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Turned this thread into this week's essay: commoncog.com/blog/seeing-ex

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1/ I’ve noticed that in every skill you become sufficiently good at, there comes a point where you begin to notice nuance in your own skill (and the skill of others) and … you begin to make up your own language to describe that nuance. Let’s call this the vocab point.

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An inexpensive way to notice you're noticing something new: jokes. Getting a joke feels NBD, but how much tacit knowledge is required to get even the lamest joke? You can say to a student: "Two weeks ago this 'joke' would've seemed like gibberish. Look how much you've learned!"

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Beautiful! cc:

8:06 PM · Apr 5, 2022Twitter Web App

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Cedric is CCing me in because I previously wrote notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2021-07- which suggests something similar. I like the idea of using this to gauge your own learning though!

notebook.drmaciver.com

The humour test for expertise

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Nice! The 1st talk I give w/ my coding students is on paying attention to how they pay attention. I have them share major-specific jokes, if they can, and set up some joke "milestones". "You'll know you're learning when you relate to this gif so much it hurts." etc.