Filling in the gaps

Why does it happen that we do not understand? As a scientist, I can come up with many explanations. The most common reason: we missed some important aspect and cannot quite catch up. It’s easy to think that some subjects require a certain level of intelligence to tackle. That’s not true. Some subjects are harder than others, but whenever you find a subject difficult, the answer is always because you’re missing some of the pieces of knowledge you need to make it easy.

When Anna came to Israel she had to skip several classes due to discrepancies in the material studied in different countries. As a result, she missed world geography classes. Now, this is a huge gap in her education. She was her school champion in geography of Israel, and yet she could not distinguish China from Japan. I tried to teach her several times. We even took a flight through China in our honeymoon. Nothing helps. She simply does not want to learn geography.

Everybody has a huge gap in his education. I cannot ride a bicycle. I do not even want to. People find it strange, yet accept that I feel much more comfortable on 4 wheels than on 2. The reason for this gap: my mother had a small bike incident when she was small and could not allow me to ride. I mountain skied, bungee jumped and skydived, yet I never rode a bike.

If you have a gap in your knowledge, the first step to fixing the situation would be acknowledging the gap, and asking yourself: is it really worth it for me to invest my effort in filling in the gap? Most of the time you do not have to fill it. Occasionally you do no have a choice.

There are some steps to fill in the gaps:
1. Accept that something is harder for you than it is for your peers.
2. Try to understand what is missing, work back why it is missing to the route cause. Usually at some point way back there was a gap in education, that made us work harder to achieve less.
3. If there is a gap in education, there may be a deep feeling of inadequacy, shame and guilt. You should understand that this happens to everybody and usually is not your fault. Accept it, like you would accept a flu or a bad neighbor.
4. Start learning from the root cause, the first time you discovered the gap. This may mean learning materials other people learned years ago. Be proud of yourself. Most people do not have courage to do this.
5. Progress slowly, do not allow frustration or a new gap to build up. Take your time. Very often simply because you learn it at later stage, the learning experience will be different.
6. Celebrate each milestone. It will take time to fill in the gap. This time may be larger than the time to the next test. So what? Worst case scenario you will pass the test next year. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.
7. Do not burn out. This is always true, but the crazy mix of fillings when filling in the gaps may cloud your mind. Work smartly. Take breaks.
8. Exercise. It is not enough to fill in conceptual gaps, you need to apply the new skills actively in controlled environment.

Tackling subjects above your level boils down to just this: figuring out what are the pieces you’re missing, and mastering them until they can be used automatically. Once you have all the missing pieces a subject isn’t difficult any more. In Feynman’s autobiography, he talks about how he handled a particular physics paper that he didn’t understand. His method was simple, he went through meticulously, every source reference and carefully went through each line of the paper until he understood everything, piece-by-piece. Learning something isn’t a magical ability, it’s simply the act of gathering the pieces you’re missing: in the form of facts, procedural steps or connections between ideas, and then fully understanding those pieces so they can be used to understand bigger, harder ideas.

To conclude: if something is more difficult for you than for the others, you probably have a gap in knowledge. Fill in the gap from the root cause up or fill it in backwards finding all the missing pieces. Be proud of your accomplishment and take your time to progress.