TITLE: Digging a Hole Just to Climb Out
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 26, 2007  7:46 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
I remember back in my early years teaching (*) I had a student
who came in to ask a question about a particular error message
she had received from our Pascal compiler.  She had some idea
of what caused it, and she wanted to know what it meant.  It
was a pretty advanced error, one we hadn't reached the point
of making in class, so I asked her how she had managed to
bump into it.  Easy, she said; she was intentionally creating
errors in her program so that she could figure out what sort
of error messages would result.

If you teach programming for very long, you are bound to
encounter such a student.  She was doing fine in class but was
afraid that she was having life too easy and so decided to use
her time productively -- creating errors that she could learn
to debug and maybe even anticipate.

I've written many times before about practice, including
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-07.html#e2004-07-16T10_46_17.htm">
   practice for practice's sake</A>.
That entry was about the idea of creating "valueless software",
which one writes as a learning exercise, not for anyone's
consumption.  But my forward-thinking student was working
more in the vein of
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-12T10_26_28.htm">
   fixin' what's broke</A>,
in which one practices in an area of known weakness, with the
express purpose of making that part of one's game strong.  My
student didn't know many of the compiler error messages that
she was going to face in the coming weeks, so she set out to
learn them.

I think that she was actually practicing a simple form of an
even more specific learning pattern: consciously seeking out,
even creating, challenges to conquer.
<A HREF="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Make_a_Mess,_Clean_it_Up!.txt">
   Make a Mess, Clean it Up!</A>,
is a neat story about an example of this pattern in the history
of the Macintosh team.  There, Donn Denman talks about Burrell
Smith's surprising way of getting better at Defender, a video
game played by the Mac programmers as a way to relax or pump
themselves up:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Instead of avoiding the tough situations, he'd immediately create
them, and immediately start learning how to handle the worst
situation imaginable.  Pretty soon he would routinely handle
anything the machine could throw at him.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

He'd lose a few games along the way, but soon he was strong in
areas of the game that his competitors may not have even
encountered before -- because they had spent time avoiding
difficult times!  Denman saw in this game-playing behavior
something he recognized in Smith's life as a programmer: he

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... likes challenges so much that he actually seeks them out
and consciously creates them.  In the long run, this approach
makes sense.  He seems to aggressively set up challenging
situations throughout his life.  Then, when life throws him
a curve ball, he'll swing hard, and knock it out of the park. 
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

The article uses two metaphors for this pattern: make a mess
so that you can clean it up, and choose to face tough situations
so that you are ready for the curve balls life throws you.
(I guess those tough situations must be akin the nasty breaking
stuff of a major-league pitcher.)  My title for this entry offers
a third metaphor: digging yourself into a hole so that you can
how to get out of a hole.  As much a baseball fan as I was
growing up, the metaphor of digging oneself into a hole was
the more common.  Whatever it's name, the idea is the same.

I find that I'm more likely to apply this pattern in some
parts of my life than others.  In programming, I can recover
from bad situations by re-compiling, re-booting, or at worst
reinstalling.  In running, I can lose all the races I want,
or come up short in a training session all I want -- so long
as I don't put my body at undue risk.  The rest of life, the
parts that deal with other people, require some care.  It's
hard to create an environment in which I can screw up my
interpersonal relationships just so that I can learn how to
get out of the mess.  There's a different metaphor for such
behavior -- burning bridges -- that connotes its irreversibility.
Besides, it's not right to treat people as props in my game.
I suppose that this is a place in which role play can help,
though artificial situations can go only so far.

Where games, machines, and tools are concerned, though, digging
a deep hole just for the challenge of getting out of it can be
a powerful way to learn.  Pretty soon, you can find yourself
as master of the machine.

----

(*)  Yikes, how old does that make me sound?
-----