This has two absolutely awesome effects:

1. Teachings others helps you understand things much better

Whenever I learn a new cool thing, I just HAVE TO teach it to others. Just ask my friend Rich. I will literally call him up in the middle of the night saying “Check this out! I just learned this really cool new thing…”. Whenever I learn something new, I just pick up my phone and start dialing whoever might be interested.
- David DeAngelo

I got to around 1900 rating, and then just leveled off. I didn’t make much progress for months. Then I decided to start teaching others. I taught dozens and dozens of people of different skill levels. And my own success went through the roof!
- Ben Seeley

The first guy above runs a twenty-million-dollars-a-year business (it’s probably more now. That statistic is a bit outdated.). The second guy became a world champion at the game he was talking about within only two years of starting to teach lots of other people.

If we could only make teaching others an integral part of the education system. Maybe we could stop splitting people into classrooms by years. Instead, we would have different skill levels (instead of different years), and we would always mix them together in a classroom. The more skilled ones would help teach the less skilled ones. That would help the higher year students so much more than just sitting quietly listening to some rambling professor.

2. Teaching others since your early years makes you a much better teacher

By the time you get to a blue belt (grade 6), you will have been taught by dozens of people, and you will have taught others hundreds of times. Your average Jiu Jitsu blue belt is much better at teaching Jitsu than most school teachers are at teaching their subject!

In fact, in Jiu Jitsu, a brown belt needs to run his own club for at least two years before even potentially being invited to grade for his black belt. By the time a Jitsuka gets to black belt, he’s guaranteed to be a fantastic teacher.

Sure, some martial arts masters believe a belt should only represent your skill at the martial art, not at teaching others. Let’s not get into a discussion of whether that’s right or wrong. The fact is, Jiu Jitsu masters believe teaching is inseparable from being a martial art master. And I agree. It runs both ways. Teaching helps you become much better. And to be a true master, you need to know how to teach your skills to others.

Some days, we all practice the basics

Sometimes we split into groups by skill level, and each group practices different techniques. But other times, we all train together. Because mastery of the basics is what separates a competent person from a grandmaster.

I was at a major go [a board game of skill] tournament. After the day’s games, I was walking around, and saw one of the grandmasters reading a simple book about go that I’ve read years ago. We strike up a conversation and I tell him I’ve already solved all the problems in that book. He looks at me, and says “So have I. Hundreds of times. And yet I solve them again, and each time, I try to solve them faster and better.”
- Some random go player [sorry, I can't remember where I read this story]

Similarly, in Jitsu, the black belts still practice some of the same techniques they teach to white belts. They just do them so much better!

Jiu Jitsu students WANT to learn

Learning is an active process. You can not make someone learn. Sure, you can convince students to want to learn by threatening them with bad grades and extra work. That’s pretty much like threatening a slave with beatings if he doesn’t do your work. You won’t get exceptional results and a positive environment that way.

Until you convince students to actually WANT to learn, you’re fighting a losing battle. And the quickest way to make someone NOT want to learn is to force them.

Yeah, I know. It’s hard to reconcile the idea of “education for everyone” with “not forcing anyone to learn”. But I just had to bring this point up anyway. If we managed to create schools where students would WANT to learn (I’ve got some ideas about that), that would be the single biggest step towards a great education system.

Possible objections

Here are a few objections you might have thought of by this point. I’ll try to explain why some of these objections aren’t really a problem.

1. Jitsu is a skill. Schools are about learning information.

This is a good point. Learning skills and learning information are two completely different things. You learn skills by doing. You can’t do information. You learn information by connecting it to other bits of information you already know.

But in this article, I focused on the universal things that are great about my Jitsu club. The things that can be applied to any learning/teaching environment. I skimmed over how the club makes great use of post-practice improvement. Or how the sensei quickly explains a new technique, gives us 30 seconds to try it, and THEN proceeds to explain it in detail. Or how they masterfully break down techniques into simple steps to help us learn faster. Those are all great for learning skills. But I focused mainly on the universal stuff – most of which I haven’t seen myself until two months ago.

Also, schools aren’t just about acquiring information. In fact, the better the school, the more it focuses on skills rather than information. Real maths is about solving problems you never encountered before, not about memorizing algorithms. Real english is about analysing great writers and using that to improve your own writing, not about learning dozens of names and buzzwords. It’s more important to know how to find information than to memorize it. And all of these are SKILLS.

