| This almost - almost - pushed me to figure out how to resubmit memebase posters so that I could say something along the lines of 'Oddly enough, Marvel seems to agree with you ...' |
In one of the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell (which I greatly enjoy despite the sometimes desperately thin characterization and development, and which have MUCH better covers in the UK), the two main characters who serve as naval officers are discussing ship-handling with the main character who is a political liaison. In this centuries-hence future, interstellar warships use inertial compensators and unspecified but presumably pretty beastly propulsion systems to scoot around star systems at substantial fractions of the speed of light (engagements can happen at relative velocities of up to .2 c before relativity starts borking the fire control computers), weapons have effective ranges of tens of thousands of kilometers, and essentially all maneuvering and fire control is done by computers as ships enter and exit engagement ranges at speeds and in timeframes that humans are not equipped by evolution to comprehend. The civilian (who is used at least once per book to initiate an infodump about naval tactics or technology) quite reasonably asks how it is that they keep on seeing poorly-trained ship crews slipping around in their formations and occasionally even running into each other, given that everything should be automated anyway.
The answer she gets from the naval officers comes down to confidence. Because maneuvers are happening at speeds not just insane, but relativistic, it can easily appear to a mind operating at merely human speeds that the ship is approaching a collision, since the sensor data of other ships is similarly delayed and distorted by the relative velocities between them. An inexperienced captain or helmsman, the officers explain, will often see this apparent collision approaching and frantically try to correct their course. However, even assuming that they don't overcorrect (again, inexperience), they are moving their ship out of the path that their computers, compensating for relativistic shifts, have determined to be safe, and frequently into the path of a collision they literally cannot see coming.
As pilots get more experienced, they come to trust their systems better and let them do what they do best while the pilot focuses on longer-term plotting and situational control. But the officers also mention a third tier of expertise, and when the civilian obligingly asks what that is, she is told that sometimes, the computers do get it wrong, and a truly masterful pilot will see it - or sense it, since the entire operation almost has to take place in the subconscious - and can just as instinctively make the correction needed to move the ship out of harm's way.
Nothing in the text suggests that Campbell viewed this as any sort of universal model of learning, although I'd be very curious to know what particular skillset he progressed through in that order that led him to share this bit of observational wisdom. But whether he saw it as applicable to other pursuits or not, it struck me that these three stages describe the development of a whole host of skills and abilities. Stripped of the sci-fi jargon, the stages of mastery Campbell describes are:
- Level 0: Ignorant. While not actually mentioned by Campbell, it is the implied initial state for all practitioners. Skillsets of which I am wholly or functionally ignorant include Swahili grammar, interstellar (or, hell, even maritime) navigation, MOBA video games, and calculus.
- Level 1: Unconfident. A practitioner has been exposed to and is familiar with the principles of a skillset or discipline, but lacks confidence and/or practical experience at applying them. Skillsets in which I am unconfident include French grammar (rapidly dwindling to ignorance), algebra, performance automobile driving, drawing, overland navigation, cooking, and real-time strategy video games.
- Level 2: Confident. A practitioner is confident about applying the principles of a skillset or discipline to produce reliable results. Skillsets in which I am confident include first-person shooter video games, Google ecosystem navigation, playing violin (borderline; I may have devolved to level 1 by now), Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, and typing.
- Level 3: Mastery. A practitioner who has mastered a given skillset is not only able to consistently apply the principles of a discipline for optimal results; he or she is able to creatively manipulate or even contradict those principles in order to produce unusual or extraordinary outcomes. Skillsets at which I would claim mastery include English grammar.
To illustrate the differences, let's look at two examples from those lists: cooking and English grammar.
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I consider myself an unconfident cook. Although I managed to satisfactorily feed myself during the 9-ish months I was in Dubuque, I do much less cooking now that I'm back in the family home, both because other people are cooking meals for me and because I'm much less involved in shopping for groceries (and because it's no longer viable to cook a full meal starting at 1 a.m). I have through dint of repetition and necessity become confident in a few recipes (ramen with vegetables, spaghetti, Vigo red beans and rice) and can painstakingly and with uneven results follow more complicated recipes to produce such outcomes as fried rice, lasagna and shrimp scampi. While I'm aware of many of the basic principles of cooking, in practice, I can only make use of them with specific directions and carefully controlled situations.
