Mastering a subject

How does one become a master at a particular subject ? To be able to truly master a subject one needs to go down to the fundamental premise of the subject and to comprehend that. Easier said than done - why because vey few teachers of anything ever give you the understanding; either they don’t know or are unable to express it in a way that could be understood. They aren’t to be blamed - the nature of education and getting a formal degree has become over time a study of how much an individual can retain in their memory banks and how they might utilise that memory in an specific pattern.  A master can comprehend and create infinite patterns and can explain them too. 

Football players practice set pieces for the same reasons - muscle memory to aid an outcome based on a set pattern. One doesn’t become the master of football but one does become the master of a particular set piece. The fundamental idea here is that the football player is memorising the details of a specific pattern and not learning the overall game which is to score a goal to win as a team. Maybe the example I share is not precise enough ; I do hope that you understand it though

To master a subject one needs to be able to fit the fundamental premises/ideas of the subject into different patterns. Patterns ? We have to dive a bit deeper to understand patterns. Each premise has to have a explicit relationship with the other premise and these relationships need to based in some fundamental principle. Wow ... what has this statement got to do with any subject? It sounds philosophical. It is and the faster one understands that philosophy and learning a particular subject goes hand in hand, the better. 

Let me give you an example of physics as the subject. There are specific principles in physics known as physical laws and these laws give birth to some premise or theory that can be proven based on its relationship to other principles by empirical measurement.  The premise or theory is the pattern; and the proof of the premise is the fitment of the principles to the pattern. 

Back to mastering a subject. 

We see the concept of a pattern and the concept of premises and the concept of principles and how they are interrelated. To truly master a subject one has to work with these three concepts and keep at it to validate premises. That is to make multiple patterns and keep proving them to either be true or false based on how the premises and principles interact with the particular pattern 

A will always be A. It cannot be B . Tough mechanism and fairly difficult to master a subject in this way. There is no other way unfortunately any other way to learn a subject will always result in some shortcoming which would mean that one is not a master. 

Question of time ? Spend a lifetime on a subject and you might just start to scratch the depths of it. Academically a Master ? Not in my book. Qualified to share your experience with others that are starting on the journey 100% yes.  Call them masters - I would avoid. Call them teachers - 100% yes 

To qualify as a Teacher, one has to decide to share their experience to better learn patterns they have not thought about via the act of informed information exchange with the students. 

I’d be a happy just to qualify as a teacher. Mastery is way difficult and requires single minded focus that I don’t have. 

C

PS : to my teachers over the years - thank you for sharing patterns that allowed me to become a student in a particular subject. I still am a student and will probably continue to be for quite some time before I even consider my self to be qualified as a teacher.