By championing the importance of understanding, teachers can inadvertently set their students up for failure as those students blunder in illusions of competence. As one (failing) engineering student recently told me: “I just don’t see how I could have done so poorly. I understood it when you taught it in class.” My student may have thought he’d understood it at the time, and perhaps he did, but he’d never practiced using the concept to truly internalize it. He had not developed any kind of procedural fluency or ability to apply what he thought he understood.

Time after time, professors in mathematics and the sciences have told me that building well-ingrained chunks of expertise through practice and repetition was absolutely vital to their success. Understanding doesn’t build fluency; instead, fluency builds understanding. In fact, I believe that true understanding of a complex subject comes only from fluency.

1. Your average is below C or you're getting D's in some of your courses.

2. You're constantly asking for (and even getting) extensions and incompletes.

3. You can't follow what the professor says in lecture—ever.

SAS and/or R

Python Coding

QL Database/Coding

“Hi professor X! Before the exam tomorrow, do you mind answering these 47 very specific questions I have about the material that I’ve been meaning to ask you all semester? If you do not help me I will fail and lose my scholarship and probably die, thank you in advance.”

“hey I just realized that since I didnt show up for the midterm or do any of the homework im probably failing the class, is there any extra credit i can do between now and tomorrow to make sure I get at least an A?”

Gates told the Times article’s author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, that after he watched it:  “I just loved it. It was very clarifying for me. I thought, ‘God, everybody should watch this thing!’”

And there you have it. Bill Gates likes something; Bill Gates pays to get it into schools. It may be a good idea. It may be a bad idea. It doesn’t matter, because Gates has the money and clout to inject it into wherever he wants to inject it.