Blahgorrhea

I have a lot working against me at work. Aside from being in a new environment with new people, I am trying to be a productive member of the team while working on an application built on a host of new technologies and frameworks. I love that I get to learn new technologies, but I get the sense that I am going about it all wrong, hacking away at new code in a copy-and-paste manner, instead of learning the technology and applying it as I see fit. I don’t feel like I’m learning the way I’m working now — or maybe I’m learning just enough to get by. Makes me feel like a fraud. [Continue reading…]

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig talks about the effect of grades on student behavior, attitude and performance. He tells a story of a college rhetoric professor who experimented with withholding grades for a semester. The experiment ended with great results, with all students eventually “scoring” where they normally would have but actually learning in the process. He gives a hypothetical example of a student in a normal system who works only for grades and becomes distracted by the “carrot” so that he does not learn at all, and a student in a gradeless system who drops out with a lack of motivation but then ends up returning to school later in life with an intense desire to learn, eventually “performing” better than he would have in the graded system. [Continue reading…]