Mind Skills

Memorization Builds Brains

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

 

    Charles attended his local gym every other day for months but nothing about him changed. He was no more fit and no more flexible than when he had first joined this ultramodern facility. To him it was a mystery! He attended the very epicenter of fitness and health so often that the front desk crew knew his name. He put in a full hour each weeknight. He put in two hours on Saturday. The other regulars knew exactly where to find him during his habitual visits. Charles made zero progress and saw no results but yet he continued to attend. His failure to make gains was no surprise to anyone who knew him. Charles refused to lift any weights, work on any cardio equipment, or take part in any swimming or cycling opportunities. 
    This sounds ridiculous. Charles paid the membership fee after extensive research looking for the right facility with the right coaches. He even bought a handsome exercise outfit which allowed full flexibility and to show-off any future gains. All this only to enter the gym and do nothing but see others lift weights, swim, exercise, climb, move, and stretch. 
    Charles attending an expensive gym for sizable parts of his week and doing nothing to improve his heart and muscles is very much like a student who plans to navigate 12+ years of education without once memorizing anything.
    Never being asked to engage one’s brain in this manner explains our public educational plight, at least in the U.S. though certainly the practice continues to spread to other nations. Never memorizing anything means that students live in the perpetual state of first steps and first impressions with no ability to climb the educational ladder to anything more complex. The brain is a muscle. It needs work and heavy lifting. Looking at charts, videos, and other students doing the work creates no benefit for yourself though it will certainly fill one’s day.
    Working memory, our superficial thoughts, takes any first exposure to new information and begins to engage the brain into a sorting exercise. The brain must decide if information needs to be stored short term, long term, or only briefly engaged and quickly forgotten. At best, working memory can keep around 7 items stored before everything gets jumbled. 
    If you look at your vocabulary flash cards for your Latin class only once or maybe twice before evaluating your retention, you’ll probably get around 5 to 7 things right and the rest wrong. If you enter a room to meet a bunch of new people, good luck. You might remember 5 to 7 names if the only thing people tell you is their name and nothing else like “nice to meet you” and “lovely day isn’t it!” Our brains are usually thinking up clever responses and we’ll not likely remember any names at all if we aren’t making a real effort. 
    Long term memory is what gives you the top score on your quiz and the ability to greet your new teammates when you see them again in a couple of days. Working memory is, at best, a tiny holding place for a handful of facts that will fade before the hour has ended. An educational system that is not built around developing long term memory skills condemns a student to live in mental deficit, like a case of amnesia. 
    Depending on how you prepare long term memory facts, you can store information in your mind for days to years to a lifetime. Learning the fundamentals of a subject for one year and then applying fundamentals the next as you add newer and more complex elements requires long term memory. This success requires memorization. If you’ve come from the vast majority of brick-and-mortar schools you’ve likely never been expected to memorize much. You’ve certainly never been taught methods to help yourself because “trendy education” has thought it old fashioned as our nation’s scores plummet lower than any other developed nation. The inability to develop topics over years means students limp through life with only a jumble of ideas temporarily stored in working memory and nothing more than hopes to look it up online.
    “When will we ever need algebraic formulae?” you might ask. Good luck moving up to more complex levels if you are juggling pages of facts you never learned but only saw. You can’t. Your brain can’t juggle working memory and the introduction of new concepts beyond that small group of 5-7 facts. You aren’t progressing because you are never learning. You are never learning because you have cognitive overload by asking your short-term memory to try to the job of long-term memory. Comprehension collapses. Your brain can’t juggle information and tires quickly, your learning slows, you get frustrated, and then you lose all motivation. 
    Listing the necessary outcomes of only using short-term working memory and never memorization sounds like a typical diagnosis of a learning disability: low comprehension, mental fatigue, delayed learning, frustration, disinterest, and low motivation. What if we didn’t need to hire all those classroom assistants? What if we started teaching students how to memorize and then expected them to progress beyond the basics by having long term memory functioning normally if not robustly?
    Let working memory do its job (juggling 5 to 7 new facts) but then move the important things into long term memory every night. The outcome makes an average student into a genius in today’s terms: increased comprehension (you memorized yesterday’s facts and can juggle the new ones today), increased mental stamina (you have sorted out how to process information efficiently and have confidence that you can keep doing it), faster learning (you don’t need to spend half your time looking up the things that you should have memorized but never did), and increased enthusiasm (look at that successful exam or project after the hard work paid off!)
    Having mastered what memorization can do for you, you get to move on to application (build that engine or complete that experiment or participate in that cool project), creation (apply what is known to new problems that must be solved), evaluation (swiftly sort out good ideas form bad ones to plan even better projects). 
    n the modern educational arena, too many have made a choice between memorizing a thing and understanding a thing. Use both as a tool to aid the other. 

