A Little Learning...

There was a time when I was growing up, when I used to read math books the way most people read novels. That was until one day when I was asked to help out on a pretty straightforward math problem and to my utter embarrassment failed to get it solved. Somehow I was unaware of an essential concept required for solving the problem, and what was worse I didn’t know that I didn’t know that.

Such are the perils of learning new stuff without the right kind of context. You end up gaining only a superficial understanding of the subject, which would be alright I suppose if it were only not a little dangerous as this delightful little quote from Alexander Pope so marvellously puts it:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again"

A piece of knowledge cannot be truly made one’s own until it has been tried and tested under battle conditions (i.e. real life, or simulated real life in the case of schools). So no matter how much students may hate the idea of doing the end of chapter problems in their textbooks, doing those problems remain indispensable for gaining mastery over the subject of their study.

Outside of the classroom, the danger of possessing only a superficial understanding assumes more serious proportions when lives are at stake, such as in the understanding and interpretation of scripture over which tragically, many wars have been, are being, and are yet to be fought.

In case you’re wondering the direction this post is taking, I would like to assure you that it’s not going to be another half baked sermon on matters of epistemology but rather about a new piece of video editing software that I purchased recently.

Experience from reading math books among other things :-) tells me that the most efficient way of mastering the software is by not reading the product manual from cover to cover, but to start using it on an actual video editing project. So I made two short music videos in an attempt to get up to speed on the video editor. Here's one of them:

A note about the song: The words are from the Baha'i writings. I had recorded a more subdued version a year or so ago, but for this new project I wanted a much more upbeat tune. The idea for the tune came about while I was fooling around with my guitar playing a few bass lines at random. The song is driven primarily by the bass.