Frustration & Problem Solving
Fellow student Bill Blatner and I were discussing how to deal with frustration and the perspective of problem solving. Bill is a long-time math educator and works with his students often to help them put into perspective the challenges that we run across in our journey.
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First, what is a problem? I think of it as a dilemma for which the path to a solution is not initially known. If the steps to solve the problem are entirely clear from the start, it’s not really a problem but more of an exercise.
When the steps aren’t known there’s a certain amount of initial mucking around required. A skilled problem solver has a repertoire of tactics or heuristics they can employ to explore the problem, gain insight and make progress cracking the problem. There’s often many missteps and false starts in this process before you find something promising. Your initial efforts are often frustrated. One has to develop a tolerance for that frustration. It’s worth it because the greatest, deepest learning comes from this process, even when you don’t solve the entire problem you originally set out to solve. You can learn from the missteps too.
For example, if learning to play a new tune on the harp is easy, you’ll gain a new tune and probably some new vocabulary with a little effort and repetition. But if learning to play the tune is hard and frustrating, it’s because your mouth needs to learn to do things it couldn’t do before, or your ears need to learn to hear things they couldn’t hear before or your whole body needs to feel something in the music it couldn’t feel before or breathe in a way it couldn’t before or...something else. The point is, if you can tolerate the frustration and have some tools to work through it, there’s a lot more to be gained than learning something that’s easy.
A good teacher provides problems at the appropriate level of difficulty. If it’s too easy, nothing is gained. If it’s too hard, it can stop learning cold. An educational theorist named Vygotsky called the ideal difficulty level the zone of proximal development. A good teacher also provides problems that help students develop that repertoire of tools (problem solving heuristics) they can use to crack new problems on their own.
The more things you find to be easy, the more all that frustration was worth it. But there’s always going to be new challenges to frustrate us, and as Rick Estrin once said, “Yeah, it’s kinda hard. But think how good you’re gonna feel when you get it!”
