#11. Studying has to be hard

The importance of struggle in education, or the hidden value of pen and paper

When I was growing up, studying in Ukraine 🇺🇦, I’ve often heard this saying that can be translated to English as:

The harder is the training, the easier is the battle.

It was inherited from the Soviet education system, so I’m sure it is shared by several generations across multiple Eastern-European countries.

This is the notion I grew up with, this is how I’m raising my children, and this is how I teach my students. I believe that persistence and discipline are qualities that are as important for an educated person as is the information acquired on any particular subject itself.

In this article I’m sharing some thoughts and observations of mine about this topic.

Paper or Spreadsheet?

Recently I’ve been preparing a laboratory experience for my students, who are enrolled in the course on fundamental physical constants at UPO¹. This particular experience involved an electronic circuit containing a cascade of amplifiers and a bandpass filter connected to an oscilloscope. The students had to do a series of systematic measurements, from which they could then derive the Boltzmann constant², which is responsible for the thermal noise registered in certain components of the circuit.

Experimental setup with the electronic circuit and the oscilloscope to measure the Boltzmann constant

The word “systematic” is crucial here. The whole thing can only work if every measurement is done following the exact procedure, varying different parameters in a controlled manner, documenting every single step. Only then the measured points will follow the exact laws of physics, from which the constant can be derived using specific mathematical formulas. Any error in the whole process will break the equality between what you’re measuring and what the formulas describe, making the whole process pointless.

After preparing and testing the whole setup, I've put a stack of A4 sheets by the oscilloscope, so that they have something to write on during their measurements. When the students arrived and I explained them everything, they've started pulling out laptops from their bags.

A little surprised, I've pointed at the stack of paper, which I assumed they would be using. They weren't a rebellious kind and easily put their laptops back, but I still had to ask myself:

Am I right insisting that they write on paper instead of using their laptops?
Or am I just being conservative?

So I’ve thought about it a little more and my answer is: “Yes, I’m right“,
and here is why…

Paper to study. Spreadsheet to work.

In the countless experiments and beam tests³ that I’ve done over the last 15 years, I've been using Google Sheets and electronic logbooks most of the time, while using pen and paper only for occasional temporary short notes. Yet it doesn't mean that pen and paper are now obsolete. It’s very much the opposite, especially in the context of studying, where the primary objective is not efficient execution, but building a solid foundation to become efficient in the future, when doing the actual work.

Screenshots of a few electronic logbooks from my past beam-test measurements

During the mentioned laboratory class my students had to do a series of measurements with different settings (about 40 variations), each resulting in 2 measured values with respective uncertainties. So that is quite a lot of writing, which takes time, concentration and patience.

The hidden value of doing it the old-school way is that this friction and inefficiency of writing numbers on paper makes you feel the pain and forces you to come up with a better way. And after a few iterations you gradually come up with that Excel table structure on your own. And this time it's not because of following someone's instructions, but because you actually realise that this is a more efficient way to organise the data. And along the way you also learn the discipline of paying attention to details and doing things correctly from the first time. Otherwise every mistake requires a correction, which gets written on top of the original writing, slowly turning your neat sheet of paper into a mess. You really feel the pain of that mess once you try to actually analyse that data 2 weeks later, struggling to decipher your own writing.

Handwritten measurement notes on paper

These small struggles build the discipline of strategic approach – to come up in advance with a structured layout for your data and a clear plan of the measurements, so that it makes your work easier and results cleaner in the future. Instead, if you only learn to use an electronic spreadsheet, these mistakes during the measurement go practically unnoticed, because after every mistake you can simply retype the numbers or swap the cells and move on, feeling no pain whatsoever. And as a result, your brain will not develop the necessary neural connections and the habit of thinking everything through in advance.

Sooner or later these students will encounter problems that can't be solved by simply swapping texts in a spreadsheet, but the habit of thinking before doing will remain. And that's the skill that is so important to develop during the learning phase, I believe.

Erasable pen

I might be going too far, but I see erasable pens as another example of technology removing a useful struggle. When I went to school, erasable pens were a luxury gimmick, which very few kids from rich families had. But even those who had them, weren’t allowed to use them, since our notebooks were meant to be clean and tidy, written with the normal pens.

For anything that required thinking, like math or physics, we would have a draft notebook, where we would do the messy writing, and then copy the final version into the main notebook. Once again, that required extra effort, which left you with two options:

1. write everything twice (first in the draft and then in the main notebook);

2. think it through in your mind and write the clean version straight into the main notebook.

Since writing by hand the same thing twice is boring, you naturally try to do more and more cross-checks in your mind, to write everything only once, straight into the main notebook. This developed the habit of thinking twice before writing anything, and being always sure that what you present is correct, at least to the best of your knowledge.

If the main notebook had more than 1-2 tiny corrections, the whole page was torn away and we had to rewrite it all clean once again.

Drafting vs writing with erasable pens

I can’t say that my daughter knows math worse than me; she understands everything. But like everyone at her school, she writes with an erasable pen, which removes that friction of rewriting things twice. Whenever she’s solving a problem, like expanding an algebraic equation, she writes the first thing coming to mind without hesitation. And if at any moment I ask her if she’s sure, she won’t be, because she didn’t cross-check herself.

This is understandable, given that at any moment she can simply erase and rewrite the wrong piece if she discovers a mistake later on. And once again, the discipline of thinking everything through does not develop, because it doesn’t provide any practical benefit. But outside of class, there will be many problems that can’t be corrected so easily, and having that discipline would be helpful.

Epilogue

As technology progresses, so does the education system. On the one hand it is important to teach things that are relevant for today and for the near future. On the other hand, it is crucial to recognise the fundamentals of education, and make sure that by adopting modern and more efficient technologies we don’t miss the whole point of education in the first place.

As I’ve shown above, the habit of thinking through in advance is one of those fundamentals, and sometimes the most obvious way to develop it is to keep the struggle that modern technologies were designed to alleviate.

1. UPO (Università del Piemonte Orientale), website

2. Boltzmann constant, Wikipedia

3. Beam test or testbeam is a small experiment that uses a controlled beam of particles with known characteristics to quickly collect a large amount of data. Such beams are produced by complex particle-accelerator facilities, usually hosted by nuclear-physics laboratories or specialised medical institutions.