|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 34
This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and
appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for
teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the whole
teaching art.
One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.
Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the laws of
memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the method of
learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the
rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.
His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by
heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a
measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now,
after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes,
we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating
manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables,
which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now
systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary
to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number
of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of
forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be
forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at
the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He
made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves
prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his
experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how
long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as
to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may
have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to
reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its
lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it
again. In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things
which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless
impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We
are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our
conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would
be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole
margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being
distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the
field.
The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to
measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly
reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may
have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we
always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the
answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical
with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this
is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life
that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it
has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our
tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great
blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having
once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to
recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of
their education. This is true even in professional education. The
doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at
the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the
layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what
books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.
Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a
poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life
sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready
reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its
combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output
consequently more important.
Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call
to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for
practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of
_thinking_; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a
new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort
should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it
with something else already there. The connecting _is_ the thinking;
and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
certainly be likely to remain within recall.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|