whales comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 January 2014 02:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (316)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: whales 26 January 2014 08:56:14PM *  1 point [-]

Nice, and good luck! I'm glad to see that my post resonated with someone. For rhetorical purposes, I didn't temper my recommendations as much as I could have -- I still think building mental models through deliberate practice in solving difficult problems is at the core of physics education.

I treat even "signpost" flashcards as opportunities to rehearse a web of connections rather than as the quiz "what's on the other side of this card?" If an angle-addition formula came up, I'd want to recall the easy derivation in terms of complex exponentials and visualize some specific cases on the unit circle, at least at first. I also use cards like that in addition to cards which are themselves mini-problems.