When I was a little boy, I lived and breathed Orioles baseball. I followed every game I could on the television and radio, I checked the MLB box scores and statistics in the newspaper every day, and I worshipped Brady Anderson, Robby Alomar, Rafael Palmeiro, B.J. Surhoff, and Mike Bordick (even though he couldn’t hit). But there was no one—no one—more heroic to me than Cal Ripken, Jr.
Cal was an All-Star virtually every season he played, a two-time Gold Glove winner and is one of the few MLB players to exceed 3,000 career hits. Still, he is probably most famous for breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games record—Cal started and played in 2,632 consecutive games for the Orioles. He was an insane work horse who did not quit, and for this he earned the nickname Iron Man.
One day, my father told me something about Cal that surprised me—that although he was easily the strongest fielder on the Orioles, he was known for being the first to arrive to fielding practice and the last to leave. Although Cal was the best, he practiced the most. (Incidentally, my father could have been making all this up. Do fathers make up life lessons? Perhaps this is a topic for another post. Suffice it to say that I believed him at the time and still do.)
The idea of godlike Cal Ripken repeatedly drilling a basic baseball movement has shaped the way I view learning. A lot of people—high schoolers, college students, and adults—see learning as a race. It’s not. Masterful knowledge of a subject requires deep, unshakable fundamentals. We acquire those fundamentals only through long, patient experience.
The past two years at Cardin have really driven this point home for me. In them, I’ve become a tremendously stronger mathematician, and I happen to have done this all while teaching subject matter I already knew cold. Rereading, relearning, and expressing mathematical ideas in front of a class for three hours a day has expanded and strengthened my fundamentals immeasurably. This has been true of every class I’ve taught, even areas I considered completely elementary. I’ve been taking ground ball after ground ball for two years, and suddenly I’m a much better shortstop.
Deep mastery of any field is terribly expensive and can only be bought with time. So find something you love and approach it with patience and thoroughness. Read, reread, then come back later and reread some more. If it’s an option, spend a semester in college to revisit the material you learned in your high school AP class—you will be surprised by how much new insight you get out of a new professor, a different book and a fresh look at the subject. Work slowly through your exercises instead of rushing through them like they’re chores. Learn patiently and thoroughly.
Long, patient learning does not offer immediate satisfaction, but it pays off huge over time. So come to practice early, take a million and one ground balls, and leave late. Learn to love taking little steps forward instead of carelessly racing ahead. One day, you’ll wake up surprised at how far you’ve come.
~Todd Bryant
Math Instructor
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