2. You expect 7-year olds to teach 6-year olds?

I have no idea. I’d give it a try. In the current education system, you usually need to get to be a postgraduate student before teaching others. That’s way too late. And even though in some schools a few select students get teaching responsibilities around 15 or 16 years old, that’s still pretty late. There might be a lower limit to how young a child can be before teaching others. But I would try pushing it as low as possible.

3. With all the different people teaching, won’t the students get really confused?

I don’t think so. You have the sensei (the classroom teacher) who walks around and makes sure everybody is doing it right. Sure, a yellow belt’s explanations might not be as helpful as those of a black belt. But they’re still damn good stuff.

How to use all this in our education system

I have a few broad ideas on how to use this in an education system. I won’t go into much detail, because I haven’t figured that out yet.

1. Replace years with grades

Instead of being “second years”, “fifth years” and such, students would get coloured belts, like in Jitsu. That way, smarter students could progress faster, and slower ones could take more time. You would always be learning mostly with students of the same skill level. Everybody wins.

2. Peer-to-peer teaching

Instead of separating classes by skill level (i.e. all orange belts in the same class), each class would contain people from all skill levels. That way, we could get full back-and-forth teaching going on.

Sure, some classes would be specifically for certain grades. But that would be an exception rather than the rule.

3. Required teaching to progress through grades

In Jitsu, you need to be a brown belt (grade 7), before you can run your own club. By the time you get to that level, you have been teaching others for years, and have been taught by dozens of other people. You pretty much know what works for students and what doesn’t. Contrast that with the current education system, where many teachers have no clue on how to make learning fun and interesting for the students.

If we required school teachers to be brown belts at education, we would have a guarantee of awesome teaching.

4. Mandatory grade instead of mandatory time

Instead of forcing students to stay in school for 12 years, I would let them out after achieving a certain grade. Say, a purple belt (grade 4). Sure, they could stay, and for example continue chemistry until they become a black belt. That would be analogous to a student continuing to postgraduate studies instead of dropping out after high school.

Some final thoughts

Sure, there are some things left to figure out. Maybe different belts for different subjects? (I could be a blue belt at mathematics, yet a yellow belt at history). What skills are needed for different belts? What to do about hard-to-measure skills like creativity and critical thinking? (Maybe have the students publish in established periodicals? Like have them get their short story published in a magazine?). And dozens more.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. I’m always open to being told I’m a complete moron and this would never work. As long as your comment is specific

{ 17 comments }

Thinking Non-Linearly

by Vlad Dolezal on November 22, 2008

When you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA, you get a nice linear step-by-step manual for assembling it. When you read a mathematical proof, it’s laid out linearly, from the beginning to end. When you want driving directions from point A to point B, same thing again. Nice, linear, first go here, then turn here, then drive here, and voila, you have arrived.

Linear thinking is perfect for some things. After all, you wouldn’t want a manual that starts from the end, then makes a couple of jumps in the middle, and then tells you how to begin. But again and again, I see people apply linear thinking where non-linear thinking is far more useful.

Creative thinking isn’t linear. The guy who designed IKEA tables didn’t think “Ok, I have exactly 8 type B screws in front of me, and exactly these pieces of wood, now obviously I fit these two pieces together… and these…”. No. It was more like “Ok, I want to build a table. So first I need to get a big flat bit of wood for the desktop, and four legs. And I need something to hold them together. Let me try this…”

Non-linear problem solving

I like to think of this as a picture. You’re at the start, and you want to get to your goal. Along the way, you’ll need to overcome some obstacles.

(a LOT of obstacles, in this case)

If you try to think linearly, (imagine you see the maze from the point of view of the stick guy), you’ll take turns pretty much at random. And you can easily get stuck in dead ends.

If you’re facing a maze, linear thinking would be like trying to figure out the best way by walking through the maze more or less randomly. As a non-linear thinker, however, you would walk outside the maze, go on top of a nearby hill, see where you need to turn at the major intersections, sketch a quick map, and THEN go back in.

And that’s exactly how creative problem solving works. By non-linear thinking. If you’re designing a piece of software, you don’t just sit down and start coding, and the right thing magically appears. You first figure out what you’re building (the goal), what you need to build along the way to get there (major intersections), and some possible problems you could face (dead ends). Only THEN, once you chop up the task ahead into manageable bits (a couple hours’ worth), do you start working linearly on the individual bits.

