After fencing for years, I think I’ve finally become skilled enough to think at the same time as I fence.

When I started fencing, and even after a few years of it, I was fencing without thinking. I don’t mean this in some kind of Taoist “be without being” kind of way. More in the “I have no idea what just happened or what I did” kind of way. I used to tell people I didn’t form memories while fencing. I was able to fence quite well this way, but I had a lot of trouble developing a higher strategy against other skilled opponents.

Fencing has a lot of cognitive load. You have to track your stance, your guard, your opponent’s stance and guard, the distance between you, how they opponent responded to your past assaults, the length of your weapon, how tired you each are. Layering all of these things makes it very hard to do anything else.

I used to think that I would never be able to think while fencing. I thought I would just be unable to have a longer strategy or to pick apart my opponent’s style. Now those things are – not quite easy – but at least doable. Now I can fence, and notice good plays that I or my opponent does. And I’m able to remember them and comment on them after a bout.

I wonder how much of this is simply due to mastering so many of the little motions, both physical and mental, that make up the art. I wonder also how many other tasks I do with only half focus are just due to immense amounts of practice when I was young.

Thinking while doing math

People who never master basic concepts at school get overwhelmed by the more advanced stuff.

It’s no wonder someone can’t do trig if they still have to pay attention when they do algebra! That’s like trying to have a fencing strategy before you’ve mastered the basic guards and cuts. Sure you can do a basic cut, and you can think about strategy outside of a fight, but putting those together in real time is painful or impossible until your cuts flow automatically.

I like the idea of mastery schooling – always return to the basics when you have trouble. If you’re having trouble with a topic, don’t review that specific topic. Review all of the prior pieces that it depends on.

This is part of why I hate contemporary schooling so much. It puts kids on a track, and it keeps kids on a track no matter how they’re doing. They learn a set topic at a set age for a set amount of time. When that topic’s time is up, they move on regardless of whether they’ve mastered it.

(As an aside, education terminology drives me up the wall. When kids can learn what they’re ready to learn, and get help when they need it, this is called “tracking”. When kids are put on a specific schedule for learning and advance at a pace decided on by the district, that’s somehow not “tracking” even though kids can’t get off the train.)

Cognitive load builds up slowly as kids age through school without getting mastery, and school becomes more and more of a painful chore.

The optimistic outlook on this is that kids can get good. Even if they’re struggling with school now, they can learn and improve.

The pessimistic prescription is that the kids have to go backwards a lot more than teachers think in order to get good.

I fenced for five years, senior year of high school through college. I took a ten year break, and came back to fencing as a beginner. I took all the newbie classes and practiced all the newbie drills. Putting it all together from scratch was fast, because I had a lot of experience. It was also transformative, because I finally saw what my old fencing teacher had been trying to get me to understand for literally hundreds of lessons.

Adulting

I’m an awkward guy. In social situations, I pendulate between shy silence and cringey proclamations. I often feel lost in the flow of a multi-person conversation, and totally adrift when people banter. Those souls blessed with the skill of banter, or of putting their conversational partners at ease, have always been subjects of envy for me.

But now I wonder how much of my discomfort and lack of conversational skill is simply that I’m missing more fundamental skills. Whether I lack those skills through nature or nurture doesn’t interest me here. I’m more interested in the idea that I could learn basic skills that give me enough breathing room to think during a conversation.

I think this is also the dynamic around the concept of adulting. In America today, kids are sometimes prevented from doing real work or engaging in real tasks. Instead they’re given homework or extracurriculars. Those do teach real skills, but they teach skills divorced from how they will be used in day-to-day life. They also don’t teach a lot of day-to-day living and organization skills.

Historically, I think kids used to learn these things just from spending time with their parents and being asked to help out the family early. Starting early, focusing on super easy fundamental parts of home-life, and then slowly building up responsibilities alongside capabilities. Eventually, things like doing the laundry, shopping, even doing taxes will be chunked actions that don’t take up all of a brain.

I think people who learn certain tasks early underestimate their importance. Once someone masters a skill, they can do it without thinking about it (by my definition). That means they may not notice when using that skill is critical for some higher level task. If they’re a parent raising their kids in a more modern context, they may not notice that their kid needs to learn those skills early.

Advice

If there’s any advice to be found in all of this, I’d say it’s this:

• if you are struggling with a new skill, you could try going back and practicing the fundamentals that it’s based on
• if you’re teaching someone (or parenting someone) who is struggling, go back to the basics
• if someone is struggling with something you think is easy, consider that you might have skills that you don’t even realize had to be learned

Practice the basics enough, and eventually you’ll be able to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.