My brother and father, on the other hand, I would call confident cooks. They know and are comfortable using in freeform cooking a much wider array of ingredients than I am. They can and do produce relatively complex dishes such as breaded/marinated pork chops and stir fry without feeling any need to consult a recipe. They know that when they combine certain ingredients in certain ways, they will get certain consistent results. My father, in particular, has through years of repetition memorized a number of key recipes, including pancakes, bread/rolls, pizza dough and a number of pies.
In the other direction, my ladyfriend (who also is a far more confident cook than I) has told me about one friend of hers who, during their first girls' night cooking experiment, was so helpless that she needed coaching in the use of very basic kitchen implements and processes, like stirring. While my ladyfriend seems to have her well on her way to attaining level 1 mastery, it's clear that when they started out, she was at level 0.
A cook who has attained mastery, on the other hand, would be one who not only can use a wide range of ingredients to produce an array of expected, consistent results, but one who comes up with innovative new mixtures of flavors and ingredients that a merely confident cook would at first look dismiss as unsuited for combination. These are the cooks who thrive on shows like Iron chef, creating unorthodox dishes using unfamiliar ingredients on the spot. These are the people who first think 'I bet bacon would taste good on an ice cream sundae', or who spend a year developing the perfect miniature potato because they have an idea for how to prepare an ingredient that doesn't even exist yet. I'm not sure that I know anyone who has attained this level of mastery, although I should specify that within the broad category of 'cooking' there are probably many possible areas of mastery; a master artisan baker, for example, would have little in common with a master industrial chef, whose innovations might come in areas like workflow and logistics rather than necessarily specific ingredient combinations.
But while I freely admit that I'm on the lower end of the pecking order among gourmets, I rank myself much more highly among grammarians. Indeed, because I have experienced grammar from so many angles, both personally and professionally, it was here that I first realized that Campbell's stages were a useful metaphor for more skills than simply c-fractional maneuvering.
While level 0 is obvious - if you don't speak any English or a related language, such as German, you won't know anything about English grammar - far too many native English speakers fall into level 1, let alone all the English language learners who fit into this category. Someone unconfident in English grammar might use commas, but often incorrectly; they will struggle with sentence fragments, dependent clause and run-ons; their spelling will be inconsistent; and they will mix up common homophones, trigger grammarian pet peeves such as 'alot' and 'literally', and engage in all the other behaviors upon which Weird Al expounds in his recent video 'Word Crimes'. In short, they will be well represented by most of the high school students I taught last year, the vast majority of whom I made lamentably little progress in helping to improve this particular set of skills. In most cases, it is not that these native English speakers have not been exposed to the ideas of commas or complete sentences, but that they are not comfortable enough with or have not sufficiently internalized such ideas to use them accurately in their own writing.
A confident grammarian would be someone who has internalized those concepts and has reached a point of making only few and infrequent mistakes in their own writing. Their sentences are complete, their commas are in place, their spelling is consistent with itself and with their dictionary, and they know the proper uses of its/it's and their/there/they're. While they might still have a few scattered weak spots - your/you're, semicolons, oxford commas, whatever - the overall level of editing their writing requires is low and generally superficial. This category would include not only a great many competent laypeople but even, I would argue, the vast majority of professional writers and English teachers, and confident grammarians with a sufficient eye for detail are perfectly qualified to work as copy editors.
