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Mia is fi ve feet seven inches of blonde ambition. Her father, Frank, ex- marine, is in awe. “She’ll do more pull- ups than most of the guys in her class. She has the Mary land state record in the bench press, she was sixth in the NCAA for powerlifting.
Very soft- spoken; you just don’t see it coming.” When we had Mia to ourselves, we asked her if Frank was blowing smoke.
She laughed. “He likes to exaggerate.” But when pressed, she admitted to the facts. Until recently, women in the Marines were required to do fl ex arm hangs instead of pull- ups (where the chin crosses the plane of the pull- up bar), but the newly toughened rules effective in 2014 require a minimum of three pull- ups, the same as the minimum for men. Targets are eight pull- ups for women, twenty for men. Mia does thirteen and is shooting for twenty. As a student at the Naval Academy, she qualifi ed two years in a row for nationals in powerlifting—
three sets each of bench press, squats, and dead lifts— setting Mary land state rec ords.
So we know she’s tough. An aversion to falling is an instinctual refl ex for self- preservation, but her decision to take the assignment was a foregone conclusion, the kind of grit the Marines and the Blundettos are known for. Mia has a sister and two brothers. They’re all active duty Marines.
As it turned out, the third time Mia threw herself out the jump door of a C130 troop transport at 1,250 feet, she plummeted right onto another soldier’s infl ated parachute. But we’re getting ahead of the story.
We’re interested in her jump school training because it’s a great example of how some diffi culties that elicit more effort and that slow down learning— spacing, interleaving, mixing up practice, and others— will more than compensate for their incon ve nience by making the learning stronger, more precise, and more enduring. Short- term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable diffi culties,
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a term coined by the psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork.2
The army’s jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, is designed to make sure you get it right and get it done, and it’s a model of learning through desirable diffi culty. You are not allowed to carry a notebook and write notes. You listen, watch, rehearse, and execute. Jump school is a place where testing is the principal instructional medium, and the test is in the doing.
And, like all things military, jump school adheres to a strict protocol. Get it right or get the boot.
The parachute landing fall, or PLF in military parlance, is a technique of hitting the ground and rolling in a way that distributes the impact over the balls of your feet, the side of your calf, the side of your thigh, the side of your hip, and the side of your back. There are six possible directions in which to execute the fall along the length of your body, determined by conditions in the moment such as the direction of your drift, the terrain, wind, and whether you’re oscillating as you approach the ground. In your fi rst exposure to this essential skill of parachuting, you stand in a gravel pit where the PLF is explained and demonstrated. Then you try it: you practice falling along different planes of the body, you get corrective feedback, and you practice it again.
Over the ensuing week the diffi culty is notched up. You stand on a platform two feet off the ground. On the command
“Ready,” you rock up on the balls of your feet, feet and knees together, arms skyward. On the command “land,” you jump off the wall and execute your PLF.
The test becomes more diffi cult. You clip yourself onto a zip line a dozen feet off the ground, grab onto an overhead T-bar, and drift down to a landing site, where, on command,
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you release and execute the PLF. You practice falling to the right and left, forward and backward, mixing it up.
The diffi culty is increased again. You climb to a platform twelve feet off the ground, where you practice strapping on your harness, checking gear using the buddy system, and jumping through a mockup of an airplane jump door. The harness has risers like those from a parachute, hooked to a zip line but allowing for the same long arc of suspension, and when you jump, you have the momentary downward sensation of free fall, followed by the broad oscillations of suspension as you move along the cable, getting familiar with the motions of a real jump. But at the bottom it’s the instructor, not you, who pulls the release and drops you the last two or three feet to earth, so now you’re executing your fall randomly, from all directions, simulating what’s to come.
Next, you climb a thirty- four- foot tower to practice all the elements of a jump and the choreography of a mass exit from the aircraft, learning how it feels to fall from a height, how to deal with equipment malfunctions, how to jump with a load of heavy combat equipment.
Through demonstration and simulation, in escalating levels of diffi culty that must be mastered in order to progress from one to the next, you learn how to board the aircraft as a part of a jump crew and participate in the command sequence of thirty troops positioning for a mass exit over a drop zone.
How to get out the jump door correctly, how to count one-thousand, two- thousand, three- thousand, four- thousand and feel your chute deploy, or if you get to six- thousand, to pull the cord on your reserve chute; how to deal with twisted suspension lines, avoid collisions, hold into the wind, sort out a tangled control line; how to avoid stealing air from another jumper; the contingencies for landing in trees, water, or power
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lines; how to jump by day or night, in different wind and weather.
The knowledge and skills to be acquired are many, and practice is spaced and interleaved, both by default, as you wait your turn at each of the staging areas, airplane mock- ups, jump platforms, and harness mechanisms, and by necessity, in order to cover all that must be mastered and integrate the disparate components. Finally, if you make it to week 3 without washing out, you jump for real, making fi ve exits from a military transport. With successful completion of the training and fi ve successful jumps, you earn your jump wings and Airborne certifi cate.
On Mia’s third jump, she was fi rst in line at the port jump door with fourteen jumpers queued behind her and another fourteen queued behind the guy standing at the opposite door.
“So what the fi rst person does, in this case me, you hand off your static line to the Sergeant Airborne, and there’s a light and it’s red or green, and you get the one- minute warning, then the thirty- second warning. I’m standing at this door for a few minutes and it’s beautiful. It’s probably one of the pretti-est things I’ve ever seen, but I was terrifi ed. There was nothing to get in my way, nothing I had to think about except just waiting, waiting for the ‘Go!’ The guy at the other door went, then I jumped, and I’m counting one- thousand, two- thousand—and suddenly, at four thousand, I had a green parachute wrapped all around me! I’m thinking, There’s no way this can be my parachute! I’d felt my chute open, I’d felt that lift. I realized that I was on top of the fi rst jumper, so I just sort of swam out of his parachute and steered away from him.”
Jumpers are staggered, but in the four turbulent seconds until your chute opens you have neither awareness nor control over your proximity to other jumpers. The incident, which
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amounted to nothing, thanks to her training, is telling nonetheless. Had it frightened her? Not at all, she said. Mia was prepared to handle it, and her confi dence gave her the cool to
“just sort of swim out.”
It’s one thing to feel confi dent of your knowledge; it’s something else to demonstrate mastery. Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do. When confi dence is based on repeated per for mance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real- world conditions, you can lean into it. Facing the jump door may always reawaken feelings of terror, but the moment she’s out, Mia says, the fear evaporates.
How Learning Occurs
To help you understand how diffi culty can be desirable, we’ll briefl y describe here how learning occurs.
Encoding
Let’s imagine you’re Mia, standing in a gravel pit watching a jump instructor explain and demonstrate the parachute landing fall. The brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental repre sen ta tion of the patterns you’ve observed. This pro cess of converting sensory perceptions into meaningful repre sen ta tions in the brain is still not perfectly understood. We call the pro cess encoding, and we call the new repre sen ta tions within the brain memory traces. Think of notes jotted or sketched on a scratchpad, our short- term memory.
Much of how we run our day- to- day lives is guided by the ephemera that clutter our short- term memory and are, fortunately, soon forgotten— how to jigger the broken latch on the
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locker you used when you suited up at the gym today; remembering to stop for an oil change after your workout. But the experiences and learning that we want to salt away for the future must be made stronger and more durable—
