Mystery of Mastery

Adam Gopnik’s new book sounded intriguing: The Real Work, “On the Mystery of Mastery”. The title comes from a colloquialism among magicians, referring to the “accumulated craft, savvy, and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.” Gopnik’s opening chapters discuss the mystery of performance, what he learned in interviewing magicians, and his own efforts in taking drawing classes. Gopnik’s stories about himself are deeply personal. He muses on his expertise as an art critic in sharp contrast to his own inability as an artist. Can one really talk about art without knowing what it’s like to perform the real work?

 

Maybe I’m naïve but I don’t think of mastery as mysterious. You have to be interested, put in the work, and aim for excellence. It takes lots of practice. Gopnik’s expertise is as a writer and has ‘book knowledge’ in the arts. My expertise is as a teacher and my theoretical knowledge is in chemistry. As a computational chemist, I’m not a lab practitioner per se, and I don’t have good hands in lab. But I do have intuition to sniff my way around a computational or theoretical problem – although I might not always have the math or programming expertise to surmount it.

 

I felt Gopnik’s book was uneven. He attempts to draw out general principles, but either he doesn’t do it successfully or I was too thick to understand his profundity. He has a knack for the turn of a phrase, but I got a feeling that many of the words were superfluous. The best parts of his book were when he would quote what his ‘teachers’ would say in whatever skill he was trying to pick up (driving, dancing, drawing, and more). Did those teachers grasp the real work in their own spheres of expertise? Gopnik seems to assume so tacitly. I’m inclined to agree simply because these folks have spent a long time and lots of practice as teachers of their craft. But you have to know your craft well to teach it. What I enjoyed most was that the book prompted me to think about my craft of teaching.

 

Am I a master teacher? I don’t think so. I have a pedagogical bag of tricks, honed over years of practice. Many of my colleagues have picked up one of my mainstays – short, frequent, low stakes in-class quizzes that take less than five minutes and students write their answers on an index card. I’m not sure I’m good at teaching someone else how to teach, nor have I tried to do so systematically. But I do know and practice the elements that go into good teaching: being organized, being well-prepared, knowing your subject matter well, displaying empathy, being enthusiastic about the material, ensuring that the pedagogical approaches are chosen judiciously to match what I want the students to learn, and there’s certainly a performance aspect to the business. You also need to keep learning yourself! Teaching is both art and science.

 

Teaching biochemistry for the first time has been interesting for me metacognitively. Before this endeavor, I kinda sorta knew swaths of the subject material – but not very well or deeply. This is the position students are in. When they first learn something, they only kinda sorta know it, but they don’t have mastery. It takes practice and thinking more deeply for things to click. And content knowledge, some of which needs to be memorized so you have it at your fingertips. That’s what allows you to go deeper. Getting to mastery is not a mysterious business. I know what I need to do, and I just need to be willing to do it. There’s the rub. The spirit might be willing but the body is weak.

 

But in a sense there is a mystery to learning. How exactly learning happens is unclear. There are steps that work most of the time for most people, but the grasping of a new concept seems to be a gestalt experience – something just clicks. We can’t explain exactly how or exactly why. The eureka moment can be dramatic, but it can equally be subtle. You don’t realize the aha moment until you’ve passed it. I know there was a time where I didn’t understand stoichiometry, until I did so sometime later, but I can’t tell you how it happened. No flash of a light bulb. I can say the same for most of the concepts I’ve learned in chemistry. As a teacher, I can sometimes see the flick of the brain switch in a student, but more often I don’t. Perhaps some background consolidation of understanding happens when we sleep or when we’re not thinking about the matter at hand.

 

Do I do the real work of teaching? Possibly to some extent. And I know there are multiple ways to do so. My pedagogical approaches may not fit so well hand-to-glove with another instructor’s. This may also be true for some of my students. But students are overall more similar than they are different. And this might also be true of good teachers. One thing I have learned is that the work never stops. I can get into a rut, I can be overconfident and be underestimate my preparedness, and so the real work actually requires constant work. No mystery there. I need to keep alert and keep putting in the work. That’s what mastery requires.