Your Own Personal Education

Passive vs. Active Approach to Building a Life

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Which do you enjoy best: a tough game played without directions or goals, or the same tough game but with access to instructions, tips, and a clear view about what you must achieve to win? Those that even have interests in challenging games typically prefer to have the basics in place so that they can enjoy the game with a reasonable hope of succeeding. The toughest games in life can be your own education.
Most of us begin well before we know we are playing and, mid-game, are expected to excel before fighting the “final boss” graduation. Many decide to endure bonus rounds with apprenticeships, college, internships, or graduate school.
Some of us love this educational process and rally around the various challenges and opportunities! Some of us look at the future and despair. So many variables! So much work! It is easy to become prematurely weary about all the demands and expectations.
Students come to love the game of education more when they are given directions and have relative control over their goals. On a scale ranging from a rigid education (like a boarding school) to a fluid education (like unschooling), any approach that gives the student increasing autonomy and self-determination works best to bolster focus and optimism for the future. A student who has room to make choices about classes and topics will enjoy more opportunities to try things they might want to do for a living before they pay for college. Students who had a rigid earlier education will struggle to know what interests them enough to study further. Though most eventually find their path, they might change majors and careers many times since they delayed the process of test running new things until they became an adult.      
When framing goals, start by exploring your general interests to see if they mesh with any realistic goals. You don’t need years in botany, medicine, or art to know that those things light your fire.
 Depending on your life experiences, you may wish to continue what you already enjoy (art, music, writing, science, sports). This first tricky step is where many of us stall out. It is FAR more normal to have no idea what we want to be “when we grow up” until we are really pushed to make some type of decision. Over-thinkers worry they won’t be good enough at something they like to do, or they have concerns that their choices are unattainable, or that others won’t agree that their chosen path is worthwhile or realistic.
Instead of pushing non-stop over top academic marks and taking impressive academic courses that aren’t particularly interesting to you, be intentional about trying classes (or camps or workshops or programs) on topics that interest you. At all stages of our education, diversions from the programmed educational path are called electives, classes we picked “just” because we liked the subject. I can’t imagine a better topic to pursue than one we enjoy. How many geniuses would have remained anonymously unimportant if they’d rigidly stuck to the regular program?
There’s a lot to navigate before you might be willing to talk about your educational path with others. Some students don’t enjoy much choice. Perhaps family expectations make it clear where you’ll end up. Maybe your family boasts several generations of engineers or maybe everyone graduated from the same school. Perhaps a family business dictates where you’ll work once you graduate. Sometimes what you enjoy plays no role in what you must do educationally.
I had a friend in college who was happily finishing a degree in information technology when his mother insisted that he apply to medical school. Though he had no interest in medicine, she was willing to cut off all communication if he didn’t choose a medical path. On the other hand, I’ve known many who receive no guidance at all. Families can be a bit tricky to navigate.
Once you explore your goals, run your ideas past the most dependable people you know. Some public and private schools have guidance counselors when dependable people are in short supply, but I recommend you find somebody who knows you well and will be honest with you. Perhaps you see yourself becoming an online influencer but the person who knows you best might suggest a path that gives you multiple options. Getting a background in public speaking, marketing, journalism, and even graphic design would foster such interests without giving you too narrow a goal. Don’t despair if your objectives remain elusive. Sometimes your “aha!” moment arrives serendipitously. Observe yourself when you get excited about a particular subject or skill. Do more of that and see how things shape up.
Once you envision a path, take an active approach to your education from that moment on. Most of us, for very practical reasons, are very passive about our education until, one day, we want to take the steering wheel. Whatever you like to do, work diligently at being the best at it and you’ll never lack opportunities.