Demonstrating Skill

I was told that when you go to university, you come out thinking you know nothing and when you go to vocational colleges, you come out knowing very specific and useful skills. What Actuarial Science did was teach me a bit of humility. I failed academic tests for the first time. I had failed things before. I got my driver's license on the fourth attempt. Not because I couldn’t drive, more likely I failed because I was confident I could drive. I got some free lessons from an instructor who saw me in the newspaper. I should have been able to tell from the way he was reading the newspaper during the lessons that there was a problem. Maybe he was looking for new clients? But I “could” drive and backed myself. The point of any test is not just for you to know what you are doing. It is to give confidence to the instructor that you know what you are doing. To follow the structure and rules and demonstrate the required methodology. The way you pass exams is by knowing what the examiner is looking for. I failed three times in short succession (twice in one day) because of observations. By not knowing what I was supposed to be conspicuously demonstrating. I then got a new instructor to smooth the edges and passed on a fourth occasion. 

Embodied Knowledge

Doing well in exams is not just about knowing the information in a I-can-google-it way. The first time I wrote open-book exams (when you can take the answers in with you!) was when I did a diploma in financial planning. The exams were spread over four days, and while I had prepared, I was not as bullet-proof as I liked to be because I assumed I could look up answers. I got through day one with very little “margin for safety” and a heightened sense of respect. Having the books is not sufficient. Knowing you can look, knowing where to look, and knowing, are three very different levels of knowledge. Beyond exams, making money is often about taking complexity and being able to articulate a very clear, instantly recognisable, ask and offer. Delivering a punchy two-mark answer in the 30 seconds allocated. Not spending 5 minutes finding the answer. That is embodied knowledge. That demonstrates having engaged with the body of work, so deeply that you know the path to the stuff that matters. Real competitive advantages are open-books. Those with mastery have engaged so deeply they don’t need to hide. The answers are simple, and available, but require you to do the work.  

The Gutenberg Bible

One of the first books to be printed with a printing press

Conspicuous Skills

One of the ways we develop conspicuous skills is through exams. Exams are not real life, but they are a blunt way to communicate your skills, so in most cases you just suck it up and write them. I prefer to think of exams as sport, where you practice writing “for the exam”. Knowing the content is a different task to showing up for the demonstration. Think from the perspective of the examiner. What are they looking for? I think of my mother as a teacher. Sitting on her bed with piles of marking, tired and keen to get to the end of the slog. As the person writing, you need to make their life easy. Think of the marking schedule. How are you going to be assessed? Unfortunately, exams are not purely about creativity. They are about signals. They are about containers. You are building a box to give the examiner what they want. You need to still your inner purist’s romance around the love of creativity and learning. That is a small part of what you are doing when you write exams. Study techniques are important. Summarising information. Identifying the main point and getting to it quickly without filler words and fluff. Practice answering questions in a way that gives the examiner the ability to mark you, so that you are match fit. 

 

Mostly Sport

One of my friends from university was the master of seeing things for what they are. It’s mostly sport. In our first year, I quickly learnt from him the power of past papers and practice examples. Getting something right once isn’t the point. Letting it soak in till you know it, rather than just recognise it is. Treating the process of tests and exams like athletics, where you are embodying the skills and reducing the performance times. The second trick he exemplified was answering in the way the markers are looking for. We did a couple of projects together, and getting the Marking Schedule from students from the year ahead was the starting point. This is like looking at job advertisements, studying your mentors’ career paths, and speaking to recruiters before choosing what to study. On very few occasions are people genuinely pushing the boundaries of human thought. The answers are normally there for those who look. Who is doing what you want to do? Were they where you are? Is there a path?

Your Own Fate

I find the initial stages of learning confusing. In a physical way that affects my breathing, my tingling skin, and my wide eyes. Education often does more filtering than teaching. Levels sort the good from bad, and move on. Searching for naturals. Searching for the chosen ones. Chosen by fate. Except different skills are needed in the early stages of gaining skills and knowledge. My secret power is I am as stubborn as a donkey. I take the next step. In my Actuarial exams, I was very structured. Early exams took 100 hours each. Later ones 300 hours. I put the hours in. How often do we put 100 hours into something, before deciding we can’t do it? How often do we ask whether the way we learnt is the best way to learn, before deciding we can’t do it? Two mentors stand out for me as teaching me practical methods on “How to learn”. Mr Saayman (my History teacher), taught me as a 12-year-old how to summarise. Pin down the main thing. When I was 20 years old, David O’Brien,(an Actuary who had finished what I was starting) reinforced the idea of spending 8 minutes on a 5 mark question, and no more. Move on. Exams are a process. No individual question is the main thing. Part of learning is accepting confusion as part of the process. Make your own fate.

