Glib understanding

In class on Friday, Charlie Whitebread closed his lecture by breaking down the three zones of understanding:

The first zone is where students attend lecture, do their homework, and review fairly regularly. They don't remember every nuance or exception, and were they to be asked a complicated question, they probably would draw up blank. They have gaps in their knowledge, but they have what Prof. Whitebread called, "glib understanding."

The third zone is where students have taken the holes in their knowledge and filled them in. The third zone is where you'll find the 'A' answers in law school, where students have dug deep into the material, wrestled with it, and attained thorough understanding of it.

The second zone, therefore, is somewhere in between. The second zone is a wasteland of partially fleshed out concepts, of questions still unanswered. On the way to gaining third zone understanding, students invariably make mistakes and omit certain details. As they discover their mistakes, these students begin to doubt themselves and to forget altogether what they learned in the first place; they've sat so long with the material but they still can't quite figure it out. The second zone is dangerous.

So the point, Prof. Whitebread said, was never to leave glib understanding. Because that's all we'll need to pass the bar.

Cool.