Lack of affordable broadband access is part of the problem but, perhaps more important, a lack of Internet literacy threatens to keep many people and communities stranded on the far side of the divide. In a rapidly changing global environment, the "digital divide" is growing wider. Have a suggestion, question, or concern for The Crimson Editorial Board? Click here.Originally published on May 28, 2008 Vatan ’23, a Crimson Editorial editor, is an Applied Mathematics concentrator in Mather House. And at the very least, we should feel a little guilty whenever we do.Īurash Z.
But we can plan our commitments at Harvard so we only have to do so rarely. It will occasionally be necessary to use a result we can’t prove or quote a passage we don’t fully understand. Some firehosing is useful to build the skills necessary to eventually do real work or research. Even in the best case, where drinking from the firehose leads to learning more material in the medium term, it chips away at that need to know in the long term. If I've made any progress, it's in realizing that a general “need to know” is deeply valuable. Instead, the responsibility lies broadly with us. Firehose learning often starts well before enrollment, and besides what could Harvard do? Cut its most rigorous classes? Limit the number of commitments students can take on? Such blunt responses would entirely misunderstand the problem. It would be inappropriate to blame Harvard. Now, even when I do have time, that impatience remains ingrained by habit. I became actively impatient with such explanations because I became used to not having enough time.
#Trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose full#
In my case, not only did the need for full explanations start to fade. If you do this for several years you will, unsurprisingly, become accustomed to understanding things only as much as is necessary to do your work well. Instead, you're forced to learn just enough to fulfill your commitments. By sufficiently overcommitting, it becomes impossible to learn the material of each class or extracurricular fully. I know a lot of much brighter friends who have undergone similar transitions. I certainly felt that compulsion for full understanding once. Likewise, it's difficult to do that work as well as required without the kind of insights (however embarrassingly shallow in hindsight) that come from rigorously questioning what you are taught. It's difficult to do as much academic work as admission requires without this kind of intrinsic curiosity. If you're at Harvard, odds are that at some point you were constitutionally incapable of accepting on faith things that you couldn't understand for yourself. I'll focus on only one: getting comfortable with partial understanding. Even if I don't understand the material particularly well at the end, the ego remains undented after all, it was an unreasonably difficult class.ĭespite these driving causes, some more persuasive than others, the firehose approach has serious costs. If I can show how smart I am by taking a harder class, I'm tempted. In our list of ever-less-respectable reasons to overcommit, we eventually reach ego. If you more than double the work assigned to yourself, then even if you only truly grasp half of it, you’re still better off on net. It follows that working with incomplete knowledge of overwhelming information is a valuable skill.Įven more practically, if the biggest limit on your productivity is external motivation, then that’s another good argument for overcommitting. Certainly, it would be absurd to require fully understanding Plato (whatever that means) before moving to Aristotle. The same applies to research, where getting to the frontier requires tolerating a very incomplete and pragmatic approach to learning. Programmers don't exegete every library they import, and engineers don't demand proof for every theorem they use. In the real world, we can't possibly be expected to fully understand every fact or tool we put to use. Ultimately, though, overcommitting does erode curiosity in dangerous ways that are easy to overlook when we’re filling our Crimson carts and comp schedules. There are also genuine practical reasons to be drawn to the firehose approach, and it's worth reflecting on those before we condemn it. There's a romanticism to the idea of jumping headlong into a challenge and reaching our limits as we just try to push through. Many of my peers will remember at least one semester that left them gasping for air, and many would be hard-pressed to remember a semester that didn't. An MIT president once likened an education from our Cambridge rivals to "trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose." Harvard may not require this firehose approach to learning, but it certainly permits it.
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