Why We All Need to Develop Our Talents

 Learning and memory are the mechanisms by which we grow in personal competence. The issue for all of us is our willingness to invest in our personal development. To what extent are we willing to let others take care of us? In political terms, there is the option of depending on a socialist or commuist government to do for us what we could be doing for ourselves.

Some socialists or Communists today argue that Jesus Christ would have also been Communist if that political option were available in his time. Yet Jesus gave a most powerful endorsement of capitalism in his famous parable of the talents expressed in the book of Matthew (25:14-30). Modern readers have typically extended this passage to refer to personal abilities. However, in the time of Jesus, the word "talents" actually referred to a lot of money, with a single talent worth about 20 years of a laborer's work. It can be more useful for us to think of the word as meaning resources, property, or personal assets, which of course includes money.

The parable describes an apparently wealthy man about to take a trip who needed to leave his money in the care of his workers. He gave different amounts to each worker with instructions to conserve and make the most of the resource while he was away. While away, the worker who got five talents invested it in commercial trade and made five extra talents, as did the worker receiving two talents, who earned two more talents. The worker who got one talent buried feared losing it, so he buried his talent for safekeeping. Upon his return, the owner praised those who increased the wealth, but to the worker who did not put the money to work, he said: "You wicked and slothful servant! ... you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest." The owner took the slothful worker's one talent and gave it to the worker who had earned more talents. Note: ancient Jews learned and adopted banking and capitalism during their capture by the Babylonian inventors.

As in much of scripture, the reason for moral edicts is not always explained. Maybe Jesus never gave an original explanation, and if so, it likely was to make us think about the parable's implications. Some people object that Jesus is portrayed in the parable as a greedy capitalist. Yet the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, puts things in complete perspective when he urges us to "make all you can, save all you can, and give all you can."

The main obvious generalization of the talents parable is the admonition to make the most of what we have got, whether it be resources, property, money, or personal abilities. Here, I would like to focus on why we need to develop our personal capabilities, which of course are a basic resource that affects our capacity to make, save, and give all you can.

An increasing number of people in today's world, Worldwide, and even now in the U.S., dismiss the need for developing the non-monetary sense of the word "talent." Why work to develop yourself, it you can get somebody else, like the government, to meet your needs and those of others? If fact, you can take a perverse sense of moral superiority in spurning the striving and stress of self-improvement that lesser beings seem compelled to pursue. You can look down on such people as greedy "supremacists" who gain their resources at the expense of the innocent.

In education circles, teachers need to explain in depth why young people need to increase their talents. However, the emphasis is on passing tests that educators think will help youngsters compete in a capitalist society. But you can avoid all that if you form a socialist society, which we are engaged in doing by ensuring welfare without a work requirement, doling out all sorts of government "freebies," and working to produce a guaranteed annual income. No wonder that academia is a home of socialism. The emerging political zeitgeist is to encourage people to depend on the government. That, of course, means they will vote for the politicians who ensure government support.

Without the need to grow your talents, you are not likely to do it. I remember vividly a middle-school classroom visit, where the teacher was chastised a Black student for not doing his homework, whereupon he replied, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me." Is this what we really want to teach our children? It apparently is what a lot of them are learning.

Five Compelling Reasons 

Gain Self-reliance and Independence

If you have developed your talents, they can be used to help you become more self-reliant and less dependent on the good will and resources of others. The ability to take care of yourself is no small thing. Ask any child.

Feel Better about Ourselves

Losers in life have a hard time trying to feel good. That is why they so often seek out drugs and other kinds of pleasures. What they seek most is to feel good about themselves and to have the status of others respecting them. They may be tempted to cheat and steal to gain the resources that can bring such status or throw riotous tantrums to protest their failures. However, if you develop your talents, you not only have acquired capabilities that will help you gain more resources, you have the positive reinforcement of knowing that you are an achiever, one who can take some pride in who have become.

Provide Goods and Services that Can Help Others

Obviously, if you have abilities and resources, you are more valuable to others. You are more able to help others in their earthly struggles. In turn, you position yourself to merit exchange of goods and services from them that will benefit you.

Get Ahead in This World

When you have many talents, you have many ways to offer goods and services that are valued by others. They benefit from what you have to offer, and are willing to pay you in assorted ways. Trade and exchange are the lifeblood of the capitalism that circulates prosperity amongst those who are equipped with appropriate talent and resources. People of high socio-economic standing will open doors for you that you could never open on your own. Even in a Communist country like China, leaders have discovered the benefits of moving peasants out of the rice fields and into a factory where they are trained to make such things as computers and electric cars. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of destitution, and China is poised to dominate the world. China is more fascist than socialist.

Set the Stage for Still More Personal Growth

If you don't develop your "talents," you stifle personal growth and stagnate. As the master in the parable said, "For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away." The master warns that personal sloth will cast one 'into the outer darkness," where there will be 'will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

 

The point is that without growth in personal resources, we can't keep up. The price can be a life of deprivation and despair. On the other hand, the more you develop personal and material resources, the more you can gain in the future. This kind of growth puts you on a higher platform to take the next step. I express this idea in my education efforts, where I always try to impress upon students, "The more you know, the more you CAN know." In blog posts on mental health, I try to make the point that the more you understand about how your brain works and how you think and behave will improve your ability for psychological peace and fulfillment.

The U.S. Army recruiting slogan is meant for us all:

BE ALL YOU CAN BE

Education Requires More Than Literacy

 

I recently attended a lecture by a prominent Texas historian,  James L. Haley. The focus of his talk was on the lessons of history in the context of the American revolution against England and Texas' revolution against Mexico. The theme was that the U.S. founders and Sam Houston in Texas used their knowledge of history to create a form of government that could avoid the errors of the past if the voters were educated. The  founders were themselves generally quite literate, reading history in the original Greek and Latin and absorbing the ideas of leading formation of a new government Renaissance philosophers. 

Haley went on to point out that today our government is imperiled because so many Americans are illiterate and thus incapable of correct knowledge about political issues and electing wise leaders. He presented a litany of statistics showing a shocking percentage of Americans who cannot read at all, cannot read at the fourth-grade level, and cannot read above 8th grade level. The clear implication was that to save our country, we need a more educated pool of voters.

