"The pin says I knew it once. The drill wants to know about today.” - Ken Woodward
What happens to a skill after the signature?
In this episode, Ken Woodward starts in a submarine chow line, where his name sat on a public list of sailors who hadn’t qualified. He was delinquent, a “dink,” for weeks. From there, he looks at how the Navy tested what he knew: checkouts and lookups from shipmates whose lives depended on his answers, and drills that kept asking.
He sets that beside the research on whether college builds critical thinking, and finds his question about atrophy is three questions. Did I learn enough, does it carry over, and do I bother to use it?
He also argues that critical thinking comes in many forms, from the bricklayer’s plumb line to a navigation fix, and admits to once reposting a political meme he never checked.
Ken closes with a question the poet David Whyte taught him: To whom or what am I apprenticing myself?
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