The Gold Standard(Part 2)

表达

1.set apart

使与众不同;使突出If a characteristic sets you apart from other people, it makes you different from the others in a noticeable way.

【语法信息】：V n P from n

【语法信息】：V n P

•What sets it apart from hundreds of similar small French towns is the huge factory...与其他数百个法国小镇不同的是它拥有巨大的工厂。

造句：His appearance sets him apart from those with black pupil.

2.cumulative

Working with such a teacher is particularly important in areas like musical performance or ballet, where it takes ten-plus years to become an expert and where the training is cumulative, with the successful performance of one skill often depending on having previously mastered other skills.

聚积的;积累的;渐增的If a series of events have a cumulative effect, each event makes the effect greater.

•It is simple pleasures, such as a walk on a sunny day, which have a cumulative effect on our mood...一些简单的娱乐，譬如在一个阳光明媚的日子散步，就能使我们的心情更愉快。

造句：The mutation is cumulative and the effect can be seen in a few decades.

感悟

作者对deliberate practice的定义为：在有着长期历史且有着准确评判标准的领域发展更好的、更复杂的技能，可以在老师或教练的帮助下习得技能。

简言之，刻意练习与其他有目的地练习的不同之处有两点:

1.所学领域高度发展，即有公认的最佳掌握者，有明确的能区分技艺不佳者与高手的标准。2.需要教练来提供训练方法、反馈、提升方法以帮助提高。

作者写了刻意练习的许多特点，列举如下：

Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed. 

Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. 

Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training. 

Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice. 

Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who

will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly. Such self-monitoring requires effective mental representations. 

Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. They show the right way to do something and allow one to notice when doing something wrong and to correct it. 

Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.

明日做解释。

令我感受比较深的一点是作者提到许多领域我们认为的“常识”其实是违背事实的，比如有经验的医生技术就要好于年轻医生，因为年轻医生常去参加医学培训班，能够掌握最新的技术。这是技术方面，但我个人认为在诊疗方面，经验还是有重要作用的。曾经看过阿图医生写的书，里面提到自己看一个病人，看之前刚刚看过有关某细菌A（忘了名字）的内容。在看到年轻的女患者之时，症状还处于初期阶段，且症状于A细菌和B细菌造成的初期症状类似，但是感染两种细菌的后期发展截然不同，A如果不能及时发现并切除感染组织，后期会造成大面积组织坏死，截肢乃至危及生命都有可能发生；但是B就简单多了，只需要用抗生素就可治愈。还有一点值得注意的是，A的发生率远低于B。在这种情况下，阿图医生感觉非常像A感染，但是不敢轻易下结论，还请了微生物专家会诊，结果专家倾向于B感染。医生还是坚持了自己的观点，最终后面的现象证实了他的判断，病人也因为及时治疗而保住了双脚。

这个例子表明医生的判断是需要经历复杂的过程，掌握的信息越多最后的结论可能越准确，也不能因为发生率低就忽视某种情况。正如作者所说，这不是一个”刻意练习“法则适用的领域。