By the time I graduated, an entire desk drawer was packed with decks and decks of Spanish vocabulary. In college I studied Spanish with flashcards. I picked up a copy of Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever, a valuable read in that it exposed me to an incredibly useful tool for permanently retaining large amounts of information: Anki. I had forgotten the majority of the vocabulary and grammar rules I learned in college, and for all intents and purposes, I starting from the beginning. A few months ago I started brushing up on my Spanish. I wasn’t sure what was the best way to retain a large amount of information. But, then again, I do teach plenty of content that requires memory retention (comma rules, important authors, grammatical function). After all, you don’t need to cram facts in order to do well on a rhetorical analysis essay, which takes a more holistic assessment of skills. Why haven’t I spent more time explaining to students the best way to learn? Part of reason is apathy. Students devote some amount of time studying and devoting the concepts to their memory as best they can. No matter the subject, the pattern is similar: introduce and lecture about concepts, ask the students to apply the content, then assess knowledge. After ten years in the show, there’s one topic I have never explored sufficiently in my classes: what’s the most effective way to study and retain what we learn? I think the failure to discuss this topic with students is probably true for most of us in secondary education.
0 kommentar(er)
