[Land-speed] Learning to drive a race car? or learning in general.

Keith Turk kturk at ala.net
Sat Aug 25 23:35:17 MDT 2007


This is junk I taught folks that were learning to teach people to fly...

The definition of learning is " A change in behavior as a result of experience
"  My contention is that the term "experience" can be a mental or physical
exercise... in other words we don't have to stick our hands on the stove to
learn that it's Hot.

There are 6 laws of learning...

Readiness, Exercise, Effect, Primacy, Intensity and Recency

Readiness... is nothing more then a willingness or desire to learn... being in
the right mindset...  If your already a driving god... and your ego comes
first...then you don't need any of this... but if your willing to admit that
you could improve then you would be ready to learn.

Exercise...  This is the practice of driving a race car on a regular basis...
I'm not sure this can't be done anywhere any time... simply totally
concentrating on driving from stop light to stop light might constitute
exercise if you take it seriously.  ( maybe on this one... but the concept
might have value )  I know that my skill level is fairly low on the
motorcycles so I take riding them Very seriously... while doing this I
maintain a certain level of concentration that could be considered exercising
my skill set.

Effect... goes back to one of Dahlgrens favorite concepts... which is if you
do the same thing year after year poorly... how many years of experience do
you really have... 10 or the same one year 10 times?  In other words... Effect
is learning a skill correctly and insuring that each time you practice that
skill you maintain a certain level of correctness in the event.  its then
effective.

Primacy...  if you learn something correctly the first time it's many times
more likely to stick... This is one of the most important laws of learning, in
that we often simply assume we know stuff rather then teaching it to ourselves
correctly the first time.

Intensity... is fun... the more vivid an experience the better we learn it...
so adding emotion to the egress procedure can in fact make the learning
experience better... or since your mom told you the stove was hot... you stuck
your finger on that burner and had a wickedly intense learning experience.

Recency...  This means that just because you did the Egress stuff when you
built the car... you still need to go thru it frequently to maintain some
degree of learning...  One of the ways I do this for myself is to bail out of
the car every time I bring it to a stop... I always have to wave a hello to
course workers to let them know everything is okay and that I'm only
practicing my bail out... but I do it every time.

Keith ( there are a couple of spelling errors in there that the spell checker
won't fix.. and I'm over it ...)


More information about the Land-speed mailing list