practical
You are viewing stuff tagged with practical.
You are viewing stuff tagged with practical.
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece for the New Yorker called “The Art of Failure — Why some people choke and others panic.” The thesis here is that choking is a reversion to basic instruction — the mechanical, poorly-coordinated, unadaptable precepts from one’s basic instruction in a skill. Sports is a great example: as one choke’s, one shows less and less of the practiced grace that come with experience and more and more of the mechanical, simplistic movement characteristic of the novice. The second part of the thesis is this: panicking is a reversion not to basic instruction but to basic instinct. A panic surpasses all training and heads right into lizard-brain survival territory. Here’s a great quote:
“Good lord, you guys look like you came out of a war zone — it’s just a test!”
— The fantastic Dr. Tautin, after our 4 hour prosthodontic lab practical
This man, one of the bench dentists who evaluates and guides us through labs, saved my sanity in Oral Anatomy lab first semester. In a class with the purpose of weeding out those who didn’t want to be in school (and the distant second goal of teaching oral anatomy), he did his best to get a new flock of uptight students to settle down. On waxing up a tooth: “If it looks like a tooth, you’re on the right track.”