Tolerating Imperfection (Part 1)

  • 2022
  • Leadership
Dan Blurton, Managing Director

Two events have come together in my life recently that have me thinking about my relationship to imperfection. 

The first is that I’ve been learning Tagalog because my fiancé is Filipina. Language learning has never come naturally to me or held my attention for very long - I took Mandarin and French in school but today only retain a few phrases from each. The benefit of learning a language as an adult is that you can approach the subject more methodically. As I dived into the research on spaced repetition, the degree of imperfection that is optimal for learning stood out to me. 

To understand what I mean by that, you have to understand the chart below. It shows what people in the language learning community (and beyond) call the “forgetting curve.” When you learn something new, you begin to forget it over time. Each time you successfully recall the concept before you forget it, the concept becomes more stable in your memory (i.e. you forget it less over time). However – and this is key - not all recalls are equal. The longer you can go before recalling the concept, the more the memory benefits from that recall. 

To use an example, if you introduce me to your friend Tim, I have learned his name. If I repeat his name during the introduction (a classic networking trick), the repetition will help me remember his name. But if I wait five minutes and then use Tim’s name, it will last longer in my memory.

As it turns out, waiting long enough that you forget some of what you know before reviewing is optimal. Most language learning apps will target between 80-90% recall for optimum memory building. Another way to think about this is that you have a lot of content to understand and you’re wasting time reviewing if you are 100% going to remember it.

This, of course, goes against what we find in traditional school environments where you’re expected to test 100%. And because I was brought up in that environment, it is a bit nerve wracking, even now, to know that I’m not meant to ace the “test” that I take on my language app every day. I still feel that pinch of pain when I get a word wrong. 

The tragedy is that children enter school equipped with all the correct attitudes for learning through complexity (and schools stamp it out). Children are born into a world of immense complexity (to them), naturally experimenting with what they find. Imagine how little would be learned if babies aimed for 100 percent. Walking, talking, picking up toys for the first time - they all demand error. It is only once schools enculture a new way of viewing the world that we begin to prefer validation over understanding. 

Due to the complexity of language, it would be next to impossible to learn a language entirely from a textbook or through independent study and this is where imperfection plays a second necessary role. At some point, we are forced to confront the language through immersion (as children do) - and we can never be entirely prepared when that happens. 

Here again, a sense of calm goes a long way. Research has found that the more we can encounter language immersion with high motivation, high self-esteem, and low anxiety (hard to do in the face of certain imperfection), the better we will be at learning the language (something called the Affective Filter Hypothesis).

While these ideas have been explored extensively in language learning, spaced repetition is a general theory that can be applied to all memorization. The next time you’re taking on new complex content, ask yourself where your comfort zone is in relation to the learning and whether you’ve optimized for new acquisition (or whether, instead, you’re trying to be perfect). I was reminded recently that rigor is individual - so even if content is “hard,” if you’re acing the test, you might not be allowing yourself all the benefits of immersion in the complexity as you could be.

Likewise, the Affective Filter Hypothesis would appear (to me) to be true in any complex situation. And with the world becoming more complex every day, we are facing a new era of ambiguity. With it, we will be required to place greater emphasis on our relationship to imperfection.

Are you a super language learner? Do you want to discuss efficient learning and learning cultures? I would love to hear your thoughts. You can email me at dblurton@ths.edu.hk


 

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