Tag Archives: education

July 1, 2014 · 9:14 am

Woodshedding

This TunesDay I want to focus on something that every musician does – woodshed. That isn’t a non-sequitor.

woodshed

(Photo credit: The Year of Mud)

With respect to music “woodshedding” means practicing your instrument but it’s so much more than that. The term comes from that people would go to their woodshed to practice without being overheard.  Well, more like not imposing their unrefined craft on people until it had been honed.  As a young guitar player, I’d sit in my room for hours listening to music and trying to play along.  I think I did that all the way through college even though I was playing in a band (for pay!) by then.  It wasn’t just about learning to play – I knew how to do that after a while.  It was about getting better, internalizing the actions my fingers would take on the fretboard so they’d happen without thought.  The goal was to let my brain hear what I wanted to play and for my fingers to play it, almost like walking or breathing.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the 10,000 hour rule.  While “Outliers” may have popularized it, the concept can be traced back to a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, called The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.  The notion is that “many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years”.  But Gladwell (“Outliers”) oversimplified the concept and ignored the fact that talent has something to do with the progress one makes.  You can practice all you want and you might get better, but the true elite at an activity generally have some natural gifts that are brought out and improved by all the practice.

Why this thought today?  Sometimes when I encounter a young businessperson they ask about how to grow:  improve their skill set, learn more, make better decisions. We talk about woodshedding and the fact that a musician plays something wrong the first dozen times but eventually learns it.  Making mistakes – playing it wrong – is an important part of the process.  So are the hours you put in practicing.  In business terms that can mean reading books, going to seminars, or taking online courses to refine and grow.  You want to pick the right instrument too.  You must have some basic talent – if you are terrible at math and not detail-oriented, accounting might not be your best choice.

If you aren’t always practicing, you’re falling behind those competitors who are.  Your call.

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, Music

Tagged as , , , , ,

July 12, 2013 · 8:50 am

Seeing vs. Doing

It’s Foodie Friday, and the topic today is culinary school. There is an ongoing debate in food professional circles about the value of, and need for, culinary school educations and I think it’s a discussion that has broader implications for those of us not in the food business.  Basically the debate boils down (should I say “reduces” since we’re discussing cooking?) to this:  is it preferable for new cooks to learn in school or learn by working?

Chef

(Photo credits: http://www.myparkingsign.com)

Some very high-profile chefs have weighed in or either side of the question.  Some such as Daniel Boulud feel that a formal culinary school education is indispensable.  Other such as David Chang think that path is overrated and that the time is better spent working in a professional kitchen.  Or as he puts it:

If you look at all my heroes, the chefs around the world, most of them never went to cooking school. What they did is they had a great mentor. You name a chef that’s awesome and people want to work for him, I’d say a majority of the time they never went to cooking school.

He goes on to make a point that culinary school students will learn skills in a very elementary fashion without any frills or shortcuts that they might learn in a professional kitchen, which is also a great broader business point and that’s my focus today.  I’ve worked with people who went to business school and with those who spent the time working.  While there was no question that the B-school folks knew what to call certain types of analyses, many of them had a totally unrealistic view of what business was about.  As many of you know, it’s not exactly as it appears in textbooks.

Technical training is valuable.  I think, however, it’s most valuable in fields such as law or medicine where there are standards to be met.  Most other businesses have no such standards – the food world certainly doesn’t.  I think a young person is better served working in a profession and, and Chang says, finding a great mentor.  Coming out of a culinary school or a B school laden with debt affects how you can approach your career – and life – every day going forward.  Is it really needed?

I suppose it’s Twain‘s reference to schooling vs. education or maybe it’s just seeing vs. doing.  I come down on the side of doing.  Where do you stand?

Enhanced by Zemanta

1 Comment

Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,

January 15, 2013 · 9:48 am

Want To Learn Something? Teach It!

As we’ve discussed before here on the screed, I went to school way back in the last century to become a teacher.

English: A teacher and young pupils at The Bri...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To do so where I went to school you had to major in both your field of choice (English in my case) as well as in Education. You studied the information you were going to teach as well as the teaching process itself.

There was a flaw of sorts in that education. English majors do not spend a lot of time on grammar or spelling (even if we do get beaten up about it by our professors). We teachers-in-training had to take a course in philology which other English majors didn’t, but in general our subject matter learning wasn’t much different from our peers who weren’t getting teaching licenses. I hasten to add we DID have to take a lot of courses about how to teach but they were for anyone becoming a teacher no matter the subject area.  What I didn’t quite understand at the time was something that I’ve since learned:

If you want to learn something, teach it.

A fairly sizable part of what we do in business is teach. It may be that we need to develop staff or it may be that we’re trying to educate a potential customer about our product. Either way, we’re teaching. The funny thing is that you discover immediately that it’s impossible to educate someone about the subject if you don’t fully understand it yourself.  You find the holes in your knowledge base.  Many of us have had teachers who we thought were one chapter ahead of the class in terms of their knowledge.  It’s the same in business – I’m sure you’ve had the experience of a salesperson who knew less that you did about a product or who couldn’t answer a question without running for an information sheet.

So today’s business point is this:  if you want to understand a topic or a product fully, prepare a lesson plan about it as if you were going to teach a class on it.  You’ll learn a great deal about it as you flesh out the various outlines.  This works for almost anything – it’s almost impossible to explain something if you don’t understand it.  Then let me know what you think!

Enhanced by Zemanta

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,