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Here are a few things a good teacher will do promote a healthy Zone of Proximal Development:3 ◊ Gain and maintain your interest in the task. ◊ Simplify the task. ◊ Emphasize certain aspects of the task that will help you “get it.” ◊ Help you control your level of frustration. ◊ Demonstrate the task. ◊ Play along with you when necessary. An experienced teacher or peer has a broader perspective of what you can and can’t do, and because they have more experience, they often see a few different strategies you might use to gain the new skills. Even better, if that teacher or peer knows you well, they’ll be able to guide you based on what would best suit your personality and interests. You may not be lucky enough to have such a teacher (or any teacher at all), but there are some things you can do to bootstrap yourself into the ZPD when you practice alone. The easy and most obvious scaffolds you can utilize to bootstrap your own learning are things like metronomes, video demonstrations, this book, and all of the suggestions in Part 6. Or take another look at the list of things teachers do on the previous page and try to do those yourself. There are less obvious strategies you can call upon, too, like the mental practice strategies on page 175. Most of those you can do yourself, things like self-talk, which can help you to maintain interest, talk yourself through a tough spot, and help ease frustration. Vygotsky believed that social interactions are rich, useful, and necessary learning environments. Sometimes musicians get so caught up in the practice room mentality, we overlook the massive practice we get when we play with others. Get yourself some of that sweet, sweet Zone of Proximal Development goodness by playing with other musicians who are better than you. Lots better. Those skills will rub off on you if you pay attention.
The Practice of Practice
Jonathan Harnum
This frames how I view strength training in general. It’s largely about improving your ability to carry things. I’ve always been a fan of carrying heavy objects with my hands. As a teenager working on a construction site over the summers, I always volunteered to haul tools and materials across the site, and today I still incorporate some kind of carrying, typically with dumbbells, kettlebells, or sandbags, into most of my workouts. I’ve also become semiobsessed with an activity called rucking, which basically means hiking or walking at a fast pace with a loaded pack on your back. Three or four days a week, I’ll spend an hour rucking around my neighborhood, up and down hills, typically climbing and descending several hundred feet over the course of three or four miles. The fifty- to sixty-pound pack on my back makes it quite challenging, so I’m strengthening my legs and my trunk while also getting in a solid cardiovascular session. The best part is that I never take my phone on these outings; it’s just me, in nature, or maybe with a friend or a family member or a houseguest (for whom rucking is mandatory; I keep two extra rucksacks in the garage).
The mystery of who bombed the apartment houses in 1999 has never been solved. To the extent that there is evidence as to the perpetrators, it points not to Chechen terrorists but to the Kremlin leadership and the FSB. When I was told on Christmas Day 2013 that the “competent organs” had determined that my presence in the territory of the Russian Federation was “undesirable,” I was certain that my role in the investigation of the 1999 apartment bombings was the most important reason. Many journalists asked me, “Why did they decide to expel you rather than someone else?” The Russian authorities had tolerated my presence for ten years since the publication of my book Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, in which I accused the FSB of responsibility for the explosions. They did this, I believe, because my expulsion would have drawn attention to an episode the rest of the world seemed to have forgotten. But by the time I worked in Moscow in late 2013, Putin’s hold on power was weakening. Mass protests had taken place in Moscow and a popular revolution had broken out in Ukraine. The question of the apartment bombings had never quite gone away in Russia, and now the whispers were becoming louder. In the new conditions, raising the topic freely was not going to be allowed.
The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep
David Satter
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