I was not a good student through elementary, middle and high school. I didn’t often complete my assignments, though I tested well. As long as I passed my tests, I didn’t see the point in the rest. The test was the thing, I knew, and I possessed a sub-perceptual awareness that I needed pressure to perform.
Not until I took up bike racing did my view of homework shift. Training rides were the exercises meant to teach me cycling’s equivalent to quadratic equations and book reports. When I didn’t finish my homework, I often reasoned that the value of any one problem was too small to matter. Classic rationalization. If I knew the material in broad strokes, had answered four problems correctly, how important could it be to solve another 16 equations of the same problem?
It’s easy to say more math won’t help. But we all know the more hills will help.
On the bike, I came to see that a training ride was a chance to try different answers to a problem. The calculus was different because there was never one right answer. If I couldn’t crack the top 10 in a sprint, then I’d try taking a flyer at 500m. If I couldn’t get away at 500m, I’d try jumping with a kilometer to go.
Unlike homework, I didn’t need to get the correct answer with each effort. I only needed to get it right once to learn a lesson, and performing under pressure seemed to give me insight I lacked when my need wasn’t critical. After being dropped repeatedly on steep climbs because I was in too big a gear, the first time I downshifted after getting dropped, and subsequently clawed my way back into the group—well, I never doubted downshifting again.
As homework goes, learning what was possible did me more good than learning what was right.