Fine Structure

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was on TV last night and I flipped it on for a couple minutes before I went to sleep. Let me get this out of the way first: I enjoy the Harry Potter books/movies. I think they're filled with mystery and intrigue (which I enjoy) even though you can probably guess the general ending to each book after no more than a quarter of the page content.

The thing that always gets me with these movies is that they promote the idea of the "fixed mindset". In Harry's case, he's been born into the idea that he's the only one that can stop Voldemort and be the hero. This plays out nicely in the books/films (let's not pretend that this fact was in any way a spoiler) but there's something missing. Harry is hardly a decent student in any of the first few books and when he's not letting his natural talent for magic solve his problems, he's running around shouting "Expelliarmus!" at the top of his lungs until something goes right. It works out for Harry, I guess, but it hardly gives the right ideas to budding students.

Many students of my generation will be familiar with this situation: I was given one reason or another to believe that I was "smart" in grade school and therefore could coast through school on a couple hours of studying right before a test and raw brain power. This may have worked for a couple years but I quickly (though not as quickly as I would have liked) realized that there are lots of difficult or just simply time consuming things to learn in this world and that these things require a significant amount of effort to learn. Unfortunately, the cultural damage is done (Harry Potter is not the first, nor will he be the last to employ raw talent in the entertainment industry) and students like myself often get frustrated when learning is difficult or takes too long. Manifestations of this issue go so far as to suggest that difficulty learning something means that you're a failure or simply not good enough to learn the material.

When it all really boils down, learning something - being good at something - takes effort and the better you are with a skill, the more effort it takes to improve on all the little subtle pieces that you hardly even noticed before. If there's a single piece of information I wish I understood growing up, it would probably be this: zero effort is a myth, effort yields results, innate skills are limited to passing gas.