But I consider myself to be more than simply confident in the use of grammar; I think I've mastered it. The difference doesn't actually have much to do with consistency or accuracy. I make my fair share of typos and misplace a modifier from time to time, and I swear I will never manage to remember whether it is sepErate or sepArate. The difference between a confident grammarian and a grammar master, I believe, is that while the former usually or even always uses correct language, the latter is able to find the right words and syntax for what they're trying to say. It's the difference between being able to pass for a native in a language and being able to pass for a poet, and indeed many of the examples that come to mind of true masters of English grammar made their mark as poets (or songwriters, which is poetry set to a melody). I'm not a huge fan of e e cummings, whose work I regard as more of a clever party trick than as a useful lens through which to view human life; nonetheless, I cannot deny that it is a very clever and skillful party trick to tell multilevel narratives through punctuation the way he does. Mark Twain was a rare and unmistakable master of English; in one of my favorite essays, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", he takes a simple concept (characters in fiction should be interesting and sympathetic or despicable as appropriate) and expresses it in a far more memorable fashion:
"(The rules of literature) require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together."Ernst Hemingway is said to have won a bet over his ability to tell a story in six words, and while it's not clear that he actually ever wrote "For sale: Baby shoes, never worn" on a napkin, someone with a peerless grasp of language had to come up with that. Nor is mastery of English restricted to famous or published writers. I haven't followed Texts From Last Night in years, but I still remember one of the very early posts on that site, a remarkably evocative text message that simply said, "This is not my ceiling". And while both of those are examples of people who have mastered the art of conveying a lot of information in very few words, others are masters of using longer or even conspicuously unwieldy sentences that level-2 grammarians would quite rightly avoid under normal circumstances. Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker's Guide fame, had a wonderful talent for lengthy sentences that took right turns to readers' expectations partway through, such as "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
My own claim to mastery I stake largely in sentence structure. While I can and do use short, succinct statements where appropriate (I write a mean sonnet), my tendency (as readers of this blog are surely well aware) when describing complex topics is to use longer, equally complex sentences with abundant parenthetical asides and clauses and terms arranged in multilevel lists, all presented with (if I dare say) nigh-impeccable punctuation including but not limited to commas, semicolons, hyphens and parentheses. For example (if the previous sentence is not enough), in a post a few weeks ago about the How to Train Your Dragon movies, I said:
"Just because you don't understand why your parents hold a position doesn't mean there isn't a reason; this is a lesson just as important for teenagers (and, to be honest, young adults) as the more child-centric lesson of the first movie. At the same time, though, the movie allows a lot of room for children to build upon their parents' beliefs; just because your parents have good reason to hold a position doesn't mean that, having understood and accepted their position, there isn't room for you to innovate and improve upon their responses."Which two sentences are extremely diagrammatically complex and yet are still, in my admittedly biased opinion, highly readable and eminently suited to explaining the abstract ideas I was dealing with.
Of course, different readers' tastes will vary. While I quite appreciated the short, simple prose in parts of The English Patient, I know others found it oversimplified and even childish, and while I obviously think my usual mode of intricately layered sentences works quite well for me, I'm sure that many very capable users of English grammar would (or do) find it needlessly verbose and cumbersome. (And while I'll own up to bragging a bit, I'll be the first to say that the way I normally write and speak is NOT appropriate to every situation; when I reread some of the novel I was working on in high school/college recently, I was horrified to see that both the narration and dialogue I used for my quasi-medieval or even pre-medieval setting and generally uneducated characters was every bit as wordy and circumlocutory as Douglas Adams at his most ironic.)
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As with all theories about human behavior, this one comes with a 'so what' to be addressed. Developing this idea didn't particularly help me as a teacher, although there was so much other crap going on at the time that I can't pretend to be surprised by that. Were I to go back to teaching someday, it might prove somewhat more useful. It does suggest an element to gaining mastery in a skill that I think often is overlooked; knowledge by itself is important, but not as much as instilling confidence in the learner. I think many of my students probably knew a lot more about English grammar than they believed they did, but had become so accustomed to being bad at it by 11th grade that they crippled their own growth. It's likely that the same is true for me to some extent in cooking. Chalk this up as yet another way of proving that it's important for learners to become good at something - and to know that they're good at it - before moving on to something else. I would even guess - although I'm sure research has been or is being done on this already - that it's more important to make learners feel confident in a few areas, like spelling or multiplication tables, than it is to expose them to bits of every aspect of their disciplines, because once they start feeling confident, they will be both capable and motivated to increase that mastery on their own without needing laborious instruction in every particular.
