My leisure time is often interrupted by educational thoughts. I am often sent scrambling to find a piece of paper after I have accidentally encountered a mathematical situation that I feel would fit great in to the classroom. Last night an episode of Modern Family piqued an interest I have had for months.
In the show, a father is desperately looking for a skill that he can say his son excels at. He creates a list of candidates, but settles on baseball as the most likely avenue for this success. As he and his boy are heading out for their first game, he explains the “10,000 hour rule” to his wife. This concept, pioneered by Malcolm Gladwell in his best seller Outliers: The Story of Success, is based on the idea that mastery is a result of repeated exposure to the feat that you are trying to master. In his estimates, he concludes that at least 10,000 hours are necessary to achieve the stage of “mastery”.