Make your own fate

Financial GPS

The world changes fast. But not fast enough (yet) that it is not worth modelling where you would like to be on a few people who went from (a) roughly where you are now, to (b) roughly where you want to be. Opening your ears to case studies. “The world isn’t fair. If it was, you’d be much worse off”, a friend of mine tells his kids. We can’t all plug the same destination into our financial GPS. We can map our point of ignorance, and develop skills and knowledge. I was good at exams. A disciplined studier and ruthless time manager. Talking to people made me think “hard but possible” was a great competitive advantage. In the box thinking. The hard box. I studied a 4-year Business Science degree at the University of Cape Town. I then kept the momentum with work and study doing three professional qualifications. A lot of this was mapping to people ahead of me. Do I want to do what they do? My eventual answer, was no. I map bits of various people. Channelling them as I need to. Accepting that life is a bit of a game of alternative realities. The combination of destinations is my own.

Global Positioning System

Survival Models

The first course I had to repeat because of failure was ironically called Survival Models. It was a step up from the course’s previous name. Mortality. If you have ever experienced the pain of finishing an essay or project, and the computer crashing, you will have some empathy for the penny that dropped for me. I hadn’t failed for lack of application. I had passed the course, but had been swallowed whole (along with most of my class) by the final exam. The exam was all that mattered for the professional qualification. Even when the evidence disappears, Skills & Knowledge built through blood, sweat and tears leave a mark. The second mouse gets the cheese. Second time round, a lot of concepts that didn’t make sense the first time sunk in. Normally we don’t have time for that. The production line moves on with progressively weaker foundations. I still look back at that course as a blessing (deep) in disguise. I learnt the value of learning through teaching people one step behind, even when you are grasping in the dark. I learnt the value of compounded learning. Of inconspicuous growth. It’s never starting from scratch if you carry hard won lessons with you.

Survival Training

Play the Whistle

In Rugby, unlike Football, you are taught to play the whistle. For the same reason, you don't celebrate in Baseball or Softball by throwing the ball up like you do in Cricket. The game carries on. I can still remember teammates getting very upset with me as I celebrated a great catch, and two people ran in. You have to know your game.

Exams at school are very much the same. Being good at exams is more important than being good at the subject you are doing. You need to know what the examiner is asking in their mind and how they want the question answered. You need to realize that the examiner is probably tired, overworked, and underpaid. You want to make their job easy. So they recognize the answer they are looking for quickly.

Kids are forced into deciding their identity in industrialized education far too early. The real skill learned at school is less to do with the subject, and more to do with the container. The same is later true of businesses. All businesses boil down to being able to articulate an offer in a recognizable way... then putting that in a container you can charge for. What you do isn't who you are. What you get paid isn't what you are worth. Most of us spend a lot of time doing what we have to. Who we are is much deeper than that.

Two mentors that stick out for me (among many) were Mr Simon, and David O'Brien. 

Mr Simon was a giant of a man who taught me History when I was 12. Except what he really taught me was how to summarise. To find the keywords, and build memory trees. The first few minutes of all my exams for the next 20 years were vomiting memorised cheat sheets onto a piece of paper to refer to when panic set in. The keywords were the ones the examiners would be after.

David was my first big boss post-university. My boss's boss's boss. His trick was really simple, but effective. Exams are largely about time management. Don't give an essay for a 3 mark question. Don't answer a 50 mark essay question with a 3 mark answer. The (post university) exams I did were all 180 minutes for 100 marks. That meant you could plan to spend 8 minutes on a 5 mark question (1.6 minutes per mark). 1.6 rather than 1.8 because you wanted a Buffer to check your work, and because it is easier to just say 5 minutes for a 3 mark question than be precise. Time runs out, you move on. The first few minutes are where you get the most marks.

Exams then become about practice. At school level, you can treat any subject like history if you do enough past papers. It becomes about match fitness, and practicing under exam conditions rather than the underlying content.

If all this sounds cynical or not what education should be about, you are right. Except you can fight the system by ignoring it, or you can outplay it. Like Richie McCaw, know the rules well enough to break them.

Money is exactly the same. Hating it is really unhelpful. It is far better to conquer it. Instead of working for money, you can learn to make it work for you. Then you get to play the game however you want.

But first, play the whistle.

Tenuous Threads

I far preferred exams to tests and assignments. I see information more as a web of connections than a path. A big black space requiring tenuous threads to be shot across. The threads only gaining strength as they are slowly connected to other initially unrelated ideas. Gradually gaining the ability to catch new information as it arrives. In my third year of university, I failed an exam that meant I had to repeat an entire course. I did really well second time round, because I was able to learn by teaching smarter people one step behind. Just passing means you have a very tentative grasp. Failure is an opportunity for a deeper understanding. Courses are often designed by people who already understand the material. They have forgotten what it is like not to understand. Sometimes it is better for the blind to lead the blind. Instead of desperately clinging to a path by never making a mistake, we can gain comfort with the broader context. Comfort within the confusion. Moving forward together.