This three-stage model of learning also reinforces another idea I developed independently some years ago, and am still struggling to properly articulate: Rules exist to tell you what to do when you don't have a good reason to do something else. While I don't subscribe to the rather anarchic declaration that 'every rule is meant to be broken', I also have little patience for rules lawyers and those who uphold rules simply because they are rules (split infinitive crusaders, I'm looking at you). What it comes to is this: in any discipline, whether it's writing or painting or diagnostic medicine or origami or baking or League of Legends or C++, there are certain best practices that have evolved or been put in place for good reasons and should probably be followed. I certainly hope that the doctor examining my innards and the baker creating my pie are current on the latest practices in their respective fields. On the other hand, in any discipline, there will come a time where the generally helpful and accurate best practices do not cover a particular edge case. The entire premise of the TV show House is to demonstrate the main character identifying situations in which standard best practices are hindering his work and then gleefully ignoring them, and while it often gets rather silly in doing so, it's also a great example of a master practitioner making the rules of his discipline work for him rather than the other way around. Writers know that they should use complete sentences, proper punctuation and varied vocabulary to make their work readable, comprehensible and interesting; they know that they should be clear in their writing about what they are writing about and what they mean to say about it. And then Faulkner writes The Sound and the Fury and for a sizable portion of the book eschews punctuation entirely as he writes about weighty events as perceived by a character with a mental handicap, and he is a master of English grammar (whatever his numerous other faults) and that the best way to do so is to take all those rules about writing and toss them out the window. Even that most rigorously codified body of rules, law, is subject to this. If my nephew is starving to death, hells yeah I'ma steal a loaf of bread (hopefully without going to jail for 19 years), and while I think speed limits are great and should be followed (more or less) under nearly all circumstances, I'll have to make an exception for a driver taking someone with a heart attack to an emergency room or trying to outrun a horde of giant spiders (what? It could happen!). Every day or two, my brother, who follows DOTA 2 competitive play, will drop by to tell me about a team that has willfully disregarded the received wisdom (known in gaming circles as the meta) about how best to play the game, and in doing so has produced a strategy that nobody else knows how to counter. Rules are great and important and generally quite useful, unless you're confident you've found a situation that the rules don't quite cover.
Obviously, there are usually consequences for breaking rules, and rightly so; a doctor who casually or carelessly disregards best practices for patient treatment, or even one who believes he or she will get better results through some unorthodox treatment and is wrong, should be held accountable for negative outcomes from such care, just as writers who misuse language in ways that weaken their writing rather than strengthen it should not be surprised when their writing fails to sway the hearts and minds of their readers. The step from level 2 to level 3 is tricky and rarely clear; the slush piles of editors everywhere overflow with the work of writers who think their particular brand of tortured prose is artful rather than awful, and so it goes in every discipline. Sometimes, even the greatest master's instincts are wrong. I do think, though, that enforcers of rules, whether they be professional associations or government agencies or grammar nazis on the interwebs, should refrain from punishing or at least mitigate consequences for practitioners who produce positive outcomes through intentional violations of best practices (as opposed to screwballs who produce improbably fortunate results through carelessness). Otherwise, you're the Salon de Paris vs. the Impressionists, and why won't those damn kids stay off your lawn.
So for all that I think rules exist as a fall-back for lack of better inspiration, I do think it's generally the safer and wiser choice to follow them. But there will come times when, even though your spaceship is travelling a hundred thousand kilometers per second and your sensors are only telling you a distorted version of what the universe looked like thirty seconds ago, you know that your computer has it wrong, and that you have to change course now or be destroyed.
So for all that I think rules exist as a fall-back for lack of better inspiration, I do think it's generally the safer and wiser choice to follow them. But there will come times when, even though your spaceship is travelling a hundred thousand kilometers per second and your sensors are only telling you a distorted version of what the universe looked like thirty seconds ago, you know that your computer has it wrong, and that you have to change course now or be destroyed.
And in that hour or moment or millisecond of indecision, you have to make a choice: do I have faith in my mastery of this skill, or do I put my faith in the received wisdom of my discipline. And there's only one way to find out which is right. Godspeed.
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