As a liberal arts-educated person and a teacher who prefers the messy and frustrating long road that yields a more capable mind, I loved this article!

Excerpt:  “Other classes get interleaved problems, where they never see the same problem type twice in a row, ever. They get more frustrated. Their immediate progress is slower. They rate their teachers and their own learning as lower. And then when the test time comes around, if they are facing problems they’ve never seen before, they destroy the other group. It turns out that the quickest way to make progress for a test is to impart what is using “procedure skill” — learning how to execute something. The knowledge that allows you to do what psychologists call “transfer,” which is the ability to take what you learned and apply it to new problems, is making connections knowledge. You have to learn how to match a type of a strategy to a structure of a problem. That learning turns out to be quite a bit slower.

“This is a theme of the book: the type of teaching that can cause the quickest short term improvement can actually undermine your long term development”