Last One Through

I always focussed on time management with exams. A mentor once taught me a technique. Most of our exams were 100 marks in three hours. I allocated 1.6 minutes per mark which left 20 minutes at the end to check the paper. It also meant I didn't spend 30 minutes on a three mark question. Three marks gets five minutes. Five minutes up, and you move on. Ruthlessly.

When I got back from the Comrades on Sunday, I got to read through the whatsapp messages from various friends and family who had been tracking my progress. I kept them on the edge of their seat because I hadn't left the '20 minutes for checking'. To be fair, I had tried. Up until 16km to go, I had pushed to keep ahead of the sub-12 hour bus. They aim to finish with that little margin for error. 

I fell behind that bus in Drummond just after the half way point. I then saw a veteran of several races muttering that we were all done. I had been running within myself, managing my energy right from the start. More shuffling than running. I had gone through the half way mark at 5 hours and 58 minutes. That was not the plan. The hill up to the half way mark was longer than expected and everyone was walking. So I walked. I should have done the walky runny thing. I was caught by surprise when people started saying that the cut-off gun was going in just 10 minutes. I heard it fire behind me. I didn't know I had been cutting it that fine. So I picked up the pace and got in front of the Sub-12 bus at around the 48km in/ 41km to go mark. 

The last cut-off was with 7km to go, but I had a little wobble with 16km to go. A wobble in my head rather than in my body. Cowies Hill got the better of me and I felt shattered. When the bus caught me, I didn't have the wits to push on. This also meant that I had to manage my time on my own. The problem is I have laughed off wearing a watch. I don't like the stress of being so military about time management any more. I had a rough sense, but had stopped giving any margin of safety. The last 500 metres before the Sherwood cut-offs was an all out sprint. I was the last one through, and had to do some dancing and shoulder dropping as the gates closed around me.

My family watched my dot grind to a halt on the tracking app. That sprint took a little toll and I walked for a couple hundred metres. I then cracked on. Unfortunately I didn't quite make the next cut off. I was about 300 metres from the end when the final gun went.

Exams aren't just about what you know. How you plan is just as important. Next year, I will have trained a bit more (I ran my first marathon a month ago), and I will be wearing a watch! 

A Comfortable Haze

I preferred the study part of working and studying to the study part of university. In standardising learning and breaking the work down into step by step sections, a course is forced to go at a certain pace as it works through the syllabus. When Salman Khan of the Khan Academy first started recording tutorials on Youtube for his cousins, they said they actually preferred it to him teaching them. This was because they could pause him. They could replay him. They could do all this without feeling embarrassed or pressurised. In formal studies with a class, you have to go at the pace of the class. This drove me nuts. Not because I wanted to speed up, but because I wanted to slow down and I didn't feel like I had context.

An important part of learning is becoming comfortable with the haze. You don't understand. Sentences don't fit together. You can't remember what individual words mean, and so the next word makes no sense. Eventually shapes start to emerge and interact and you realise where you are. I am not convinced learning is a linear process where you can go from lesson to lesson conquering each step. Tutorials had me tearing at my hair. Particularly if they were new concepts and then you had to do something which was marked at the end. You couldn't learn to be patient with yourself as you had this burden of testing at the end. As you went through the syllabus, tests would have to be studied for surrounded by whatever other dose of life circumstances was adding to your stress.

Industrialised Education doesn't test the depth of your understanding or your ability to perform as much as it tests Exam fitness. There is no stronger symbol for me than one of the exam venues I used to write in - the UCT sports centre. Rows upon rows of seats, pens and paper. Stressed students. I would love to produce four 10m X 20m paintings of these rows and rows of desks. In the middle of the room you could place a single chair and desk and then play a surround sound of furious scribbling. Remaining calm and being exam fit become the key things that get tested. You need to have practised writing under exam conditions over and over again until you are ready. Past papers aren't just about testing the knowledge, they are about training your body to cope with the actual event. I always tried to study very little the day before an exam, to go to a movie or something to clear my head, so that I could walk in calm.

UCT sports centre exam venue

Source: KRwhiteZA

I was actually a much better 'exam athlete' than I was in tests. Until I had gone through the full body of the syllabus and connected the dots I was very aware of how superficial my knowledge was. It often took the study week just before the exams for things to come together. I used to think maybe it would be a better idea to have study week in the first week of the semester followed by an exam. If you passed, good for you, but most people would fail and then start learning. Second time round you have the context. The exams I failed and had to repeat were some of the most enjoyable courses I did because I could learn haze free (ish).

Many get to the work environment and draw a solid line under their studies barely escaping the urge to tattoo 'done' on their foreheads. While working though, often exams become self study and it is another ball game altogether - you can slowly working through a subject at your own pace. You can get the context you need. For the most part though, it still becomes about that exam at the end - and that is what scares people. There is naturally the challenge of balancing work commitments, but that is a post on its own.

To encourage life-long learning, we need to harness technology to make testing environments less intimidating or at least more reflective of real life situations in which the knowledge will be used. We also need to think of education less as linear step by step process, and more as search for context.