“The experience of creating beauty calms me down,” she says, but it’s strictly a discovery pro cess. She has always been a writer, and some years after having launched herself into the garden, she began publishing the Garden Letter, a quarterly for northern gardeners in which she chronicles her exploits, mishaps, lessons, and successes. She writes the same way that she gardens, with boldness and self- effacing humor, passing along the entertaining snafus and unexpected insights that are the fruits of experience. In calling herself the Blundering Gardener, she is giving herself and us, her readers, permission to make mistakes and get on with it.
Note that in writing about her experiences, Bonnie is engaging two potent learning pro cesses beyond the act of gardening itself. She is retrieving the details and the story of what
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she has discovered— say, about an experiment in grafting two species of fruit trees— and then she is elaborating by explaining the experience to her readers, connecting the outcome to what she already knows about the subject or has learned as a result.
Her leap-
taking impulses have taken her through vast swaths of the plant kingdom, of course, and deeply into the Latin nomenclature and the classic horticultural literature.
These impulses have also drawn her into the aesthetics of space and structure and the mechanics thereof: building stone walls; digging and wiring water features; putting a cupola on the garage; building paths, stairs, and gates; ripping out a Gothic picket fence and reusing the wood to create something more open and with stronger horizontal lines to pull down the soaring verticality of her three- story Victorian house and connect it with the gardens that surround it; making the out-door spaces airier and more easily seen from the street, while still circumscribed, so as to impart that essential sense of pri-vacy that makes a garden a room of its own. Her spaces are idiosyncratic and asymmetrical, giving the illusion of having evolved naturally, yet they cohere, through the repetition of textures, lines, and geometry.
A simple example of how she has backed into more and more complex mastery is the manner in which she came to embrace plant classifi cation and the Latin terminology. “When I started, the world of plants was a completely foreign language to me. I would read gardening books and be completely lost. I didn’t know what plant names were, common or Latin.
I wasn’t thinking about learning this stuff, ever. I’m like, Why would you want to do that? Why wouldn’t you just get outside and dig a hole and put something in it?” What she rel-ished were pictures that gave her ideas and passages of text where the designers used phrases like “my pro cess” in describing
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how they had achieved the desired effect. It was the possessive pronoun, my pro cess, that affi rmed Bonnie in her head-long rush to learn by doing. The notion is that every gardener’s pro cess is uniquely his or her own. Bonnie’s pro cess did not involve taking direction from experts, much less mastering the Linnaean taxonomy or the Latin names of what she stuck in holes and dragged her water hose to. But as she thrashed around, working to achieve in dirt the magical spaces that danced in her mind, she came to Latin and Linnaeus despite herself.
“You begin to discover that the Latin names are helpful.
They can give you a shortcut to understanding the nature of the plants, and they can help you remember. Tardiva , which is a species name, comes after hydrangea, which is a genus.”
Bonnie had taken Latin in high school, along with French, and of course En glish, and the cues to those memories began to reawaken. “I can easily see that tardiva means late, like tardy. The same word comes after many plant varieties, so you see the genus and then the species is tardiva, and now you know that par tic u lar plant is a late bloomer. So you begin to realize that the Latin names are a way of helping you remember, and you fi nd yourself using them more and more.
Also you remember plants better, because it’s second nature to you that procumbus means prostrate, crawling on the ground. It makes sense. So now it’s not so hard to remember that par tic u lar species name when it’s attached to a genus.
It’s also important to know the Latin names because then you can be absolutely specifi c about a plant. Plants have common names, and common names are regional. Actaea racemosa has a common name of black cohosh, but it’s also known as snakeroot, and those names are often given to other plants. There’s only one Actaea racemosa.” Gradually, and despite her inclination to resist, she came to grasp the
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classical taxonomy of ornamental plants and to appreciate how Linnaeus’s schema frames family connections and communicates attributes.
Bonnie said that the farmers she had recently met were particularly interested in what she has learned about the advantages of composting and earthworms over chemical fertil-izers for building nutrients and soil aeration, and how to get strong root growth on low rations of water through a home-made system of drip irrigation. She paused in recounting her meeting with them, refl ecting on how all of this knowledge has sneaked up on her. It was never something she set out to conquer. “Look, blundering’s really not a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that you get stuff done. A lot of people, when they contemplate the enormity of the task and they see all that’s entailed, they’re stopped in their tracks.”
