What to Teach Children Instead of “practice Makes Perfect”
“Practice leads to excellence” has never been a good saying. Let me tell you, I have practiced playing the clarinet a lot , both as a child and then as a teenager, and I am never anywhere near perfect. However, the notion that we can become better at something only by practicing it is still very relevant. There is simply a better way to explain it: Imagine you are building a brain chain.
Barbara Oakley , who calls herself a “retired lackey in mathematics” who later became an engineer, studied learning from both adults and children. She likes to visualize that as you practice a new skill or learn a new subject, you gradually build a new chain in your brain. The Washington Post describes these brain circuits as follows:
The more you practice a skill, the thicker the chain becomes, until a problem (such as solving a certain kind of math problem) becomes automatic. For example, when you first sit down to practice a song on the piano, things go slowly. You focus on every note. But after a while, you can sit down and play the passage smoothly and accurately, because you have the brain chain for that song. Each new skill turns out to be the most difficult at the beginning – and it is then that the child is tempted to give up and say: “I cannot do this!” Encourage them to change it to “I can’t … yet.”
Oakley tells KQED Public Media that all day-to-day activities appear to be automatic, but that mastering them required careful step-by-step training and practice – like learning how to back up a car.
“Any type of skill involves developing a chain of procedural fluency, ” Oakley tells KQED . “Then you can move on to more challenging areas of language proficiency.”
So the next time your child gets upset that he still can’t ride a bike without rolling over, read this song without hitting the wrong note, or solve a math equation unaided, remind him that he is is still building this brain circuit. … A chain may never be perfect , but it will get thicker and stronger over time.