How We Learn

I stole this title from a segment by one Tomaz Mencinger, and yes, it has to do with tennis, though this particular blog entry does not.

I used to teach programming. To be an adequate programmer, one that can write some program that does something, you need to think methodically. You need to be able to reason about how a program behaves, and be patient enough to figure out where your assumptions have gone wrong. Indeed, if programming teaches you anything, it teaches you that you makes lots of assumptions, many you don't realize.

Code is a harsh mistress. It does exactly what you tell it to, and nothing more. Any assumption you make, whether you realize it or not, is being expressed in code.

The kind of thinking you need to code is one that is logical, organized, and able to do things given the tools you have available to you. You might think of programming as eating with chopsticks. If your not Asian, then eating with chopsticks is awkward, and it takes a while to eat this way.

Even the comparatively simple eating with your hands is not so simple. Most cultures that eat with their hands have rules. In particular, they almost always eat with their right hand, because the left hand is unclean (basically used for hygiene given a lack of toilet paper). This creates interesting skills, including the ability to rip flatbread using one hand.

Once you can think in a certain way, then coding is second nature, and it's your patience and cleverness that matters. You work at something, and if that doesn't work, you try something else. You question your assumptions. Why does this fail? What am I doing that might cause this to fail?

There are people who can't seem to get their heads wrapped around this idea of organized, disciplined thinking, and can't get around being able to discover an aha moment, and being patient enough to try a bunch of things. Generally, they don't become good programmers.

Lately, I've been trying to teach some folks how to play tennis. And this has made me think about how tennis is taught. While I'm generally analytical by nature, I realized there's still a lot about tennis I don't know, even though I've played for 20 years (more).

Tennis requires physical coordination. Given that our bodies are creatures of habit, it can be very hard to train the body to do motions. I think it's analogous to learning math. You have to learn how to prove things, and you have to understand what makes a good proof, and what makes a bad proof, and that takes a while, because good and bad proofs look the same to beginners, and so beginners think people are just making stuff up when it comes to proofs.

It takes a while to get to this way of thinking, and many people never do.

Learning physical habits is, in my opinion, even harder.

I've been trying to tell Stan how to hold his racquet during a tennis serve. To be fair, a tennis serve is one of the hardest shot in tennis to master. It involves a lot of unnatural movements, and it takes a long time for the body to learn to coordinate what is a myriad of activities, from knee bends to wrist pronations.

I wanted Stan to learn to put the racquet behind the back as if it were a sword in a scabbard held on the back. Despite this, he would resort back to taking the racquet back the way he normally hits it.

I recall, once upon a time, when I was in college, and there was a dad, trying to teach his son how to play table tennis. He went over to his side, and had him shadow stroke the "correct" movement over and over. Once we went to his side of the table, and served the ball, the kid simply went back to the way he hit before, despite having been taught the "correct" way to hit a ball.

Body coordination is really hard. Your body has certain habits it gets into. To tell the body to do something else can be tough. This is that mental leap that, in my opinion, is similar to learning how to do math.

Except, with math, you can be completely rational, and force yourself to be organized about your thinking (I know that math also requires an aha moment, but being organized with the information also helps).

With physical mastery, you need to make the body repeat the action over and over and over again, until it becomes second nature, so you do it without thinking.

It's a lot like learning to drive. Initially, there are lots of rigid rules you follow, but eventually, you know what to skip and what to pay attention to.

Learning tennis, on the other hand, requires a huge number of skills, and it's easy to learn the "wrong" way to do things.

I'll give you an example. David has this smooth fluid motion for his serve, but the stroke isn't really "correct". Since the serve is so hard to teach, I want him to do something far simpler. Get the racquet behind the back, toss the ball up, and then hit it.

The problem? He's so used to his completely elaborate motion, that he can't force himself to do just part of it. The left and right arm are so used to doing certain things, that to break this normalcy creates a huge amount of awkwardness.

Stan has a differently problem. Where David can more or less raise his hands together, Stan tosses the ball with one hand, then strikes with the other hand. While some people have very high tosses (Ivan Lendl and Steffi Graf, to name two), this two part motion (toss, then hit) is not something most decent servers do.

I also tried to get him to hit an abbreviated serve. He too had big problems trying to hit that abbreviated serve, since he was used to hitting a full motion with his right arm.

Both people would be served (no pun intended) by having video taken of them. I think the would be surprised that they change their motion when hitting.

I find that fascinating. You tell a person to do X, but their inclination to do Y is so strong, that they do Y, but think they are doing X. A video would clear show them that they are doing Y.

Perhaps that's one reason I spend so much time learning tennis. We learn by imitation, but imitation is really hard. It requires very powerful observations, and it requires a kind of physical mimicry that most people lack. This means, much like learning how to program, it takes time to learn how to play a sport, especially one that requires as much coordination as tennis.