While I accept that literacy is important, I think it is a myth to attribute our hyper politically correct "woke" cultural to illiteracy. In the Q&A that followed, I raised the following point: "I am not persuaded that education is the solution. The origin of much of our cancel culture originates in the universities." Liberal arts professors seem to be obsessed with race, gender, revisionist history, and Marxist ideology. James heartily agreed with my point, but the paradox was not explored, because time was running out.

How can education be a solution to illiteracy when the source of our current historical and political dystopia largely originates with ostensibly the most educated professors in the universities and more and more youngsters go to college? Could it be there is something wrong with how professors were educated and how they in turn educate citizens these days?

The answer is a resounding YES. Civics is no longer taught in K-12. History, when taught at all, is commonly taught from a revisionist perspective. As a professor with over 58 years of observing university teaching practices and consulting with the middle school teaching community, I disparingly conclude that we no longer teach youngsters HOW to think but focus on WHAT to think. Educators have confused education with indoctrination. We tell students what they must learn and then test them for compliance. Too many teachers and professors were trained, not educated in the classical education sense. The focus of teaching at all levels is on WHAT to think.

The problem is illustrated by how few people know about logic and logical fallacies, which I tried to address in a recent blog post. The problem extends to a general inability to think critically and creatively about what one reads and hears. Where are the Socratic teachers of today who are showing students how to engage reading content, ask penetrating questions, develop reasoned possible answers, distinguish evidence from opinion, test knowledge for accuracy, and how to learn from history instead of erasing it? When it comes to reading literacy, many youngsters have such limited vocabulary and reading skills that they cannot handle the extra cognitive load of critical thinking about what they read.

In his essay on college graduate illiteracy, Dale Ahlquist concludes, " The rise of incomplete thinking has been marked over the last several decades by a near-total loss of true humanities studies at many colleges and universities.  It’s a terrible scandal that, without authentic humanities education, universities around the world are manufacturing cohort after cohort of uneducated people " He explains the cause of the scandal this way: " Everyone agrees, or claims to agree, that we want citizens who can think for themselves. But our education system, our commercial culture, and the latent message of our social media are precisely the opposite. We want everyone to get in line."

Literacy alone is not the answer. We already have too many under educated college graduates, as has been amply documented in numerous surveys. Some shocking examples are found in Walter Williams's essay,

Though I am known as a "Memory Medic," many of my followers misunderstand my emphasis on improving memory ability. My whole point is that the quality of thinking depends on what you remember. Remembered knowledge is what one uses to think with. The less you recall from past learning, the less knowledge you have to inform rigorous thought.

Improving the way reading skills are taught would surely help. But recall that the pupils of Socrates were not necessarily all that literate in reading Greek. The main value of Socrates' pedagogy was that he showed his pupils the value of avoiding knee-jerk thinking, of questioning and thinking about reasonable answers, that his was a mind-set habit they could learn, and that such practices help to minimize error and foolishness.

 

Sources: 

Ahlquist, Dale (n.d.) The Scandal of Uneducated College Graduates. Principles from Christendom College. https://www.getprinciples.com/the-scandal-of-uneducated-college-graduates/

Williams, Walter (2016). It's Little Mystery Why So Many College Students Are Illiterate. March 29. CNS News. https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/walter-e-williams/campus-lunacy

A key to thinking straight is to get your facts straight. I urge readers to check out my book, Realville, which explains how to wade through the swamp of the seven main forms of untruthfulness.

Succeeding Without Brilliance

I recently got a note from a fan of this blog who was depressed because her IQ scores were not much above average. Her sadness magnified when she read a research paper from a group of 16 researchers at several prestigious universities who asserted that education after you are 20 years old doesn´t much improve your intelligence. My reader said, “That is devastating for me, as it makes it clearer that I´m pretty stuck in my "average" position. Do you think that this analysis is clearly conclusive? Or is there still some way to improve myself?”

She continued, “I dream of finishing my degree in Electronical Engineering and then going for Physics, but after seeing that analysis and lots of IQ charts for job positions and careers, I’m pretty disappointed.”

Before addressing her concerns, I need to summarize the paper that dismayed her. The report, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNSA) was based on what authors called General Cognitive Ability (GCA), which they defined as any IQ-like summary or principal component index of overall cognitive function. They admit and referenced some studies that have found that additional education increases intelligence, but their hypothesis was the opposite.

One thing the researchers did was conduct a basic meta-analysis of seven studies (10 datasets) with pre- and post-comparisons. The basic finding was that each additional year of education accounted for an average of 1.20 additional later-life IQ points.

My blog fan apparently missed the good news. That is easy to do, because the paper was one of the most poorly written and confusing research reports I have read over decades. This is what you might expect from anything written by 16 academics. What I think the report said about the meta-analysis was that each additional year of education accounted for an average of 1.20 additional later-life IQ points. You can see this as a glass half empty or half full. The half full view is that four years of formal post-high school education raises your IQ almost 5 points on average. Don’t bet the farm on this conclusion. These studies had an excessive amount of uncontrolled variables.

The PNAS paper did cite a study reporting that completing a university education led to a midlife gain of gains of 6–22.4 IQ points over adolescent cognitive ability compared with individuals who did not attend university. The students in that study were tested for IQ at age 15. That means that the average IQ of 100 could have jumped to 122, which is definitely adequate for most intellectually challenging careers. And this assumes just four years of ordinary college, without regard to major or rigor of intellectual challenge. Trust me, all college education is not equal.

These authors also conducted their own study and found little effect of education on IQ in an all-male, predominantly white, non-Hispanic sample at age 56-66. For example, averaging data across a large pool of subjects, they report that GCA accounted for 40% of GCA variance in late midlife and approximately 10% of variance in each of seven other cognitive domains. Averaging obscures the detection of individuals who could have had large GCA gains from education and life experience. Moreover, the kind of education and life experience must surely have varied widely and was not accounted for in the study. Even so, 60% of the variance in CGA did NOT depend on the test scores the men had taken when they were 20 years old. Don’t forget that 90% of late-life GCA variance was influenced by something other than formal education.

