09.02.07
Shorter breaks help kids recall lessons — True of False?
Shorter breaks help kids recall lessons - Yahoo! News
Interesting theory. As I understand it, you forget about half of what you learned in just 21 days, with the bulk of the forgetting coming in the first few days. In California, a number of our school districts are using these kinds of schedules. In the Victor Valley area, it started with the use of separate “tracks” to shoehorn more children into existing facilities. Once the local school districts built more schools, they kept the schedules, without the tracks.
The result? After six to ten weeks of classes, the schools go on a break for one to four weeks. After the break, the first few days are spent reviewing what was covered before the break. At least with MJ and his friends, it appears to have slowed down their progress.
You have to remember that most kids hate school1. The more that they differ from whatever the school’s norm is, the more that they hate it. If you pick up things more quickly than most students, you hate the repetition and the slow pace. If you pick up things more slowly than most students, you hate the quick pace. If you speak another language at home, it is more difficult to absorb things in English, at least until you learn spoken and written English at the same level as most of your peers.
For most students, sitting while someone lectures and scribbles on a whiteboard is about the worst way to try to teach them. Spending six to eight hours having someone yak at you, and expecting to remember most or all of what they covered is idiocy. That’s why recess is probably the most educational part of school. Not only do children learn coping and social skills that they will need for their entire lives, but they also get to rest their brains from overt learning and slip into the far more effective covert learning mode.
How many young males have you seen that can’t read at grade level, but can figure out how to “juke” you into an ambush on the latest online first person shooter game? What is the difference? In the game, he is learning by doing, for the purpose of using what he learns and not learning for the sake of learning. When Ms. Jones says to read page 37 of Beowulf aloud in class, not only is it overt and intentional learning, it is learning for the sake of learning when he has no intention of ever using what he learns.
MJ, for example, learns by reading and doing and discussing. He formulates arguments, promotes and defends them, and learns from this kind of interaction with his peers. Sit him in a classroom, listening to a lecture, and he cannot even tell you what topic the teacher discussed. He also cannot absorb very well in a typical classroom full of people. He seems to require that the number of learners stays south of twenty. I’ve noticed that even twenty-five students significantly degrades his achievement. I don’t know if it is instructor attention so much as the fact that large classes require an intensely structured environment (students sit and listen and take notes while the instructor lectures, no questions until and unless the instructor asks for them, no discussion or interaction among students, and students are not allowed to do other things such as read the textbook for another subject).
As he heads off to college, it will be important that he is aware of this, and that he selects his school and classes to meet his needs.
When I was in school, I learned by reading and doing. I wasn’t much for argument or discussion, as it took time that I would have preferred to use learning. All these years later, I’m finding that it hasn’t changed. Lectures, presentations, audio and video tapes present obstacles to me learning, as do large groups (larger than five to ten individual learners), although smaller groups within a larger class is a workable alternative.
(Note: I am not an education researcher, but I have read a bit on the subject. I also noticed the difference in performance when MJ attended a local charter school. It wasn’t just his performance that improved. It seemed like nearly every child in his school was doing better than they did in the “lecture and notes” programs at the public schools. For more on what the school was doing differently, see this article in the Victorville Daily Press.)
Do you disagree? Why is it that the three most enduring songs for young people are “Schools Out,” by Alice Cooper; “Another Brick On The Wall,” by Pink Floyd (”We don’t need no education …”); and the traditional “no more pencils no more books, no more teachers dirty looks” song?
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Tags: education
