My “took 30 seconds to think about it” first impression is that the common thread is twofold: firstly that you can’t die from being bad at the thing, and secondly that you are fundamentally capable of performing at the necessary level. That way the forced practice is both survivable and also leads to mastery.
In swimming or subsistence farming you might die before figuring it out. In math you might hit cognitive limits. Come to that, in child rearing it’s also possible for it to go wrong if you hit some hard limits and resort to infanticide or neglect… tragic but not exactly unknown.
Teaching math (and many other, but not all topics) requires finding where in the chain of necessary understandings between some fundamental skill and the current topic a student has not completed their learning, and working there. Parenting and immersive language are fields where the fundamentals are constantly being tested, and so provide unlimited opportunities for mastery. Likewise, the parenting and language skill trees are not as linear as the one for math: the former have a wide variety of skills that can be learned in relative isolation and in a variety of different orders. Not all the early lessons will even be applicable later (I haven’t changed a diaper in years, now), and sometimes mastery in one area is sufficient to produce overall adequacy even if other areas suffer.
AllAmericanBreakfast has a post related to the topic that I found very insightful (and I think ryan_b is onto something similar). In this context it suggests that the commonality between >>parenting<< and >>language learning<< is that both categories point to aggregate skills that can be learned simultaneously and do not necessarily have strong interdependencies even at the higher levels, where >>math<< is more of a narrow tower of skills, each depending heavily on the last all the way down.
My “took 30 seconds to think about it” first impression is that the common thread is twofold: firstly that you can’t die from being bad at the thing, and secondly that you are fundamentally capable of performing at the necessary level. That way the forced practice is both survivable and also leads to mastery.
In swimming or subsistence farming you might die before figuring it out. In math you might hit cognitive limits. Come to that, in child rearing it’s also possible for it to go wrong if you hit some hard limits and resort to infanticide or neglect… tragic but not exactly unknown.
This, and...
Teaching math (and many other, but not all topics) requires finding where in the chain of necessary understandings between some fundamental skill and the current topic a student has not completed their learning, and working there. Parenting and immersive language are fields where the fundamentals are constantly being tested, and so provide unlimited opportunities for mastery. Likewise, the parenting and language skill trees are not as linear as the one for math: the former have a wide variety of skills that can be learned in relative isolation and in a variety of different orders. Not all the early lessons will even be applicable later (I haven’t changed a diaper in years, now), and sometimes mastery in one area is sufficient to produce overall adequacy even if other areas suffer.
AllAmericanBreakfast has a post related to the topic that I found very insightful (and I think ryan_b is onto something similar). In this context it suggests that the commonality between >>parenting<< and >>language learning<< is that both categories point to aggregate skills that can be learned simultaneously and do not necessarily have strong interdependencies even at the higher levels, where >>math<< is more of a narrow tower of skills, each depending heavily on the last all the way down.