The IQ-like test they used was a military qualification test (AFQT), known to correlate well with established IQ tests. All their subjects, military veterans, took the test around age 20 and again about three decades later. Their data were interpreted to indicate that education does not make one much smarter. One result seemed especially clear: individuals with higher intellectual capacity tend to attain more education, achieve higher occupational status, and engage more in cognitive-intellectual activities.

There was an association of education, occupational complexity, and cognitive-intellectual activities with better later-life cognitive functioning, but these associations are not the cause of late-life ability. In other words, smart people are smarter when they are older because they were smarter to begin with. They became educated because they were already smart enough to seek it, not that education made them smart. The authors did concede that they were unable to definitively confirm their hypotheses regarding possible sensitive periods for brain development and the age of baseline testing. Such confirmation would require testing at multiple time points before the completion of education all within the same study.

One clear take-home message is that most intellectual gains occur before the age of 20. This is why elementary and secondary school education are crucial for creating optimal intelligence. As a professor for over 50 years, I am convinced that public schools today are not doing as much to make youngsters smarter as was the case in previous decades. That does not mean that further gains cannot be obtained after age 20. Education and intellectually challenging life experience do produce intelligence gains, just not as much as they do in youngsters.

The preference of researchers for averaging data obscures finding out what happens for a particular person. Is a person age 20 with low IQ more or less able to benefit from education than a person with a higher initial IQ? Or is it the other way around? Would the effect of education be different for women or minorities?

The kind of education and intellectual life challenge surely matter. For example, do we really expect the same mental benefit from four years of being a college physics major as an education major? Think also about still more benefit from a rigorous, emphasize rigorous, PhD program. Do we expect the same results from someone with little post-college training compared to a life-long learner?

IQ scores are affected by many things besides education that can affect how we interpret any effects of education. What about the age at which IQ is first tested? Brain development occurs throughout youth and extends past age 20. Obviously, IQ tests in elementary school are less valid than test results obtained after puberty.

Other variables affect IQ scores as well, particularly the mental state of the individual when the test was taken. Factors that will surely decrease scores, independently of actual cognitive ability, include sleep deficiency, emotional stress, and persistent mental distraction.

Consider especially stress. The persistent release of cortisol in chronic stress shrinks neuronal synapses and surely diminishes cognitive ability. The pool of veterans in this study must surely have varied widely in the amount of stress the men experienced during their military years. Some surely had combat-related PTSD, while others had non-stressful jobs.

One other thing: IQ tests not only measure how well you can figure things out, but only certain kinds of things, especially analogies. They also measure how fast you can solve a problem. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how long it takes to solve a problem. Einstein worked on special relativity for at least 10 years, despite claims of some others that it was a lightning-flash eureka moment.

What is my advice to my blog follower, and all those others, including me, with unimpressive IQs? First, do what you love that is helpful to you and others. But do not allow your reach to exceed your grasp. As the Army says, “Be all you can be.” The turtle sometimes beats the hare. But accept that the hare usually wins. Do not obsess or become stressed over your limitations, for that is counterproductive.

You should be happy and bring happiness to others. That should suffice. You don’t need the ability to invent relativity to be happy or make a meaningful contribution to others.

Source:

Kremen, William S. et al. (2019). Influence of young adult cognitive ability and additional education on later-life cognition. PNAS. 116(6), 2021-2026.

Learning Is Just the First Step to Understanding

As a college professor for many decades, I am always amazed at how so many students pass exams while having so little understanding. If I taught math, it would probably be different, because the task in math is to solve problems, which you can't do if you don't understand how to construct and solve appropriate equations. But for most other subjects, it is amazing how much students can learn with so little understanding.

This problem also exists in the real world outside of academia. Opinions masquerade as fact. “Facts” are often asserted without evidence-based reasoning. Facts are presented out of a context that would otherwise promote understanding.

In school matters, teachers don’t seem to emphasize the importance of evidence and reasoning. Educational knowledge and skills standards used by all the states focus on conclusions, with little regard for how such conclusions are justified. Conclusions are presented to be memorized. Testing rarely focuses on the reasoning that constructed the conclusions.

In the k-12 teaching of history, for example, students may not learn the right lessons about our government. Numerous polls uniformly have revealed that the typical high school graduate has very little understanding about U.S. history. School history textbooks are roundly criticized for inaccuracy, bias, and omissions, especially omissions of context. I have verified this in conversations with my grandchildren. The young people I talk to know nothing about explanations for the form of our government in the Federalist Papers or the reasons for many of the events that happened in U.S. history. Students have little appreciation for how creative the ideas in the Constitution were at the time and how they have had at least some impact everywhere in the world. They may have very little understanding about why WWII was so important.

In the teaching of biology, evolution is presented as a theory widely accepted by scientists, but with much less emphasis on why they believe it. It seems like too much trouble to explore the scientific observations over the centuries that lead to an inescapable conclusion that life forms do evolve. Why they evolve was the hallmark of Darwin’s work, but somehow this tends to get lost in the conclusion that they evolve or assertions that the theory should not be believed.

In the teaching of neuroscience, with which I am most familiar, students memorize what neurons are, how they generate electricity, and communicate with each other, with much less attention to what this all means in a larger sense of mental health and meaningful living. For example, students may conclude that humanity resides in a late-term fetus without knowing why such a claim can be made on neuroscience grounds. Students may memorize which parts of the brain light up in a brain scan under different conditions without the slightest idea of how misleading and uninformative such information may actually be.

In science in particular, the “why” and “how” are often more important than the “what.” I remember as a graduate student that my major professor rejected my research findings until I could find an explanation for the results. It is not enough just to know.

The larger point, of the need to understand the factoids you are learning, applies in all aspects in life: school, workplace training, and relationships with people of different backgrounds. In everything we read or hear, we should get in the habit of asking ourselves certain questions:

·       Do I understand what this means?

·       What are the limitations of this information? Where could be wrong or incomplete?

·       How much can I learn from it, not just of it?

·       What are the implications of this information?

·       To what good purpose can I put this information?

Understanding is much more demanding and valuable than just knowing. I might add as the "Memory Medic" that this perspective on learning makes it easier to remember what you learn. The best way to remember factoids is the thinking required to understand them.



