This might ramble a bit as I am thinking something through publicly. If I start boring you, please don’t read it.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with Dr. Jones and I asked him, as an expert on accelerated learning and memorization methods, for his advice on how we might best remember the things that we are learning in our book-reading. We read a lot of books, and while I’m sure some of it does sink in, most of it becomes implicit memory (the sort of memory that makes you go, “Oh, yeah, I remember that,” when someone reminds you of a fact–but which you can’t articulate when someone asks you about the fact).
Now, most of us go through our schooling with very little memory work, and we don’t think it’s pointless to read books just because we’ll forget most of them. If we didn’t read them, we’d be really ignorant. So if that’s how it has to be with my boys, I’m resigned to their fate. They’ll still be well-educated.
But what if there is a way to retain more of what we learn? Obviously, always re-reading books after reading them once will help do the trick. But ultimately, you can’t read as much that way and it’s not clear that you would learn more that way.
Anyway, Dr. Jones gave me an intriguing answer. He said that you’d review the information one hour, one day, one week, one month, and one year later. Seems this is something that people in the field often say. He recommended that I highlight the info I want H. to retain as we read, then read the highlighted portions into a recorder, then we simply listen to the recording a day, a week, a month, etc., later.
So, never one to pass up trying out some easily testable idea, and since I have a nice handheld recorder and am a fantastic user of it (and I know how to edit sound files and stuff), I decided to give it a try.
The day before yesterday I recorded one thing (a minute long, summarizing a bit from DK Presidents–H. decided he wanted to learn more about the presidents so we’re off and running with that). Then yesterday I made five more recordings, covering a True Book about the Declaration of Independence, a poem, a few facts from Children Just Like Me, a bit of What’s Physics All About, and a section of The Story of the World Vol. 2. Actually, I don’t think we read all that just on Sunday. I think we did some on Saturday and the first one was on Friday. Whatever, added together, the weekend’s recordings were 8.5 minutes long. (We continue to read during mealtimes on weekends because it doesn’t seem like work and we’re used to it.) Weekdays will surely have more recordings, and today, Monday, we have 12.7 minutes of recordings.
Now, to continue on this way might seem admirably ambitious, but it’s really just plain crazy. I mean, it’s OK as long as you’re reviewing just one of these recordings per day. But suppose we limit the recordings to 10 minutes a day, and each day you are reviewing recordings from a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, a season ago, a year ago, and two years ago. That would be 60 minutes per day of listening to yourself summarize stuff that you read…that long ago. Have you ever heard of anyone doing such a thing?
Now, H. expressed great enthusiasm after listening to yesterday’s recordings. We talked about this and he said basically that it was a lot of fun, because it reminds him of what he knows. His reaction surprised me. I thought it was pretty interesting, most of the time, but maybe not that exciting. I did see two great advantages aside from the long-term memory aspect. First, it immediately reinforces what we just read. That alone might make the practice worth doing. Second, H. (when he pays attention to my summary–he doesn’t always) gets a very lively idea of what a good summary “narration” looks like. I flatter myself that I am good at summarizing things I’ve just read quickly and accurately, and picking out the important points.
But I just can’t imagine that we’ll want to listen to a full hour of this stuff every day. Would we? Surely not…would we?
Even if it is somehow conceivable, which I do wonder about, perhaps it would be better, anyway, to go for quality rather than quantity. Let’s suppose that we do the review of the longer recording just once or twice, but otherwise just pick out a minute’s worth of the day’s recording. That sounds interesting but the time spent editing the recording is prohibitive. Simply making the recordings and uploading and listening to them daily would be a pain. To add on top of that editing a 12-minute recording into a minute, well, the idea is ridiculous. No, the only way to make it practical is to record no more than a few minutes of recordings every day. Even five minutes a day would mean 30 minutes of review every day. One or two minutes a day would be much more manageable–that would mean 6 or 12 minutes of review, which sounds downright easy.
So much for what seems practical. But what is really desirable? Well, there are three considerations here. The first is knowledge. Knowledge is good, and we want to maximize it. Second is love of knowledge, or motivation–a different thing. We don’t want to burn out kids (or parents) by requiring too much of anything or more than tolerable of what is tedious. Third is pleasure, we want life fun, especially life for children. Fourth (OK, four considerations) is opportunity cost–even if it is in all a benefit to do, would the time we spend on this be better spent on something else?
Well, H. liked reviewing the recordings from yesterday and the day before. As to length, 8.5 minutes didn’t seem too long. But I get the sense that it might get old, and when we start doubling the time, it might start getting way too long. Still, there’s no need to speculate about that. We’ll just keep doing this for a week. For the coming week, we’ll see if we can stand ten minutes of review a day. Then, beginning next week, we’ll see if we can stand twenty minutes of review. If we can handle that, in a month, we’d start doing thirty minutes of review.
Now, let’s suppose that–to my surprise–both H. and I feel we can handle it. We even like listening to my summaries, quotations of main points, facts to recall, etc. Maybe we would like it because we actually do recall what we’re hearing, and we derive pleasure from calling to mind what we might have forgotten otherwise. I’m not sure how likely it is, but it’s possible that the act of reviving memories, even when it requires close attention for many minutes in a row, will turn out to be pleasurable, or pleasant enough.
Would it be worthwhile, though? I tend to believe Dr. Jones. I’ve heard his advice before, I don’t know where, and it’s very plausible that jogging your memory according to that pattern would help you retain information that otherwise would be forgotten. Well, if so, it would be extremely valuable. It might even be worth some unpleasantness, or at least foregoing of more intense pleasures. After all, what we’re talking about is remembering a hell of a lot more stuff than you would remember otherwise. Suppose that someone could wave a magic wand and suddenly you’d remember, instead of 20% of what you learned in school, more like 60%. (I’m picking numbers out of the air, but you get the idea.) You know that, right now, you’d be a lot better-informed than you are now. Having a handle on all that information would in turn enable you to draw connections and make insights that are unavailable to you because, well, you’ve forgotten so much. Reflecting on this makes me wonder if this is something that we should all be doing, even as adults. Should we be spending an hour each day simply reminding ourselves of what we have already learned? I don’t know. It sounds like a fascinating idea to consider, though.
I think we’ll keep trying, anyway, because after all, supposing that H. and I do like this method, it seems like the time will be very well spent. Besides, I suspect that even if we review some information a couple of times, that will increase the long-term memory retention, and that alone might repay the effort.
Of course, it might end up being an enormous pain, and I’ll drop it soon.
Another consideration I’ve been thinking about, however, is that we might very well achieve a similar effect simply by reading increasingly difficult books on the same subjects that we’ve already studied. In this way, maybe we don’t have to review, and we get a similar effect. But I don’t think so. Even someone who revisits the same fact four times in his education, in increasingly difficult contexts, might still forget it because it never, on any of the passes, makes it into long-term memory. But the method Dr. Jones describes is designed specifically to get those facts into long-term memory. Reviewing info a day and a week later, in particular, seems important to getting it into long-term memory. My guess is the month and three-month reviews will set the neural pathways quite well. Then one will likely come across the information later in one’s education, and if one is still using the same memory technique, and one has forgotten it, then it will be revived all over again. Of course, that assumes that the technique would be used long-term…
Thoughts?
since we do less reading it is possible they have more chance of remembering what they read, which is less overall that what you are trying to achieve.