Here are a few questions I like to ask to get myself thinking the right way:

1. What’s my goal?

2. What are the major checkpoints along the way?

3. What are the potential problems?

4. What’s the next step I can get started on as soon as possible?

Creative problem solving is like painting. You start with an idea of what you want to paint, then roughly sketch the outline, and then fill in the details. And if you ever get stuck, just take a step back, and look at the big picture. The solution will usually appear clear as day.

So, next time you have a problem to solve, just use the methods outlined here. You’ll see for yourself how well they work.

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Activation Energy

by Vlad Dolezal on November 16, 2008

Ah! This concept finally came together in my mind!

It all started one bright summer day. I was walking through a housing area and saw the shoulder-height fences around the houses. I thought: “What’s with those fences? They would never stop me if I wanted to actually rob the place.”

Then I realized what the fences are for. They aren’t there to stop burglars. They’re there to stop people’s compulsive behavior – like teenagers spraying their signatures on the houses. If the teenagers see those fences, they’ll go “Ah, whatever, let’s go do something else.” They decided to spray something on a whim – and they will lose interest just as easily.

The fences simply raise the activation energy for impulsive behavior. (They’re also there because having a bigger fence around the house makes us guys feel more manly. But that’s a topic for another day…)

What is activation energy

In chemistry, activation energy is the energy you need to start a reaction. For example, paper doesn’t just spontaneously combust in thin air, because you need to heat it up to a certain point before it bursts into flames.

But once it starts burning, the reaction will sustain itself, because each burning molecule releases enough energy to push all the surrounding molecules over the edge, and get them burning as well.

So I stole this concept, and applied it to productivity.

I like to think of activation energy as the following picture:

You want to roll the rock down the hill. Once you get it rolling, you’ll be fine. But you first need to overcome the small hump. The rock represents an action you want to do (like writing a paper). The hump represents the activation energy – how much effort it takes to get you started. Also notice that once you get going, it’s easier to keep going than to stop.

Activation energy for bad habits

Let’s say you have a bad habit you’d rather not do. For example, I sometimes waste time on reddit (a social news site). Yet if I had to drive into town and go into an internet cafe just to check reddit, I definitely wouldn’t bother. It’s all about the activation energy.

A friend of mine came up with a brilliant way to use this to cut down on his facebook usage. He simply removed facebook from his bookmarks… so now to visit facebook, he needs to type out the URL. It sounds like a trivial change, but it raised the activation energy enough for him to noticeably cut down on his facebook usage.

So if you have a bad habit you would like to stop doing, try raising the activation energy. It works wonders for compulsive behavior!

But that isn’t the most awesome part of tweaking activation energy.

The real power comes with good habits!

Activation energy for good habits

Leo Babauta has a great recipe to get himself running. He says he simply focuses on putting on his running shoes and stepping out the front door. The rest takes care of itself.

That’s an awesome application of activation energy. How much effort would it take you to get out of the house and run for 20 minutes? Now, how much effort would it take you to put on your running shoes and just step out of the front door?

In my case, the second scenario definitely takes a lot less mental effort. But wait! Look at the diagram for activation energy. Once you overcome the initial hump, the rock will get rolling without any effort on your part! So once you’re standing outside with your running shoes on, it takes almost no effort whatsoever to go to the park and start running.

In the same way, you can lower your activation energy for any other positive action. Instead of focusing on writing a paper, sit down with the goals of writing 500 words. Instead of trying to eat healthy from now until eternity, set yourself a goal of eating healthy for 14 days straight. Or choose any other positive action, and figure out how to lower the activation energy.

Here’s how you can apply this immediately:

1. Think of a good habit or action you’d like to do more often

2. Figure out how to make the first step easier to accomplish (make

it smaller, or more fun)

3. Focus all your energy on doing the first step. The rest will

take care of itself.

Cheers!

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Do What’s Important, Not What’s Urgent

by Vlad Dolezal on November 8, 2008

I keep a sheet of paper pinned on a notice board on my wall. It looks quite innocuous. Quite insignificant. (I would also add incandescent, just to keep up the pattern, but I’m not quite sure what that means). And yet this piece of paper is my second biggest productivity tool! (The first one is always carrying around pen and paper)

If you looked at this mysterious sheet of paper on my wall, you would find it’s very simple. There’s a date for each day, followed by a few bullet points. The bullets points are my most important tasks for each day.