"Memory Medic" has four books on improving learning and memory:

• For parents and teachers: The Learning Skills Cycle.
• For students: Better Grades, Less Effort
• For everyone's routine living: Memory Power 101
• For seniors: Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine

For details and reviews, see Memory Medic's web site: WRKlemm.com

Cursive Is Not Dead Yet

The national education standards, Common Core, aimed to kill the teaching of cursive. But is not dead—just wounded.

Yesterday, I did a radio interview on WHO in DesMoines. WHO bills itself as the “America’s #1 Audio Company.” I remember fondly listening to WHO over the three years when I lived in Iowa many years ago. The Justin Brady Radio Show people had read one of my articles on why teaching cursive to children is valuable, and they wanted to explore things further. As many people know the Common Core standards did away with the teaching of cursive, presumably because it is not relevant in the digital age where children write by tapping a screen or keyboard.

My state of Texas, notable for doing its own thing, has refused to endorse Common Core, but still the state did not require the teaching of cursive. Now Texas mandates the teaching of cursive. In accordance with the state's new school guidelines, second graders will be taught how to write cursive letters before advancing to third grade, where they'll be expected to "write complete words, thoughts and answers legibly in cursive writing leaving appropriate spaces between words." When students get to fourth grade, they'll be required to write all of their assignments in cursive.

Justin Brady wanted to know what I thought about all this. My first reaction was this: “If we don’t need to teach cursive, why do we need to teach printing by hand?” Cursive is just a refinement of printing letters. Why don’t we just show them pictures of the letters and teach them to punch a key for the letters? In fact, that may well be the next educational “reform.”

We teach printing so kids can more easily learn their ABCs. We could teach ABCs by showing children which letters to tap on a screen. Maybe in some states that think they are so progressive, the teaching of printing letters will be on the way out. However, the reason learning to print letters by hand matters is that it demands mental engagement. A child has to think about the structure of each letter, and in the process of thinking about how to draw it, learns and remembers what the letters look like. Hand printing is an example of the “production effect” principle that benefits memory. We remember things better if we reproduce the learning, either by drawing, writing, or telling. One of the fundamental but unheralded principles of learning is that the best way to remember anything is to think about it.

Learning cursive builds on this principle and provides additional benefits. Cursive has two special advantages over printing: it promotes a higher-level mental development, and it can nurture a child’s emotions and motivation for learning and achievement.

Brain Development

Cursive should be easy to learn once one knows how to print letters, because there are many good books explaining the slight modifications needed to turn printed letters into script. But cursive demands more hand-eye coordination, a change in brain wiring that creates the mental infrastructure for many later uses in real life. Hand-finger dexterity becomes crucial in later life if a child wants to play a musical instrument, excel in sports, manipulate tools, or even master a computer keyboard. In my blog post that Justin had read, I had described how writing in cursive activated many more areas of brain than mere printing. It is training the brain to recruit neural resources to solve problems.

Excelling at cursive does another important thing. The learner has to pay more attention and focus on what needs to be done to make each letter and attractive. To do a good job at cursive requires self-discipline. Who can argue that kids don’t need to learn focus and self-discipline? Our multi-tasking culture is teaching kids to be scatterbrained. All kids have some level of attention deficit.

Learning cursive successfully also incidentally programs the brain for the habit of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a mental heuristic that enables a person to pay attention to the details of what is needed to improve a skill. If an adult wants to improve her golf game, she has to do more than just repeat a swing of the club. She has to think about what is the best way to improve the swing with each attempt.

Motivational Benefit

Learning to write cursive well has enormous motivational and emotional benefits. First, writing cursive is a form of drawing, and children naturally love to draw. The child happily takes ownership of their cursive creations, being proud of having a skill that generates such elegant writing. They can even develop a personal style, which is gratifying in their limited world that demands so much conformity. They discover that they have powers of mastery, which motivates them to do better in other school work. Of course, they also discover the practical benefit of cursive, which is that they can write much faster than printing, which helps them greatly in taking schoolwork notes.

In recalling my own childhood, I remember that I did not like school until the seventh grade. Before then I hated school and made poor grades. It may have been no accident that I started to like school and make all As in that year when I also had a couple months of penmanship class. I knew how to write cursive earlier, but penmanship taught me how to write cursive that was attractive, not perhaps as elegant as the script in the Declaration of Independence, but still something I created that I could be proud of. I still have attractive cursive today.

So, I say “hats off” to states like Texas that are restoring the hallowed place of cursive in elementary education. My only criticism is that second graders are not likely to have the brain development and hand-eye coordination required to create attractive cursive. Children need refresher instruction when they are older, as I was lucky enough to get in a couple months of the seventh grade. If a child does not learn to do cursive well, many of the emotional and motivational benefits do not occur. In fact, if their cursive is ugly and unreadable, the emotions are negative.

Six Principles of Learning in School Jazz Programs

Jazz is complex music that even some professional musicians have difficulty playing. Yet somehow, jazz-band teachers create new jazz musicians out of youngsters who just a few years earlier knew nothing about music. What magic must they be using? In the spring of every year in Texas, Katy High School near Houston hosts a jazz festival that showcases junior- and high-school stage bands from around the state. I have attended several times and never failed to be astonished at the musicianship of these youngsters. Each year, there is one or more middle-school band. Even the professional musicians who critique each band’s performance are amazed that these 7^th and 8^th graders “play like adults!”

I never cease to be astonished at how accomplished these students are. I ask myself, “How did those kids learn such complex music?" The music played by the school stage bands is mostly the big-band music of Goodman, Basie, Kenton, Ellington, and others from the eras of swing and progressive/modern jazz of the 50s and 60s. They also play more modern jazz.

The emphasis on teaching reaches into the festival itself. Each band or ensemble performs for 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of critique from professional jazz musicians (some of whom are music professors at universities). The critiques are shared with the audience, consisting mostly by family and friends. Are university professors ever asked to evaluate student performance in regular secondary school academic classes?

The festival includes small-group performances, which are also openly critiqued by professional musicians. Katy High puts great emphasis on music teaching and has built a magnificent Performing Arts Center, where the festival takes place. If Texas schools are hurting for funds, it certainly isn’t evident at Katy High School. I bet they get extra support from parents.

