After a summer break Mike and Jon return to discuss their travels in Peru, California, and Ireland, new jobs, settling into a new city and country, the American educational system, how we learn, the distinctions between skills and knowledge, how society thinks about failure, life long learning, and a some recommended reading.

Links:

What we did instead of recording:

Shrugging at a waterfall

Making faces at a river

Taking in the Sierra Nevadas

Skills versus Knowledge

Rote memorization

Improving Memory:Mnemonics; Narratives; Spaced Repetition Systems

Questions if you want to learn marine biology:

How do you learn that?

What do you do?

What techniques do you use?

What materials do you use?

How do you determine how good those materials are?

Not just teaching information but teaching people how to learn information

We know how to learn skills:

1) Look at skill

2) Break it into its component parts

3) Practice those parts

4) Reintegrate them

5) Practice them together

Thinking: look at information, understand it, and break it down

Learning: retain new information, develop a new skill, understand concepts

People are ashamed of failure, is it just part of the process of learning

How do interest and curiosity affect memory?

Recomendations:

Book - Getting things done - David Allen - Introduction to thinking about Organization and task management

Article - Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs - Michael Pollan - NY Times - Microbiome and immunology