Tag: learning

On Limerence

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David Brooks, in his latest piece in The New York Times has covered a fascinating piece outlining the basis of my philosophies of living, learning, and teaching: “The New Humanism.”

Brooks exposes the individualistic, materialistic, uber-rational philosophies of the past and present as single-faceted paradigms which ignore much of what is true about human nature. Brooks notes that this focus “has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below,” to our collective detriment. In particular, Brooks recognizes that “When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say.” The message to students, which often becomes internalized, is that you are the sum of the numbers, or letter grades, and your worth is tangibly related to the outcomes. This message takes years to unwind, and that’s only for the lucky ones. Some people wind up tangled in the web of conflicting messages between innate human desires for social success or pleasing loved ones and their internal feelings of boredom, hatred, or disinterest in what they have been told makes them valuable. Who likes taking the SAT, and what happens when it’s over (answer: the GRE)? Who is motivated endlessly by a score; everyone gives up on Galaga eventually, because the numbers begin to look alike, or be meaningless. In fact, intrinsic motivation is identifiable most often in non-measurable forms.

In particular, Brooks points out that

research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Equipose and metis are essential “talents,” or, more appropriately, learnable skills for most people. Courses like Advanced Placement Literature & Composition are arguably useful not because they make learners smarter, but because they lead learners to reflect and monitor their own understandings and skills, changing as they individually must: equipose. Or, useful because the course demands higher order thinking skills and integration of complex sets of data in the form of texts for synthesizing new understandings: metis (at least partially, or within a given set). If taught correctly, a course builds a sense of honest, authentic engagement, possibly limerence: loss within the challenge of a task, questing for Phaedrus’s Quality. But, the AP falters badly in May, testing, assigning a number. I love my task, I’m playing the game, and questing for improvement, but I’m not going to score perfectly on the AP test, so how likely am I to give myself to the task? To experience limerence?

If it were me, and it has been, the answer is not bloody likely. So the tests, the measurements, don’t help honest, prolonged engagement, but rather feed into our “rational,” materialistic selves. The symptoms are cramming, learning disposably, and widespread misery. Oh, how I wish for schools in which humans teach humans, explicitly, in which we respect our different strengths, foibles, blind spots, and in which we all seek to become more happy, healthy, and complete humans together through this shared process called school.

Written with limerence.

Learning Information is a Reflective Process; Get Started with a Test!

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A fascinating study has just been published in the journal Science regarding kinds of study strategies and their effectiveness in improving recall, or retrieval, of information later. An article on the study has been linked below and all quotes come from the linked text.

In brief, when compared to strategies such as repeated reading, cramming, or concept mapping, taking tests has proven to increase recall later. I find this terribly interesting because of the conclusion that making mistakes on tests leads the learner to revise their understanding:

The students who took the recall tests may “recognize some gaps in their knowledge,” said Marcia Linn, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “and they might revisit the ideas in the back of their mind or the front of their mind.”

When they are later asked what they have learned, she went on, they can more easily “retrieve it and organize the knowledge that they have in a way that makes sense to them.”

It may also be that the struggle involved in recalling something helps reinforce it in our brains.

Maybe that is also why students who took retrieval practice tests were less confident about how they would perform a week later.

“The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you’re not learning,” said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College. “You feel like: ‘I don’t know it that well. This is hard and I’m having trouble coming up with this information.’ ”

By contrast, he said, when rereading texts and possibly even drawing diagrams, “you say: ‘Oh, this is easier. I read this already.’ ”

So, overconfidence about the quality of one’s knowledge leads to poorer retrieval, no doubt because the brain does far fewer reflective cycles over the information and is not forced to revise understandings for greater clarity or correctness, as it must after flaws or gaps are pointed out via a test. Of course, the learner has to experience the results of the test. As such, our practice AP tests are of much higher value in improving your knowledge of the subject than the final exams themselves, because you will be given the results and be asked to revise answers, consider errors, and generally revisit the material. In short, you will naturally reflect on the outcome and seek to improve. At least, this is my reading of this study.

Also important is the conclusion at the end of the article that this study doesn’t mean more standardized tests are needed in American public schools, for example. Those tests are generally worthless, as students never receive feedback on the test beyond a score. Sometimes, the lucky ones get a print out with numbers in categories. None of this leads the learner to reflect on the specific gaps in his or her knowledge, as determined by the test.  As such, tests useful for improving learning should be specific, meaningful, valid, regularly occurring, and (probably) fairly brief. Tests should be given back to the learner soon after their scoring, and the learner should be led through a reflective process by the instructor as much as possible. These are, of course, my conclusions and not necessarily the conclusions of the study.

What does this mean for the secondary school student? When you have an identifiable set of information to learn – say, a text like Slaughterhouse Five, in which recall of many specific details are necessary for writing and discussing, or dark and light photosynthesis, with myriad attendant details and process – find a partner and devise a little test for each other, focusing on the most important ideas and essential details, as you see them. Take, swap, and discuss. That process would utilize your study time much, much better than sitting in a room and rereading lines that flow in your eyes and out through your mouth, hanging open with boredom. Would any of you try that process?  I’m genuinely curious. Would a session on writing test questions be helpful as a study strategy?

“To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test” – The New York Times

Language & Learning; or On Poop Words

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Usually, we change and grow silently, invisibly. Sometimes, changes in our brains become obvious and pop out in crystalline detail. Only once, poop and pee has crystallized a real change in my life.

Yesterday, my wife, Kal, looked at our daughter of 2 1/2 years, Dot, and asked “Do you feel peeps muzza-muzza?” This sentence has meaning, unbelievably.

Kal’s links with this sentence begin in the deep past, her own toddlerhood. For some reason, pee, or its hyphenated variant pee-pee, wasn’t enough for her mother, wasn’t cute enough, sweet enough, or unique enough. So pee became peeps, which are offensively sweet marshmallow birds in my experience, capitalized. Peeps.

Peeps!
So, peeps is the language in our house for pee-pee. It works – it’s fun to say and the peeps meme is embedded deeply within Dot’s language understanding. Poop is also plural, in effect. Poops muzza-muzza is also a phrase, with true and useful meaning. So, how did the entire phrase gain meaning? Dot was showing mixed interest in potty training, sometimes willing to try the potty when prompted, but often having accidents that seemed to be increasing, rather than decreasing over time. We tried candy, stickers, high fives. Still, motivation was flagging amongst us all.

As we sought to motivate Dot’s potty training, Kal searched about for cool things to hook her attention and focus her on the process. Of course, as one would expect, Japanimation came to the rescue:

Shimajiro!

Shimajiro is a very popular cartoon character in a wide ranging series of cartoons for teaching kids skills and etiquette. When Shimajiro is ready to hit the head, he proclaims a feeling of “muzza-muzza,” or possibly wuzza-wuzza, which is what I hear. Of course, it doesn’t really matter. Shimajiro, via Youtube, gave Dot a vocabulary for bladder and large intestinal pressure. Overnight, she was into the potty. Dot was taking responsibility for heading to her potty and taking care of business.

For Dot, the language is real; she has no reason to question the meaning behind these words. But, even more interesting to me is how seamlessly Kal and I have integrated this new language into our daily experience. Kal didn’t think before she asked if Dot felt peeps muzza-muzza, because she didn’t have to. The language was integrated already and part of a communication circuit with Dot. Via Japanimation on Youtube.

Fantastic!