Jazz fans everywhere lament that jazz seems like a dying art form overwhelmed by the simpler music of country, rap, hip-hop, rock, and whatever it is that most kids listen to these days. But the professional “coaches” at the festival reassure the audience that “jazz is in good hands.” The future of jazz is bolstered by the fact that many school and university music programs teach jazz.

Learning to playing any musical instrument is hard, but playing jazz is the ultimate challenge. In jazz, you not only have to know the tunes, you also have to use the chord structure and complex rhythms to compose on the fly. A jazz professor from North Texas State University counseled in one of his critiques, “I know you have sheet music you have to follow, but when you hear something in your head, play it. That’s what we (jazz musicians) do — improvise!” My impression is that in regular academic classes, we don't do much to encourage the creative application of knowledge. In jazz, it is the whole point.

Another jazz professor during a critique session had two bands re-play a number from their performance. About one-third of the way through, he silently and casually walked through the rhythm section (piano, guitar, bass, and drums) and picked up the sheet music. The kids went right on playing without skipping a beat, because they had already memorized the sheet music. His point was they were using the sheet music as a crutch and not engaging with each other. Musicians talk to each other with their instruments, and listening is a big part of jazz improvisation. Students playing jazz need to be engaged with what each member of the rhythm section is doing, and, moreover, the rhythm section needs to interact with the saxes, trombones, and trumpets.

Hearing such wonderful music from children raised a nagging question. Why can’t kids master science, math, language arts, or social studies? Why does everybody struggle so mightily to get kids to pass simple-minded government-mandated tests in academic subjects? And then it hit me. Jazz-band teachers do the right things in teaching that other teachers need to do more of.

Two things are essential in teaching: the professionalism of the teacher and the motivation of the students. Most school jazz programs provide both. Sad to say, this is not so true of traditional curriculum.

Consider professionalism. It was clear that these band directors really knew what they were doing. Some had professional playing experience. Most, I am certain, were music majors in college. Think about what they have to do. They take young kids who know little about music beyond humming a tune and teach them music theory, teach them to read music, and teach them to play the different instruments in a band. And then they have to teach students how to compose on the fly. You can’t do that without being a real professional.

As for motivation, teaching and learning jazz involves clearly identifiable motivating features. Jazz-band teachers can’t take credit for some of these features, but creative teachers in other subject areas can think of similar motivating things they could be doing, based on what is involved in jazz.

First, there is passion. Jazz stirs the emotions, from blues to ballads to hot swing. If Benny Goodman’s music doesn’t make you want to jump up and dance, you better check your pulse to see if you are still alive. That brings up this point: jazz is fun! Learning chemistry, for example, is almost never considered by students to be fun — but teachers should be thinking of ways to make it fun. 

Some academic subjects do have intrinsic emotional impact. If, for example, the emotions of history students are not stirred by the Federalist Papers or the turmoil of the Civil War and the country’s other wars, then history is not being competently taught. If the beauty of the laws of physics and chemistry or the biology of life are not evident in the teaching of science, it is the teacher’s fault. 

Second is that jazz involves personal ownership. A jazz student intellectually owns his instrument. He or she owns the assigned space on the bandstand. One critiquing musician at the festival reminded students that they own that space, and if the sheet music stand or the audio at their station was not left just right from the previous band, they must fix it. It is now their space.

Jazz players demonstrate their learning in public. How well a student has learned jazz is public knowledge. What you know and can do is on public display all the time in practice sessions with fellow band members and, of course, in public performances. Unlike many traditional classrooms, there is no way to hide. Every student is exposed to embarrassment by mistakes. In a traditional classroom, the teacher is counseled not to embarrass students. It is actually against federal law for teachers to reveal grades on individual performance, even within the more private area of the classroom. The belief system in education these days is that you should not allow an unprepared and under-performing student to be embarrassed. What dingbat policymaker came up with that? I know; it comes from the perverse politically correct movement that ignores the reality that youngsters have to earn self-esteem.

Third is that jazz is ultimate constructivism. All teachers know about constructivism, which is the idea that students have to do something to show they have mastered the learning task. Student jazz bands and combos demonstrate personal accomplishment all the time in rehearsals and stage performances. But in many traditional courses, the main constructive thing students do is fill in circles on a Scantron test answer sheet. In science, “science fairs” encourage constructivism, but these are usually one-time events. Students need to be doing something every day to demonstrate their learning. In English, how often do students write and rewrite an essay, poem, or short story? Does anybody write book reports anymore? In social studies, how many students are required to explain and debate capitalism, socialism, fascism, democracy, and republican government? Do students in academic courses spend hours in deliberate practice and applying their learning comparable to what a jazz student spends in practice? 

Fourth, jazz is social. Jazz students perform as a group, either in a big band or combo. Recall the earlier example from the Katy festival, where the professionals had to emphasize this point by taking away the sheet music. Students had to learn to talk and listen to each other through their instruments. In traditional education, there is a movement called collaborative learning, the idea of learning teams, but many teachers don’t use this approach or do it without regard for the proven formalisms needed for success. Regardless of academic subject, students benefit when they learn how to help each other learn.

Part of the social aspect of jazz is competition. In many schools, many students don’t have to compete to get into a music class. But once in, they have to display learning in order to advance into more prestigious classes (think the “One-o-clock Lab Band" at the University of North Texas). In whatever music lab they are in, they have to compete for “first chair” in their instrument section. It is like competing to make the varsity and then the first team in sports. Where is the equivalent in science, social studies, or language arts?

The fifth point: Unlike a traditional education, where the goal is to meet minimum standards on state-mandated tests, jazz band directors make very clear their high expectations that everybody in each band class should become as proficient as they can. The whole point of their teaching is mastery and excellence, not just achieving minimum standards. They expect excellence, and they get it, as documented by the festival performances. Thanks to the unenlightened thinking of No Child Left Behind law, our public education has degenerated into “No Child Pushed Forward.”

And finally we consider the matter of reward. Somewhere in teacher college courses, pre-service teachers learn about “positive reinforcement,” and most teachers try to use these ideas to shape the learning achievements of their students. But jazz performance provides public reward, in the form of public applause. Is there anything comparable in the teaching of science, social studies, or language arts? Is publishing (inflated) Honor Roll lists in the newspaper the best we can do?

