Deliberate practice grows here naturally.
And this attitude extends everywhere, not just to programming and/or washing dishes.
I find ego to be persistent, expansive and not very deliberate. Mythical or fictional identities are deliberate, perhaps through their ephemeral nature, limitless yet constrained. For me it's a way of tapping into a play/flow state and compartmentalising away stress and uncertainty. As a teenager the mythic entity was my self; as an adult I have had to turn elsewhere to find that spark (this was a very painful lesson).
It just took one person to speak up when everyone was jokingly trash-talking their own math skills. One normal-looking guy, not bookish or anything but tatted up and heavy-set with a big biker beard, broke in to the conversation and said "I actually really like math." All of a sudden I just felt so stupid and realized what I'd been doing to myself. High school me was literally a moron. At least I still had time to catch up.
Unfortunately, this wishful thinking can lead to an inadvertent cruelty of unrealistic expectations. Through no fault of their own, some people just aren't very intelligent and have no real chance of excelling academically. We encourage those people to go to college, without considering whether they have any real chance of graduating. We lumber them with a few semesters worth of student debt for no good reason. We offer them no good alternatives in terms of vocational training or apprenticeships. We don't provide them with the educational, social and emotional support they need to make the most of their potential and find a path towards a fulfilling life. The flip side of "anyone can succeed if they really set their mind to it" is the rather callous "if you didn't succeed, it's only because you didn't try hard enough".
Some studies go one way, other studies go the other way on the matter.
Plus studies in such soft sciences are notoriously feeble, and there's also the whole replication crisis.
I don't think we're ready to discard the whole idea just yet.
"The dominant theme was a stated need to use a diverse range of teaching methods. This is a separate issue to the use of Learning Styles and there was no suggestion in the survey that to not use Learning Styles was to advocate for all students to be taught the same way, and/or to use only one method of teaching. Neither of these approaches are advocated by the wider literature which seeks to ‘debunk’ Learning Styles, but it is clear from the abundance of comments on this theme that these two issues were related in the view of many of the participants. This is supported by the emergence of the related theme of ‘styles of learning rather than Learning Styles’; many participants had a looser definition of ‘Learning Styles’ than those introduced early in the survey. This finding leads us to urge caution and clarity in the continued ‘debunking’ of the ‘myth’ of Learning Styles. Learners obviously have preferences for how they learn. In addition, there is an obvious appeal to using a variety of teaching methods and in asking students to reflect on the ways in which they learn. However, these three concepts are unrelated to the (unsupported) idea that there is a benefit to learners from diagnosing their ‘Learning Style’ using one of the specific classifications (Coffield et al., 2004) and attempting to match teaching to those styles. However, these concepts were clearly linked in the mind of many of our participants".
> These include a ‘pigeonholing’ of learners according to invalid criteria, for example a ‘visual learner’ may be dissuaded from pursuing subjects which do not appear to match their diagnosed Learning Style (e.g., learning music),
I struggle with learning music off by heart. The suggestion that has helped me most was to learn the score by visualising the appearance of the notes on the stave. I've taken the usual approach: break it down into small pieces (that is learn a bar at a time), practice by writing out notes from memory onto music manuscript paper and checking, spaced repetition.
Learning music off by heart is still terribly hard. Even when I can picture the appearance of the score in my head, I start of only able to play from that score at under quarter speed and without rhythm. Building up speed by repeatedly playing from my visual mental image takes a huge number of repetitions.
The two concepts of "Learning Style" in play here strike me as very different. One is strategic "Oh, you are a visual learner, best give up playing the piano, because that is so auditory.". The other is tactical "Oh, you are a visual learner, here is the appropriate technique for learning to play music from memory."
Same with Meyers-Briggs personality types, which are accepted as truth by so many that some companies use the test with new hires. It's about as scientific as a horoscope. All the personality traits described are tuned to that magical level of vagueness--vague enough to describe literally anyone from time to time, as we are all many different people as time goes on, but specific enough to seem eerily accurate. We want to believe things like this.
Same with "learning styles." It's a convergence of cognitive bias. We want to classify, name, and organize everything--especially when it pertains to ourselves. We want to be unique and know ourselves. It has an added bonus of being an excuse for our failings as well.
I think most people don't know what science really is, but they think they know how it sounds. So people easily believe and even self-diagnose themselves with pseudoscientific phenomena like this. It's so important to be able to look for predictions that are being made and then confirmed or disproven, and the rigor of an experiment to prove it's not just wishful thinking or bias.
If you decide you have a different learning style because [brain words], then do an amateur experiment to try to assess how it has affected you, it's really hard to actually nail down what's happening. You might simply be focusing harder because of the novelty of the situation. You only have a single subject for your experiment, and the subject is also the observer. Terrible setup. But most laypeople will believe that seeing is believing, and that they have proven something to themselves beyond doubt. Thus pseudoscience spreads.
It would be perverse to tell a mathematician to use only their best intuition to learn. These sort of thing lean on each other to make one another stronger. Why would it be any different for any sort of learner?
But then I read this: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140312-audi...
According to that article, the brain remembers visual/tactile memories equally well and better than auditory memory.
So in order to prove learning styles exist, we'd need to find people who provably have better auditory memories than visual memories.
I've not seen any studies or data for this, so I'd hesitate to call it a myth until I did, since on the surface the idea seems plausible. Wish the paper referenced in that article wasn't paywalled. Be curious if it's been shown that all (or a large majority) of people tested show the same result (visual/tactile > auditory).
https://qz.com/585143/the-concept-of-different-learning-styl...
> So how did a false belief become so widely-held? In his paper on the subject for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Howard-Jones argues that it’s not a result of fraud, but of “uniformed interpretations of genuine scientific facts.” The assumption behind learning myths seems to be based on the scientific fact that different regions of the cortex have different roles in visual, auditory, and sensory processing, and so students should learn differently “according to which part of their brain works better.” However, writes Howard-Jones, “the brain’s interconnectivity makes such an assumption unsound.”