Most Important Tasks (aka Big Rocks)

Leo Babauta makes a great analogy in his article on Big Rocks. Your day is like a bucket. The big rocks represent the most important tasks in your life. But unless you’re careful, the bucket will quickly fill with sand and small pebbles (unimportant tasks), and you’ll find you can’t fit in your big rocks anymore. So you wait for the next bucket (next day). Yet somehow, you again end up filling it with sand and run out of space for the big rocks. It doesn’t help that other people are more than happy to help you fill your buckets with their own sand.

If you want the big rocks to fit, you will need to place them in your buckets well in advance, to make sure there’s enough space. You can then fit the sand around them.

And that’s exactly what my piece of paper on the wall does. I write down the most important tasks for each day. The tasks I simply WILL accomplish, no matter what. The tasks that will really make a lasting difference to my life. If, on some day, I finish my most important tasks, and then spend 8 hours straight playing computer games, I will go to bed happy. (ok, it’s not really possible to feel good after 8 hours of playing computer games, but you get the general idea.) Because I know I got the really important stuff done. Getting the life-changing stuff done in a few hours and wasting the rest of the day is better than doing mildly useful things all day long.

How to recognize the important tasks

Lots of tasks seem important, but once you pause to think about them, they’re just urgent. Like returning a DVD to the rental store on time. So what if you don’t return it today… just return it tomorrow and pay the late charge.

Or at school – I think understanding the stuff is important. Homework is merely urgent. So throughout school I often ignored homeworks. (And, at university, I still do. I often hand in a homework with only half the questions answered, with “boring” written next to the rest.) Some high school teachers used to hate me for treating homeworks how they deserve to be treated – as merely urgent, not important – and gave me some really bad marks during the year. Yet, in the final exams, I always got great marks, because I understood the subject.

So how do you recognize important tasks from the merely urgent? Here are a few helpful questions:

1. Will this matter 5 years from now?

If something will have lasting positive effect on your life even 5 years from now, it’s probably important. And if it won’t, it’s probably not that important. (cumulative things, noted in number 3. below, are an exception.)

2. If I accomplish this today, will I go to sleep happy and content?

I often delay important decisions (like booking airplane tickets) for days or even weeks. Then, once I finally get off my lazy butt and actually do them, I suddenly feel so free. Like a big weight has been lifted off my chest. So learn from my mistakes. Schedule your important tasks in as soon as possible, and get them done. You’ll be going to bed every day with a sense of accomplishment and happiness.

3. Is this cumulative?

It might not seem like a big deal to skip one exercise session. Or to sleep late one day when you’re trying to switch to waking up early. But every time you skip your habit, it makes the subsequent days harder to maintain.

Conversely, it might not seem like a big deal to give a small speech in front of 20 acquaintances. But the confidence and experience you get from it will carry along with you. You will feel more confident and comfortable with public speaking EVERY SINGLE TIME after that. It’s like compound interest – every little bit matters, because it builds on itself forever after.

What you can do RIGHT NOW

Want to get started immediately? After all, every day you delay doing important things, you miss the compound interest!

The easiest way to get started is to grab a pen and a piece of paper. Then just spend a few minutes thinking about important tasks in your life you’ve been delaying. Or even come up with new tasks you haven’t thought of. Maybe you could call or e-mail someone with a business offer. Maybe there’s a book you’ve wanted to read for a long time. Maybe there’s a hobby you’ve always wanted to try out… and all you need to do is a quick google search to find a local club!

Only you know what are the really important things to you. So take a few moments to figure it out. Then write down when, within the next 7 days, you’re going to accomplish all the things you came up with. You won’t believe how fast you can transform your life if you make sure you get done the truly important tasks.

Cheers, and good luck!

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Random Ideas

by Vlad Dolezal on November 1, 2008

I have loads of random ideas. Every now and then, they’re interesting enough I share them with some friends. And even more rarely, I feel just telling them to my friends isn’t enough. So I wish I had a website I could post them to. And guess what. I DO have a website to post them to

Some of the following random thoughts are kind of serious, some are just random observations I find amusing. If I have more of them in the future, I might make this into a static page instead of just a blog post. Anyway, here’s the first batch of my random thoughts!

Infinite staircase

I love walking up long flights of stairs. One of my favorite tourist spots is the Eiffel tower, where I walked as far up as I could using the stairs (unfortunately the stairs don’t lead all the way to the top).