So in a nutshell, the reason jazz students do so well is because their learning environment is built around six motivating factors:

1. Passion

2. Personal ownership and accountability

3. Constructivism

4. Social interaction, both collaborative and competitive

5. High expectations

6. Reward

What I take home from attended these school-band performances is a renewed feeling that, outside of jazz music programs, our schools are letting our children down. These young musicians prove that when motivated and challenged, they can do astonishing things. The printed program for the festival concluded with the comment, “The future belongs to those who are able to capture their creative intelligence. Jazz music education and performance develop the ability to create and produce the ideas that are individually unique.” Why can’t the rest of education do that?

Reference: Klemm, W. R. 2017. The Learning Skills cycle. A Way to Rethink Education Reform. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

To Remember, Make It Weird

Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit other things we remember—but have a slightly weird twist. The most effective memory strategy is to relate new information with something you already know, but do it with a weird twist. This is the basic principle of well-known mnemonic strategies, like acrostics or "Memory Palace." The idea of acrostics is to construct a sentence in which the first letter of each word reminds you of what you are trying to remember, as in the names of the 12 cranial nerves:

"On Old Olympus Towering Tops A Finn and A German Viewed Some Hops"

(olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, hypoglossal).

Acrostics and all other mnemonic aids work best if you create mental-image representations—the weirder the better. It is the  weirdness that makes things especially memorable. There are three basic techniques:

1.      Subject-Verb-Object. This linguistic sequence comes naturally to us. It is the way we speak. The mnemonic application is to create images for what you want to remember in a subject-verb-object form. For example, if you want to remember to pick up some corn, milk and sausage at the grocery store, you might mentally see yourself pushing a grocery cart in the store, throwing in a package of your favorite sausage, pouring milk on it as if you were watering a plant, and corn stalks sprout up as you approach the cashier. Weird, yes. Easy to remember, yes. If you wanted to remember the capital of Arkansas, one of the first things that might come to mind is Bill Clinton, who was governor there. Given his scandals, you might want to throw a rock at him. Visualize throwing a "little rock" at a picture of Clinton.

2.      Story Chains. With this more sophisticated method, you use the mental-image representations to create a story. You could, for example, try to memorize the order of planets around our sun by rote repetition: of mercury, venus, earth, mars, jupiter, saturn, uranus, and neptune. But the weird, more effective way would be to create a mental image story wherein you visualize the winged warrior of mercury, who is attracted to the statue of venus; they go to the NASA image of earth to get married; they go on honeymoon taking a suitcase of mars candy bars; they divorce and go to wail at the Jewish (jupiter) wailing wall;  they die and you sit on a cremated urn (saturn) of their remains; you dump the remains on the ground and it rains on you (uranus), which  washes the ashes out past the pitchfork sign of jupiter, who reigns over the sea.

3.      Memory Palace. This is one of several “peg” systems in which memory becomes easier when you attach your image representations to known objects, such as furniture in your home “palace.” This is how I memorize the names of students. I may attach mental image representations  of their names to objects in my yard and then move mentally into various rooms in my house until I complete the class enrollment. For example, for the names Bott, Carino, Castillo, Dillawn, Eckerdt, Flores, Garrett, Grantham, and Hans, I might see the following in my mind’s eye:

As I leave my back door, I see a robot (Bott) trying to hold the door shut as I turn the knob. Then as I push the button to raise the garage door, I see the button jump off the wall to my car (Carino).  As the door rises, I see my lawn, covered not in grass but in pickles (Dillawn).  Then, going left to right, the next thing I see is my my shed, which magically has morphed into Eckerd’s drug store (Eckert). Next I see my big cedar tree which is growing out of a wood floor instead of the ground (Flores). Then I see my little raised garden bed where I see Ulyssses Grant (Grantham) leading toy soldiers in battle. Then I see my flower bush, which instead of sprouting flowers has hands (Hans) hanging from all its branches. And so on. Students are amazed I can do call the roll in order from memory. They would be even more astonished if they knew I could do it backwards or in any order. The link anchors in my “palace” are already memorized and when I see them in my mind’s eye, the images I am trying to memorize pop into mind automatically.

 I discuss these techniques and other memory principles in great detail in my memory books (students will love my 5-star e-book at Smashwords.com). See reviews of my books at the author tab of WRKlemm.com.

Per Sederberg, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University says that "If we want to be able to retrieve a memory later, you want to build a rich web. It should connect to other memories in multiple ways, so there are many ways for our mind to get back to it. A memory of a lifetime is like a big city, with many roads that lead there. We forget memories that are desert towns, with only one road in. "You want to have a lot of different ways to get to any individual memory."

Once you have organized new information in a novel, weird way, rehearse it right away without distraction or interruption. New memories net time to set up, like wet concrete. The process is called consolidation, and without protection from distraction, a new memory may get erased or corrupted.

Sources

Memory Power 101 (New York: Skyhorse)

Better Grades, Less Effort (Smashwords.com; https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623

Ohio State University. (2017, June 19). Why the 'peculiar' stands out in our memory. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 20, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170619092713.htm

Note-taking 101

The Fall return to school is a good time to remind students and parents about learning strategies. Lectures still dominate teaching approaches. In spite of such teaching reforms as "hands-on" learning, small group collaborations, project-based learning, and others, teachers generally can't resist the temptation to be a "sage of the stage," instead of a "guide on the side." Maybe that's a good thing, because many students are not temperamentally equipped to be active learners. Rather, they have been conditioned by television and movies, as well as their former teachers, to function passively, as an audience. Students are even conditioned to be passive by the way we test learning with multiple-choice questions, which require a passive recognition of a provided correct answer among three or four incorrect ones.

The other major teaching device, reading, is also problematic. Too many students don't like to read academic material. They want somebody to spoon fed the information to them. Most lectures are just that—spoon feeding.

Given that the dominance of lecturing is not likely to change any time soon, shouldn't teachers focus more on showing students how to learn from lectures? It seems there is an implicit assumption that passive listening will suffice to understand and remember what is presented in lectures. The problem is, however, that deep learning requires active, not passive, engagement. Students need to parse lecture content to identify what they don't understand, don't know already, and can't figure out from what they do already know. This has to happen in real time, as a given lecture proceeds. Even if the lecture is taped, seeing it again still requires active engagement for optimal learning.

