Learning through Immersion

I was talking with Jimmy on Friday, March 10 and I asked him for advice on time management.  I asked something like, “do you ever plan ahead of time to do one thing for a certain amount of time, then do another thing for a certain amount of time, etc?”  I was thinking of making a schedule for each day, like “from 1-4 I”ll read this book, from 4-5 I’ll eat, from 5-9 I’ll write about x, etc.”  He said something like, “yeah sometimes I’ll plan to spend a few weeks on one thing, then a few weeks on another, etc.”

This made me reconsider.  I realized I’m trying to do too much at once.  For the next week I only did one major thing per day.  I allowed myself to do other, minor things, like answering emails, but the day was centered around a single thing.  On Saturday and Sunday I just did cleanup, organizing and administrative things.  I packed all of my clothing here at Stony Brook to bring to Manhattan except for predetermined quantities — 7 shirts, 7 pyjama shirts, 10 underwear, etc. — because I have way too much here.  Monday and Tuesday were just devoted to reading Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right with Russell Dale’s notes (I am taking Russell’s class).  Wednesday and Thursday were for computer science, which I am studying with AnarchoTechNYC.

I didn’t spend weeks on a single thing like Jimmy had mentioned, though I do hope to get to the point where I can do that.  This was still much preferable to my prior method, however.  I was able to focus on things I needed to do without constantly feeling guilty for not doing some other thing I also needed to do.  I also felt in control of myself, which is a very nice feeling.  My plans aligned with my actions much more than I am used to.  I required much less sleep than normal because I was excited to get up in the morning.

The two days of Marx (Monday and Tuesday) were really helpful.  Marx is very difficult and slow to read.  On Monday I read pages 5-19 (and Russell’s much easier notes concurrently), and it took me about 10 hours total.  On Tuesday I read to page 36 (without Russell’s notes, which didn’t make it to page 36 yet, now they do so I will catch up in them shortly), and it took me about as long.  So I got faster from Monday to Tuesday.  I also got faster on the short time scale.  I noticed that when I first sat down to read, it would take about a half-an-hour of reading really slowly before I got into the groove, and then I could read at a workable pace.  This meant that every time I stopped reading and my flow was broken, I needed a half-an-hour to get back into it.

The reason I am mentioning all this is to illustrate how indispensable it was that I read Marx intensively, rather than, like, a little every day.  Reading a little every day, it would have taken much longer, I wouldn’t have understood it as well, and it would have been more frustrating because it would take longer to see any progress.

I think this is a key principle of learning.  To learn a new field, you must at first immerse yourself in it.  Once you have done this, you can then later do it more intermittently.  Most people already know this about language learning.  The best way to learn a language is immersion.  Learn French by going to Paris for a month.  Then when you come back, you will still be able to read a French news article when you need to.  Immersion first and a little a day later.  In a sense, all learning is language learning.  To learn Marx is to learn how to understand his language.  To learn math is to learn the language of math.  To learn computer science is to learn computer languages.  When considered this way, the principle that languages are learnt best by immersion is not just analogous to this key principle of learning, but identical with it.

School does not allow this.  In school, you must divide yourself between many classes, and you cannot ever immerse yourself in any of them.  Moreover, each class switches violently between topics, so even within a class you are split between many topics.  Thus you cannot ever really learn.  School does not help you learn, it prevents you from learning.  In school your mind is split between many different things.  You are schizophrenic in the literal sense of the word:  split (schizo, from Ancient Greek σχίζω, split) – brained (phrenic, from Ancient Greek φρήν, mind, but seemingly used in English for words about “brain”).  You cannot learn when you are split-brained. To learn you must be focused.

If you are in school and you want to learn, I recommend either 1) drop out of school and find teachers who care about your education, 2) take very few classes (even just 1 class if you can pull it off!), or 3) bullshit your way through school with as little effort as possible and devote your time and energy to actually learning by immersing yourself in topics with teachers who care about your education.  More information on these approaches.

There are more things I want to talk about relating to this, but they belong in separate posts.  I will update the following bulleted list with links when I write these posts.

• The learning as digging analogy
• How and why I unfairly maligned making schedules
• I want to write something about this article I just found, which gives an extremely convincing argument illustrating why it is more efficient to do things one at a time than to multitask.  I think it is a decisive result.  I can’t see any way of getting around the logic of it.