So I was thinking – why stop only as high as the Eiffel tower? Or Burj Dubai, or any other man-built staircase. How about making an INFINITE staircase, for a freak like me? (Or at least the illusion of an infinite staircase). Well, never a man to be stopped by logical impossibilities, here’s what I came up with:

Imagine a long escalator. Really long. No, not infinite, just long enough for this to work. Now imagine you go and start walking up the escalator. Let’s say it’s basically in a tunnel. Just the escalator, and nothing else. Then, the whole tunnel fills with mist, so it’s more mysterious, and you can also see only a few meters ahead.

A person will be watching you from a surveillance room, using hidden cameras. Then they will start the escalator into motion. Moving in the opposite direction than you’re walking. So if you’re walking up, this escalator would be going down. It would be built so that it gets moving VERY gently, so you don’t feel it. It would take a while to match your speed, but after that, you would be in one spot, just treading the stairs. In the mist. Maybe with some cool soundtrack playing. Walking for EVER. MUHAHAhahahahaaaa…

Laugh-out-loud funny indeed

The other day, I was walking down the street and saw a movie ad on the side of a bus. One thing that struck my eye was the reviewer quote on that ad. It said:

“Laugh-out-loud funny!”
- some reviewer

I, being a geek, of course immediately translated the quote into an abbreviation – “LOL funny!” and burst out laughing. Using the abbreviation literally transformed a serious reviewer quote into something that looked like a YouTube comment left by a 12-year old.

Splitting the maths teachers

I’ve been a university student for over a month now. I’ve noticed one thing – most maths lecturers suck. The thing is, maths teaching is composed of two bits – maths and teaching. Most maths lecturers are great at the maths bit, but crap at the teaching bit.

In high school, I had a very unique maths teacher for one year. He was so bad at teaching, stuff actually made LESS sense after he explained it! (No, seriously.) I haven’t met anyone quite like that since… until now. One of my lecturers is just like that. The stuff makes some sense, then the lecturer talks about it for an hour, and by the end you’re more confused than when you came into the lecture!

This got me thinking. To make a good maths teacher, you need both the maths and the teaching. Unfortunately, finding both in the same person is very rare. But hey, what if it didn’t have to be the same person…

What about having two lecturers in each lecture? One would be great at maths, the other would be great at teaching. The teacher would by default do most of the teaching, and the maths expert would be there to correct any mistakes, and answer the students’ questions if the teacher can’t cope with them. That way, the students get the best of both worlds. Good teaching with clear explanations, but also an experienced mathematician to answer any random questions they might have.

Six Random Things about me

I got recently got tagged by fairyhedgehog in the Six Random Things meme. It’s a blogging version of those annoying chain e-mails. You know, the ones that go “If you don’t send this on to 10 people, a zombie girl will come at midnight and eat your brains”. (I actually got an chain e-mail like that once. “Sweet!” I thought. Finally a chance to test this out! So I deliberately didn’t pass the e-mail on to anyone. All excited, I stayed up until midnight. I even left the window right next to me open, so the zombie girl would have an easy entry. Unfortunately, she never showed up. I guess someone she was visiting earlier that night had eaten a garlic sandwich or something. Sigh.)

So… I won’t be passing this on, since I’m not a fan of pointless chain e-mails (or chain blog posts, in this case). But since the idea of writing six random things about myself goes well with this post’s theme, I figured I might include them . Without further ado, here are six random things about me:

1. I can’t stay still while brushing my teeth. So I walk around, or browse the web, or whatever. Last week, I was reading a book in my bed. Suddenly I feel toothpaste trying to drop out of my mouth onto the bedsheets. I barely avoid it, and realize I still have my toothbrush in my mouth. It’s been there for at least 10 minutes, and I completely forgot about it. (the book was a Terry Prachett).
2. I once solved the Rubik’s cube with my feet.
3. I love walking barefoot through grass. I love it so much, at several points in my life, I went out in the middle of the night just to do it.
4. I spent more time pimping out my computer’s operating system than pimping out my room. Orders of magnitude more.
5. I once tried learning to count in hexadecimal. No, I mean really count in hexadecimal. I invented six new symbols for the extra digits (ABCDEF just wouldn’t cut it for me), and then spent days practicing basic addition and multiplication. I got bored before I could become proficient at it. But one of the symbols I invented made it into my “evil overlord sign”, and it’s now even part of my official signature.
6. I sometimes read books upside down. It makes me read about 5 times slower, so I can savour the book more. For example, I read the whole last book of the Harry Potter series upside down.

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Current Mission

November 2008