Of course, in some settings— like learning to jump out of airplanes and walk away with your life— blundering is not the optimal learning strategy.
Undesirable Diffi culties
Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, who coined the phrase “desirable diffi culties,” write that diffi culties are desirable because “they trigger encoding and retrieval pro cesses that support learning, comprehension, and remembering. If, however, the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to them successfully, they become undesirable diffi culties.”19
Cognitive scientists know from empirical studies that testing, spacing, interleaving, variation, generation, and certain kinds of contextual interference lead to stronger learning and retention. Beyond that, we have an intuitive sense of what kinds of diffi culties are undesirable but, for lack of the needed research, we cannot yet be defi nitive.
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Clearly, impediments that you cannot overcome are not desirable. Outlining a lesson in a sequence different from the one in the textbook is not a desirable diffi culty for learners who lack the reading skills or language fl uency required to hold a train of thought long enough to reconcile the discrepancy. If your textbook is written in Lithuanian and you don’t know the language, this hardly represents a desirable diffi -
culty. To be desirable, a diffi culty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort.
Intuitively it makes sense that diffi culties that don’t strengthen the skills you will need, or the kinds of challenges you are likely to encounter in the real- world application of your learning, are not desirable. Having somebody whisper in your ear while you read the news may be essential training for a TV anchor. Being heckled by role- playing protestors while honing your campaign speech may help train up a politician. But neither of these diffi culties is likely to be helpful for Rotary Club presidents or aspiring YouTube bloggers who want to improve their stage presence. A cub towboat pi lot on the Mississippi might be required in training to push a string of high- riding empty barges into a lock against a strong side wind. A baseball player might practice hitting with a weight on his bat to strengthen his swing. You might teach a football player some of the principles of ballet for learning balance and movement, but you probably would not teach him the techniques for an effective golf drive or backhand tennis serve.
Is there an overarching rule that determines the kinds of impediments that make learning stronger? Time and further research may yield an answer. But the kinds of diffi culties we’ve just described, whose desirability is well documented, offer a large and diverse toolkit already at hand.
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The Takeaway
Learning is at least a three- step pro cess: initial encoding of information is held in short- term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive repre sen ta tion of knowledge in long- term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long- term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it.
Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know.
Long- term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge.
Because of the vast capacity of long- term memory, having the ability to locate and recall what you know when you need it is key; your facility for calling up what you know depends on the repeated use of the information (to keep retrieval routes strong) and on your establishing powerful retrieval cues that can reactivate the memories.
Periodic retrieval of learning helps strengthen connections to the memory and the cues for recalling it, while also weakening routes to competing memories. Retrieval practice that’s easy does little to strengthen learning; the more diffi cult the practice, the greater the benefi t.
When you recall learning from short- term memory, as in rapid- fi re practice, little mental effort is required, and little long- term benefi t accrues. But when you recall it after some time has elapsed and your grasp of it has become a little rusty, you have to make an effort to reconstruct it. This effortful retrieval both strengthens the memory but also makes the
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learning pliable again, leading to its reconsolidation. Reconsolidation helps update your memories with new information and connect them to more recent learning.
Repeated effortful recall or practice helps integrate learning into mental models, in which a set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills are fused into a meaningful whole that can be adapted and applied in later settings. Examples are the perceptions and manipulations involved in driving a car or in knocking a curveball out of the ballpark.
When practice conditions are varied or retrieval is interleaved with the practice of other material, we increase our abilities of discrimination and induction and the versatility with which we can apply the learning in new settings at a later date. Interleaving and variation build new connections, expanding and more fi rmly entrenching knowledge in memory and increasing the number of cues for retrieval.
Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.
5
Avoid Illusions of Knowing
At the root of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the mea sure of our own per for mance. We’re constantly making judgments about what we know and don’t know and whether we’re capable of handling a task or solving a problem. As we work at something, we keep an eye on ourselves, adjusting our thinking or actions as we progress.
Monitoring your own thinking is what psychologists call metacognition ( meta is Greek for “about”). Learning to be accurate self- observers helps us to stay out of blind alleys, make good decisions, and refl ect on how we might do better next time. An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don’t know when we’ve got it.
Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.1
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In this chapter we discuss perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, and distortions of memory that commonly mislead people. Then we suggest techniques for keeping your judgment squared with reality.
The consequences of poor judgment fi ll the daily papers.
