Marcus Geduld's answer to Why do we get frustrated when learning something?

Why do we get frustrated when learning something?

Teacher for 25 years; student for longer. · Author has 23.3K answers and 99.8M answer views · Updated 5y ·

School trains us to get frustrated when we fail.

Failure is a very good thing. It's one of the best—maybe the best—learning devices. Yet rather than capitalize on it, most schools work hard to turn failure into something distasteful. And by the time people graduate, having spent most of their formative years in an institution where failure is a sin, they have a huge aversion to failing.

And if you believe that people have a natural hatred of failing, then note that school encourages that hatred, rather than helping students understand that failure, even if unpleasant, can be a useful learning tool.

In most schools, the major structural element is ranking. We're psychologically wired to take ranking seriously. As soon as ranking exists, we care about it*. A, B, C, D, F. Pass/Fail. And in the worst-case-scenario, you fail and are "kept back a grade," which affects you socially.

I have many memories of teachers and parents compounding the problem. They didn't say, "How interesting: you got an F. Let's examine the situation and see how that happened..." Instead, Fs came with stern lectures. When we got Fs, grownups were very disappointed in us.

I've never heard a teacher say, "Oh dear. You've gotten four As in a row. I must not be challenging you enough. Let's see if we can push you to failure so that you can overcome it." Personal trainers understand how vital that is. They won’t let you keep lifting weights that don’t strain your muscles. Many schoolteachers either fail to understand this or work in environments that won’t let them capitalize on it. If a teacher pushes kids towards Fs, parents and school authorities will complain.

When we were kids, grownups didn't tell us failure was a natural part of the learning process. They told us we had let them and ourselves down. Over and over, for years, we were told that if we got Fs, it meant we were lazy or stupid. Laziness is a moral failing; stupidity is an innate deficit. Failure—school tells us—means we're moral or physical cripples.

People (understandably) hate this so much, that, as soon as they can, they put themselves in a position where they never have to fail again. (Or where their chances of failing are as small as possible.) They find jobs that aren't all that challenging after an initial learning curve. The goal, conscious or not, is to coast for the rest of one's life.

Which gives adults very little day-to-day experience with failure. Most people I know failed at certain subjects in school (maybe not by getting Fs, but by struggling with those subjects for years), and now have simply decided "I'm not a ______ person" or "I just don't get _______", e.g. "I'm not a Math person" or "I just don't get Shakespeare." That absolves them from trying. Which keeps them from failing. Which keeps them from learning.

This is not the way we started out. If infants decided, after many hundreds of failures, "I'm just not a walking person" or "I just don't get talking," we'd all be screwed. Luckily, those skills are acquired before school gets its clutches on us.

UPDATE: In a comment thread, below, Vincent Rubinetti and I discuss natural talent: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-we-get-frustrated-when-learning-something/answer/Marcus-Geduld/comment/6799934

UPDATE: Google agrees with me. See Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college graduates.

Megan McArdle argued recently that writers procrastinate “because they got too many A’s in English class.” Successful young graduates have been taught to rely on talent, which makes them unable to fail gracefully.

Google looks for the ability to step back and embrace other people’s ideas when they’re better. “It’s ‘intellectual humility.’ Without humility, you are unable to learn,” [Google’s head of people operations, Laszlo] Bock says. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure.”

"... What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’"

Also worth reading: Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators:

[Carol] Dweck has spent her career studying failure, and how people react to it. As you might expect, failure isn’t all that popular an activity. And yet, as she discovered through her research, not everyone reacts to it by breaking out in hives. While many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn’t do well, some people thrived under the challenge. They positively relished things they weren’t very good at—for precisely the reason that they should have: when they were failing, they were learning.

Dweck puzzled over what it was that made these people so different from their peers. It hit her one day as she was sitting in her office (then at Columbia), chewing over the results of the latest experiment with one of her graduate students: the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.

... “The kids who race ahead in the readers without much supervision get praised for being smart,” says Dweck. “What are they learning? They’re learning that being smart is not about overcoming tough challenges. It’s about finding work easy. When they get to college or graduate school and it starts being hard, they don’t necessarily know how to deal with that."

And The best way to learn math is to learn how to fail productively:

Singapore, the land of many math geniuses, may have discovered the secret to learning mathematics (pdf). It employs a teaching method called productive failure (pdf), pioneered by Manu Kapur, head of the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore.

Students who are presented with unfamiliar concepts, asked to work through them, and then taught the solution significantly outperform those who are taught through formal instruction and problem-solving. The approach is both utterly intuitive—we learn from mistakes—and completely counter-intuitive: letting kids flail around with unfamiliar math concepts seems both inefficient and potentially damaging to their confidence.

Kapur believes that struggle activates parts of the brain that trigger deeper learning. Students have to figure out three critical things: what they know, the limits of what they know, and exactly what they do not know. Floundering first elevates the learning from knowing a formula to understanding it, and applying it in unfamiliar contexts.

The education ministry in Singapore has given Kapur over $1 million to explore productive failure, including a $460,0000 grant to train teachers for 11th and 12th grade statistics.

He learned the approach firsthand as a student at the National University in Singapore. He spent four months trying to solve a non-linear differential equation in fluid dynamics. His teacher finally let on that the problem was unsolvable with math alone (it required computation). Frustrated, he asked why he had allowed him to waste so much time. It wasn’t wasted, the teacher explained; Kapur now truly understood the problem he was trying to solve. As a teacher himself, Kapur wondered whether this method could be more broadly applied.

He soon designed studies to test it. In one, written up in Cognitive Science, researchers presented 9th grade students in an Indian private school with the following math problem. The concept is standard deviation, but the kids—who have never been exposed to it before—don’t know that.

One group is asked to figure out how to solve the problem in as many ways as possible. They are given 30-45 minutes and teachers cannot help. After that, the teacher discusses 3-4 of the most common approaches. The teacher then shows the class the standard solution.

A control group is taught standard deviation the traditional way and then asked to do problems. Both groups are then tested.

On procedural knowledge, or applying the formula, there was no difference between productive failure and direct instruction. But on conceptual understanding—understanding what it means and possessing the ability to adapt the information—the productive failure students dramatically outperform their direct instruction peers.

From the article Teaching Smart People How to Learn in the “Harvard Business Review”:

… many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their single-loop learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.

… well-educated professionals are especially susceptible to this.

Nearly all the consultants I have studied have stellar academic records. Ironically, their very success at education helps explain the problems they have with learning. Before they enter the world of work, their lives are primarily full of successes, so they have rarely experienced the embarrassment and sense of threat that comes with failure. As a result, their defensive reasoning has rarely been activated. People who rarely experience failure, however, end up not knowing how to deal with it effectively. And this serves to reinforce the normal human tendency to reason defensively.