So how should students engage with lectures? Traditionally, this means taking notes. But I wonder if note-taking is a dying art. I don't see many students taking notes from web pages or U-tube videos. Or textbooks (highlighting is a poor substitute). Or tweets or text messages. My concern was reinforced the other day when I gave a lecture on improving learning and memory to college students. The lecture was jam packed with more information than anyone could remember from one sitting. Yet, I did not see a single one of the 58 students taking notes. Notably, the class's regular professor, who had invited me to give the lecture, was vigorously taking notes throughout.

An explanation of how to take notes is provided in my e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort (Smashwords.com). Just what is it that I think is valuable about note taking? First and foremost is the requirement for engagement. Students have to pay attention well enough to make decisions about the portion of the lecture that will need to be studied later. Paying attention is essential for encoding information. Nobody can remember anything that never registered in the first place.

Next, note taking requires thinking about the material to decide what needs to be captured for later study. This hopefully generates questions that can be raised and answered during the lecture. In the college class I just mentioned, not one student asked a question, even though I interrupted the lecture four times to try and pry out questions. Notably, after the lecture, about a dozen students came to me to ask questions.

daikubob.com

A benefit of hand-written note-taking is that students create a spatial layout of the information they think they will need to study. A well-established principle of learning is that where information is provides important cues as to what the information is. The spatial layout of script and diagrams on a page allows the information to be visualized, creating an opportunity for a rudimentary form of photographic memory, where a student can imagine in the mind's eye just were on the page certain information is, and that alone makes it easier to memorize and recall what the information is.

This brings me to the important point of visualization. Pictures are much easier to remember than words. Hand-written notes allow the student to represent verbalized ideas as drawings or diagrams. If you have ever had to learn in a biology class the Kreb's cycle of cellular energy production, for example, you know how much easier it is to remember the cycle if it is drawn rather than described in paragraph form.

This is a good place to mention note-taking with a laptop computer. Students are being encouraged to use laptops or tablet computers to take notes. Two important consequences of typing notes should be recognized. One problem is that for touch typists, taking notes on a laptop is a relatively mindless and rote process in which letters are banged out more or less on autopilot. A good typist does not have to think. Hand-written notes inevitably engage thinking and decisions about what to write down, how to represent the information, and where on the page to put specific items. Typing also tempts the learner to record more information than can be readily memorized.

One of the earliest tests of the hypothesis about learning from handwriting was an experiment with elementary children learning how to spell. Comparison of writing words on a 3 x 5 card, or laying out words with letter tiles, or typing them with a keyboard revealed that the handwriting group achieved higher test scores when tested after having four days to study the notes. These results have been confirmed in other similar studies.

One follow-up study with college undergraduates compared the effects of typed and handwritten note-taking in 72 undergraduates watching a documentary video. Again, students who wrote notes by hand scored higher on the test.

The most recent experiment involved hundreds of students from two universities and compared learning efficacy in two groups of students, one taking notes on a laptop and the other by hand writing. Results from lectures on a wide range of topics across three experiments in a classroom setting revealed that the students making hand-written notes remembered more of the facts, had a deeper understanding, and were better at integrating and applying the information. The improvement over typing notes was still present in a separate trial where typing students were warned about being mindless and urged to think and type a synthesis of the ideas. Handwritten note benefits persisted in another trial where students were allowed to study their notes before being tested a week later.

Though multiple studies show the learning benefits of handwriting over typing, schools are dropping the teaching of cursive and encouraging students to use tablets and laptops. 

Why is it so hard for educators to learn?

Sources

Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1990). Early spelling acquisition: Writing beats the computer. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(1), 159-162. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.82.1.159

Duran, Karen S. and Frederick, Christina M. (2013). Information comprehension: handwritten vs. typed notes. URHS, Vol. 12, http://www.kon.org/urc/v12/duran.html

Mueller, Pam A., and Oppenheimer, Daniel M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard. Pschological Science. April 23. doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581

The Perils of Multi-tasking

We live in the age of multitasking. Though a phenomenon of the young, older folks are being dragged into the age by the digital revolution in mobile electronic devices. Youngsters, as digital natives, are wired to multi-task, but they don't realize how multitasking impairs their impaired thinking skills. We call our phones "smart," but they can actually make us dumb. This may be one of the reasons that under performance in schools is so common.

Microsoft clip art

Older folks tend to be amazed and awed by the multitasking ability of the young. But those in all generations should realize that multitasking does not make you smarter or more productive.

In school, multitasking interferes with learning. In the workplace, multitasking interferes with productivity and promotes stress and fatigue. Multitasking creates an illusion of parallel activity, but actually it requires mental switching from one task to another. This drains the glucose fuel needed by the brain, making the brain less efficient and creating the feeling of being tired.

Neuroscientist, Dan Levitan, reminds us that multitasking is stressful, as indicated by increased secretion of cortisol and adrenalin. He cites work showing that IQ can temporarily drop 10 points during multitasking. A brain-scan study showed that new information gets processed in the wrong parts of the brain and not in the hippocampus where it should go in order to be remembered. The most insidious aspect of multitasking is that it programs the brain to operate in this mode, creating a debilitating thinking habit that is permanent.

Constant switching creates a distractible state of never being fully present. It trains the brain to have a short attention span and shrinks working memory capacity. This is especially pernicious in young people, who are most likely to multi-task and whose brains are the most susceptible to programming of bad habits.

Multitasking not only becomes a habit, it is addictive. I see many youngsters who seem to have withdrawal symptoms if they can't check their phone messages every few minutes. Mail messages send an associated signal that someone thinks you are important enough to contact. This provides powerfully reward personal affirmation. Worse yet, like slot-machine payoffs, the reinforcement occurs randomly, which is the most effective way to condition behavior. It turns us into trained seals.

