Determination

There is a martial arts teaching that goes something like this:

To become a true master of a move, you must practice it 10,000 times.

• After 1,000 repetitions you have the basics.
• After 2,000 repetitions you are really good.
• After 3,000 repetitions you can perform the move perfectly.
• After 4,000 repetitions you start to get bored.
• After 5,000 repetitions you have no interest in the move anymore.
• After 6,000 repetitions you start to see the move in a different way.
• After 7,000 repetitions you expand on the move.
• After 8,000 repetitions you invent new variants.
• After 9,000 repetitions you have integrated the move into your arsenal.
• After 10,000 repetitions you no longer think of the move.

We have certainly written many more words in our lives, so if writing a word is the kata we are repeating then we have mastered it long ago. If writing a novel is the kata the I do not think any of us have a chance to master it.

But clearly there are masters of writing, even if they themselves stumble in mid novel. The kata writers are seeking to master is something in between a word and a novel.

When I was young, maybe 7 or 8, There was a patio in my back yard with basketball hoop. It was made of hexagonal patio tiles and they fascinated me. I knew that when I was grown and spectacularly wealthy, I would have a house with hexagonal patio tiles. I was a math nerd. I also had a brother two years older then me, a low growth rate and relatively little athletic skill. I was not competitive at basketball.

In fact I could barely dribble, but that was what I could do, and I wanted to prove I could do it a lot. I also knew that numbers had no limit. So I started dribbling, and counting my dribbles.

It didn't take me long to realize that I could dribble faster than I could say large numbers, so I started saying only the ones place, and only saying the value of the tens place when it changed. one two three four five six seven eight nine ninety one two three four five six seven eight nine hundred one two three....

It also didn't take me long to realize that the lower I dribbled, the faster I could go, And when you're dribbling that low to the ground, the basketball barely moves in relation to it's size, and you could slowly rotate it in any direction just by dribbling offset sightly to that side.

Even dribbling that fast I wanted a bigger record than I could get in one sitting. I had to remember my count from day to day so I tried to stop at round numbers or numbers with a pattern to them.

I still remember the last number I stopped counting at: thirteen thousand one hundred thirty one, or as the mnemonic I used at the time 1 3 1 3 1.

So I guess I know how to dribble, and I also know how to count. And that's probably the closest experience I have to learning something in the style of a repetitive kata.

No Solution

Let's talk about Ben:

"He just found it incredibly difficult to grasp reading at school, his reading age was well below average. When he got homework I had to help him read it and when he sat his Sats tests at 11 (in English, maths and science) he had to have someone read the questions to him."
"I initially thought he was dyslexic and took him to be tested but, because he could not read very well, the test did not work and they could not determine whether he was or was not."

This is an example of a failure in education. The root cause of this failure is a system that developed over time based on the limited knowledge of leaders decades or centuries ago. When we hear about Ben's problem this way it seems intractable, the kind of problems that might take years to resolve or work around. Indeed, one might conclude that there is no solution and that he is simply not able to keep up.

How coloured lenses helped Ben read

It turns out that he had a condition called scotopic sensitivity which is thought to affect half of all children with learning difficulties. This is clearly a huge problem with a cheap and simple solution, but the educational system could not have been designed to deal with an illness that wasn't known centuries or decades before. This might be forgiveable, except that it can't adapt because it wasn't designed to react appropriately to a student having trouble.

There is a well defined formal process for failure and segmentation based on past performance, but no similarly entrenched process for prioritizing and seeking out the cause of the difficulties. If you've failed to do what it takes to teach a child to read, having someone read his tests to him is in no way fair to him.