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sketerpot comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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I found this:
To be very true.
Many times in my classes I have barely grasped what the professor was saying throughout the year only to click the subject at a later time when a fellow student explained it to me in a way that grokked. Whenever this happens, I feel like I have learned more in that brief period then in the entire class before then.
This is actually how I approach difficult textbooks. I read through as much as I can before I just totally collapse in confusion, look up related information on the internet, take a few days off, and then go back through from the beginning. The textbook usually makes vastly more sense then, as all the disjointed pieces come together in a way that's obvious in retrospect.
This is how I was able to read through and understand an algorithms textbook in junior high, even though it terrifies and befuddles people in their third year of college. It's just not that hard if you attack it in multiple passes, because multipass studying is much more likely to get you to the click of understanding.
Glad to know I'm not the only one who does this!
I found that this approach sorta-works, but results in much more shallow reading of the material than if you studied the prerequisites first (at least in math, an algorithms textbook might be an exception).
I already had the prerequisites for learning about algorithms. It's just that the topic itself was hard to fully grasp. I mean, on the first reading I'm sure I could have written a hash table or a mergesort, but it wasn't until I read it again that I got the depth of understanding that lets me optimize hash tables for special applications, or quickly understand timsort. The multipass approach was how I got past a shallow reading of the material.