As some have noticed--and combing through the blog's archives, so have I--there's been a prolonged dearth of new posts on the site. In explanation, I can only think of few that fit, and only in a general way at that; that I have been either too busy, without any clear ideas for posts, or some combination of the two. As it is a cold, rainy day here on the mountain, and at the urging of some friends, I thought perhaps to describe some projects I'm currently undertaking which might some day lead to a post of their own. So here goes.
1.) Relearning the Bassoon:
I started playing the bassoon many years ago in the 5th grade. I enjoyed the sound it made, and felt drawn to its quirky shape and unique place in the elementary school concert band. I didn't take playing it seriously until high school, however, when a grouchy band director with a gift for invective pushed me to make bassooning a daily habit, which I kept more or less until my senior year in college.
Upon graduating, however, I found myself slipping ever more away from the practice, until sometime last year I basically ceased playing at all. Having gone almost a full calendar year without cracking the instrument's case, I recently decided to start playing again.
The results, alas, were not pretty. I sounded awful, and it is hard to keep going when the going is not good. Be that as it may, accepting that things would be bad before they improved seemed to help, and after a few sessions I am beginning to see some progress. The road is long, and it is frustrating sometimes to labor at something which once felt easy. Yet it is also rewarding to step back and fill-in the gaps in one's knowledge and skills, experiencing thereby the advantages of a solid and well-laid foundation as challenges grow more difficult. Which segues nicely into another project...
2.) Relearning Math with Khan Academy:
I've had difficulties of various kinds related to math since about the 5th grade, when we started learning the multiplication and divisions of numbers with decimals. For whatever reason, these topics left me briefly behind. Matters grew foggier the following year with a failure to intuit the concept of negative numbers, which caused all manner of problems with basic algebra. I might go on, but you can probably begin to see how these gaps in understanding and knowledge left me feeling quite incompetent as a mathematician, which over the years compelled me to limit the scope of my potential professional goals by the degree to which they employed and relied upon the math.
About a year ago, I discovered the site Khan Academy (an earlier post on the subject can be found here), and so much seems to have changed since. I used it whilst taking Statistics at the local community college, and again when I took Chemistry over the summer. The video lectures helped quite a bit, and the tutorials provided useful practice and feed-back.
Several weeks ago, with my second crack the GRE approaching, I decided to go back and try relearning math from the point at which I started having difficulties. As it turned out Khan Academy is great for this, having recently launched a new learning dashboard that makes tracking progress easy.
On the day of my GRE test, I'd "mastered" about 90 separate topics, and felt better versed in math than perhaps at any other point in my life. This new-found confidence yielded a smaller improvement on the exam than I'd hoped, yet the improvement and sense of progress compelled me to keep going, such that a few weeks later I've "mastered" over 200 topics, and intend to keep going until every skill on the dashboard is mastered.
It's been very encouraging, and I can't wait most days to jump in and practice some new skill (yesterday's challenge involved converting between degrees and radians). I'm thankful for Mr. Khan and his team for developing such a useful online tool, which brings us to final project I've been working on...
3.) Learning Spanish with Duolingo:
For a little over the past two years, I've had the pleasure to work alongside a number of Guatemalan immigrants. They're hard-working chaps with a great sense of humor, and I feel as though I learn something new from them everyday. In particular, I have picked up a bit of Spanish, a subject I never studied in school. Having never studied it formally, I found the language I was learning to be a smattering of vocabulary governed by the unofficial grammar of "Spanglish," which is effectively the language I and my co-workers use among ourselves. Not surprisingly, when conversing with each other the Guatemalans speak Spanish. Over time I've felt the urge to learn this language, at least to the point that I could understand what they said to me, and communicate in kind.
To that end I've considered taking a class, but that costs money and time which I don't necessarily have at present. With that, I took the lesson learned from Khan Academy and sought an online tool that could help me achieve the goal of learning Spanish. After some searching, I recently came across the site Duolingo, and began a regimen of Spanish instruction. So far, I've enjoyed using the site, a fairly recent start-up offering free language instruction for English speakers in Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and English instruction in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Interestingly, Duolingo is a "crowdsourced text translation platform," such that as students progress through the levels of instruction, they simultaneously help translate other websites over the Internet. So by learning another language through Duolingo, one not only consumes lessons but also contributes to a good cause.
Conclusion:
These projects, along with work and school, have kept me pretty busy since the end of the summer, but I've learned a lot in the interval, and perhaps some of what you see here will inspire you to attempt a new project or take up an old one of your own. There are lots of tools out there on the Internet if you have the time and inclination to figure them out; and finding one that works for you, can make a big difference in the quality and frequency of your practice. Underlying everything, however, is a good attitude that can simultaneously accept feeling incompetent at the beginning of a process while maintaining good habits and patience throughout. I am no expert in this subject, but taking on the projects described above has provided some helpful reminders of how nice it can be to work with a positive frame of mind.
Happy Thursday :)
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