My mother gets up slowly from the kitchen table and walks over to the sink where plates are drying on a rack. She demonstrates. She turns her right hand palm up, creating a wider surface on her forearm, and begins placing plates, large and small, from biceps to fingertips layering them so that the bottom of one plate rests on the edge of another. “You don’t dare let a plate touch the food,” she explains, “and it’s got to be balanced, steady.” Then with her left hand, she lays out two coffee cups and two saucers. She kind of pinches the saucers between her fingers and slips her index finger through the handles of the two cups. “The coffee splashes from one side to another if you’re not careful. It takes practice. You just can’t do it all at one time.”
I ask her, then, how she learned to do it. Beginning with her own restaurant, “you watch the other waitresses, what they do.” She was “cautious” at first, starting with two plates, being deliberate. Then she began adding plates, responding to the demands of the faster pace of the restaurants in Los Angeles. “Norm’s was much busier. So you had to stack as many plates as you possibly could.” And, with continued practice in these busy settings, you get to where “you don’t even have to think about it.” I’m struck by the similarity between my mother’s description and the studies I’ve read on the role of cognition in the development of athletic skill. My mother mixed observation and practice, got some pointers
from coworkers, tricks of the trade, monitored her performance, and developed competence. As she achieved mastery, her mind was cleared for other tasks—such as remembering orders.
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