The Smith-Rogers Error

Tricking yourself into learning and doing

Photo © Henri Prestes — more coming soon.

When I was a young boy at school we had a French teacher called Mr. Draper. Every week there would be a vocab test in which we had to prove an understanding of what twenty words meant, along with their gender. I can’t remember what the penalty for failing was, but it was sufficiently uncool that to some of us it seemed worthwhile to take up the insurance policy Draper offered: if we came to him before the test with the words written out by hand ten times — complete with gender and meaning — then we’d avoid the penalty if we didn’t pass the test.

And this, of course, is a little piece of teaching genius: because if you’ve done that, it’s extremely likely you’ll have learned the words as a by-product. By offering us what seemed a lazy escape route, he’d tricked us into doing the work.

Several years later, my best school pal David Rogers and I were studying A-Level Chemistry. Dave was good at chemistry (he was pretty good at everything, and is now a doctor in Maryland), whereas I always found it a bit of a boring slog. I’d started the Sixth Form (that’s the Junior and Senior years in high school, for American readers) thinking I wanted to be a scientist, and initially took Biology, Physics and Chemistry. I rapidly discovered that A-Level Physics was much more gnarly and math-intensive than the previous material, and talked the school into letting me switch to English instead. I had to stick it out with Chemistry, however.

Each week featured a two-hour lesson dedicated to a practical experiment. Neither Dave nor I were much enamored of these, as they generally involved carefully measuring small amounts of not very interesting chemicals, and getting upside pipettes and shit, before eventually arriving at disappointingly inaccurate results. So we devised a workaround. We’d hit the textbooks and figure out what the theoretical ideal outcome of the experiment should be, and then work backwards — fabricating the results as if we’d actually conducted it. We realized we couldn’t present perfect numbers or it’d be obvious what we were up to. So we came up with something we called the ‘Smith-Rogers Error’. We’d introduce an acceptable margin of error into our “results”, generally around 4.3% — varying it slightly each week, again to avoid detection. One of us would vaguely move bits of equipment around while the other wrote out the fictional results, and then we’d spend the rest of the time chatting.

Did the teacher guess what we were up to? Possibly. Kids always assume they’re smarter than the guy standing at the front of the class, and a lot of the time, they’re wrong. But of course… it didn’t matter. Because what we’d done was trick ourselves into learning the theory of the specific reaction at hand, often at a deeper level than the kids who doggedly performed the experiment as requested.

Now, teaching has changed a lot since the above, which took place in the 1970s. Rote learning is no longer in fashion. A French teacher nowadays might for example kindly tip you off to the fact that you can guess the gender of the language’s nouns with a high level of accuracy (eighty to ninety percent) by simply learning the fact that if it ends in an -e, it’ll almost certainly be feminine, whereas words ending in -t or -l or -m or -n will very likely be masculine. You’re welcome.

Other methods have swung in different directions too. My son has spent his school years being indoctrinated against use of the passive voice, to a degree that has driven me lightly insane when called upon to assist him in an essay (and no, grumpily pointing out I’ve written over a dozen novels did not help my case at all, merely providing further proof that I am ancient and annoying and everything that is wrong with everything). I’ll admit it has given his prose a commendable directness, but we’re not all going to only deploying English (or any other language) to write business letters. I’ll note also that misdirection is often at the heart of education, especially the parts that may to the student seem the most pointless. It’ll probably never be important in your life to know about the colonialist underpinnings of the build toward the First World War, for example (surprisingly interesting though that turned out to be): what’s intended is that through the process you’ll gain skills in research and marshaling an argument, along with appreciating the hidden undercurrents of history, and the world — skills that are widely applicable to life in general.

But my point is that learning can be hard. I’d love to be much better at French, but it’s always easier not to put in the work (especially as I live in California, where it’s not a tongue many people encounter in school, and the nearest French speakers are probably in Canada). One approach that works for me is watching French or Belgian TV, with English subtitles. There’s a lot of great genre television being produced in those countries (I’ll do a post with some highlights soon), and useful words or phrases or pronunciations seem to seep into my mind while I’m caught up in the stories.

I use a similar tactic when I’m in a new city. There’s no better way of getting to know one than pounding its streets on foot, seeing how it all joins together, soaking up the tone and texture of neighborhoods, observing who lives where. And I love walking. On the other hand I don’t enjoy just aimlessly wandering about. My wife and other bastards keep trying to get me to hike: but unless there’s a meaningful answer to the question “To where?”, then I ain’t going. So I give myself a goal. Find evidence of a bookstore forty blocks away, and head for it — even though I know I’ve got quite enough unread books already, and probably don’t have room in my luggage for any more. It doesn’t matter. That spurious carrot is enough to get me out there striding along with purpose and intent… and I get all the other good stuff along the way.

And so my question is this: have you come across or developed any of these little tricks? Strategies that bypass an inbuilt resistance to any given project, whether to do with learning or simply getting through life’s endless tasks and trials, something to lift you over the humps and into a place where — apparently against your will — you’ve wound up doing what you were supposed to do in the first place?

If so — please share in the comments!