Surgical Learning vs Rapid Fire Learning

My approach to rapid fire learning is this:

Rapid Fire Learning

Basically I’m fire hosing myself until I feel like I understand all the steps and 90% of the details. At this point I switch into surgical learning.

This is the approach I use when my kid comes up to me and says “Dad I don’t get this!!”.

So what’s surgical learning? It’s simply isolating the parts we don’t understand and exploring them and the related concepts and massaging that until we get this:

The Power of the Simplest Possible Example

So for example I might read a passage like this:

We bind our onChange method to the this of the class and save the new reference as cardHandler. This reference is used to add an event listener when the card element is created and remove it in the OnDestroy hook.

Its not immediately obvious to me what this means. If my kid came up to me and asked me what the flag nug this means I would start with the question:

Do you understand what “We” means? Yes Dad!

OK do you understand what bind means?

Um …. no

OK lets explore that concept first and move on.

Do you understand what this is?

And so on.

Making the Content Relatable for your Mind

When I’m doing surgical learning I try to put the content that I’m memorizing in as much interesting context as possible so that it’s easy for me to remember it. I ask myself what the purpose of a particular content attribute is and then relate it to a scenario that its used in. In addition I try to have a clear picture of sequence and composition. In other words what is the lego manual?

I find that this is also a good way to ask questions. It’s essentially this skill:

The Most Important Debugging Skill

Related Concepts