of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
It’s not the failure that’s desirable, it’s the dauntless effort despite the risks, the discovery of what works and what doesn’t that sometimes only failure can reveal. It’s trusting that trying to solve a puzzle serves us better than being spoon- fed the solution, even if we fall short in our fi rst attempts at an answer.
An Example of Generative Learning
As we said earlier, the pro cess of trying to solve a problem without the benefi t of having been taught how is called generative learning, meaning that the learner is generating the answer rather than recalling it. Generation is another name for old- fashioned trial and error. We’re all familiar with the stories of skinny kids in Silicon Valley garages messing around with computers and coming out billionaires. We would like to serve up a different kind of example here: Minnesota’s Bonnie Blodgett.
Bonnie is a writer and a self- taught ornamental gardener in a constant argument with a voice in her head that keeps nat-tering about all the ways her latest whim is sure to go haywire and embarrass her. While she is a woman of strong aesthetic sensibilities, she is also one of epic doubts. Her “learning style” might be called leap- before- you- look- because- if- you-look- fi rst- you- probably- won’t-like- what- you- see. Her garden writing appears under the name “The Blundering Gardener.”
This moniker is a way of telling her voices of doubt to take a hike, because what ever the consequences of the next whim, she’s already rolling up her sleeves. “Blundering means that you get going on your project before you have fi gured out how to do it in the proper way, before you know what you’re getting into. For me, the risk of knowing what you’re getting
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into is that it becomes an overwhelming obstacle to getting started.”18
Bonnie’s success shows how struggling with a problem makes for strong learning, and how a sustained commitment to advancing in a par tic u lar fi eld of endeavor through trial-and- error effort leads to complex mastery and greater knowledge of the interrelationships of things. When we spoke, she had just traveled to southern Minnesota to meet with a group of farmers who wanted her gardening insights on a gamut of issues ranging from layout and design to pest control and irrigation. In the years since she fi rst sank her spade, Bonnie’s garden writing has won national recognition and found a devoted following far and wide through many outlets, and her garden has become a destination for other gardeners.
She came to ornamental gardening about the time she found herself eyeballing middle age. She had no training, just a burning desire to get her hands dirty making beautiful spaces on the corner lot of the home she shares with her husband in a historic neighborhood of St. Paul.
“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