Why does anybody engage in behaviors that can turn them into a trained seal? One study indicates that susceptibility to task switching depends on the existing mental state. The researchers monitored 32 information workers, of near-equal gender, in the work environment for five days. Workers were more likely to switch off task to Facebook or face-to-face conversations when they were doing rote tasks, which were presumably boring. When they were focused, they were more likely to switch to e-mail. Time wasting in Facebook and e-mail increased in proportion to the amount of task switching. Over-all, the workers witched to Facebook an average of 21 times per day and to e-mail 74 times. Though the total time spent off-task was small (about 10 minutes on Facebook and 35 min on e-mail, the excessive task switching must surely have degraded the productivity of the primary work tasks. Why does anybody need to check Facebook 21 times a day or e-mail 74 times a day? This is compulsive behavior that has affected the entire workforce like an infectious disease.

How does on break the multitasking habit? The most obvious way is to reduce the opportunity. Turn off the cell phone. You do not have to be accessible to everyone at every instant. Don't launch the mail app, and when it is on, turn off the feature that notifies you about the arrival of each new message. If you don't need to use a computer or the Internet for the task you are working on, don't turn on your electronic devices. If a computer is needed, don't launch the browser until you actually need it.

Be more aware of your current mental state, because it affects your distractibility. If doing boring work, find ways to make it less boring and thus less tempting to switch tasks. If you are doing work that is engaging, make it a goal to stay focused for longer and longer times on such work. Set goals for increasing the time spent on task. You should at least be able to sustain focus for 30 minutes. Just as multitasking can condition bad habits, mental discipline can condition good attentiveness and thinking habits.

Sources:

Levitin, Daniel J. 2015. Why the modern world is bad for your brain. The Guardian. Jan. 18.

Mark, G. et al. 2015. Focused, aroused, but so distractible: A temporal perspective on multitasking and communications.  ACM Digital Library. https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Research_files/CSCW%202015%20Focused.pdf

Mark, Gloria. 2015. Multitasking in the Digital Age. doi:10.2200/S00635ED1V01Y201503HCI029. Morgan and Claypool.

Two New Models for School Choice

Across the nation, there are three common ways to increase school choice: charter schools, vouchers (subsidies) to help pay for private school, and tax credits for companies that donate supplemental funds for voucher programs. All three approaches have serious deficiencies, and I propose two better alternatives.

But first, what is wrong with the current options? Charter schools are relatively unregulated, compared to regular public schools. They often are special-purpose schools that do not offer solutions for the broad swath of typical students. A common problem with school-choice options such as vouchers and tax credits is that such bills will be tied up in court challenges on the grounds that public money is being diverted to private, profit-making schools. The widely popular Nevada program, for example, is now held up in court.

Voucher programs provide only part, often around a half, of the cost of private schools. In the Nevada plan, the state transfers up to $5,700 per child directly to the parents. But the national average private school tuition is approximately $9,518 per year. Thus the shortfall means that only people who have the means can pay the difference. In other words, voucher programs are a subsidy that clearly discriminates against the poor and minorities. How can that survive court challenge?

Also, think about what happens to a public school when all the middle class students transfer out. Public schools can be undermined in another way as well. In Nevada, for example, all the funds that normally would go to the public school are transferred, thus removing support for overhead costs of running a school (utilities, janitorial service, physical plant maintenance, etc.).  In addition, a new bureaucracy has to be created to administer the program and monitor allowable expenditures by every participating parent.

Arm waving and lip service will not do. We must seek better options. One option is to privatize the management of public schools. An innovative approach has been enabled by Louisiana Senate Bill 432, passed on May 12, 2016, which transfers oversight of charter schools to local school boards. In the New Orleans Parish district, historically shamefully inadequate, there is now the opportunity to put schools under contract management. Basically, the program allows the school district to convert all public schools into charter schools, controlled by safeguards from abuse by supervision of the Orleans Parish school board and state law. Each school can have complete autonomy over all areas of school operations, such as school programming, instruction, curriculum, materials and texts, business operations, and personnel management. Further details are provided in the documents listed below.

Parents can send their children to any school in the district, and all schools must use the district-wide enrollment and expulsion system. Schools that develop so much excellence that enrollment limits are reached can create lottery admission policies. This puts enormous pressure on the local board to hire contractors who can upgrade the performance of the other schools. Multiple contractors are not only allowed but encouraged. Boards have the authority for competitive bidding processes that ensure competition among the various schools it also makes sense to allow students to transfer from one public school to another, or even to a public school in an adjacent country. Florida just passed such a law.

In Louisiana, safeguards include the requirement that each charter school must have independent third-party administration and monitoring of state high-stakes tests. The state Department of Education can withhold funding from any school districts that under-perform or abuse these new liberties. Local boards have authority to close a charter school. The state superintendent of education can rescind the charter for any school that is being inappropriately protected by a local school board.

A second option that I propose is to break up mega-enrollment schools into smaller schools-within-a-school as separate units that face open competition for enrollment. Carving out smaller schools would increase school choice because there would be more schools and more competition. They could be managed in the usual ways or as in New Orleans by independent, competing contractors. Note that the philosophy is akin to that used in premier universities like Oxford, where separate small, relatively autonomous "colleges" are embedded within the university.

Inner city schools with enrollments of several thousand or more are common after the sixth grade. This has helped to create the dysfunction in inner city schools. It is a well-documented fact that smaller schools produce better student learning. That is why you don't see private mega-schools. Super-sized schools breed attitude and behavior problems and are bad for education quality because:

• Students become part of a herd collective, losing individuality and personal attention from teachers who know them well.
• Students have less opportunity to hone leadership skills or to participate in key extracurricular activities.
• Behavior and security problems are greater. Teenagers have enough trouble "finding themselves" emotionally and socially without being swallowed up as just another number passed from teacher to teacher who can't possibly know much about everybody's learning and emotional needs and problems.
• Students in mega-schools face fierce and demotivating academic and social competition. Only a few get to participate in the popular extracurricular activities. School can cease to be fun. Almost a third of public school students quit, and many more just drift through. Minorities are especially harmed.
• In this school-within-a-school model, the small schools may grow too large because of population growth in the community. But if that happens, the district can build new schools with the same school-within-a school philosophy. The philosophy

In this school-within-a-school model, the small schools may grow too large because of population growth in the community. But if that happens, the district can build new schools with the same school-within-a school philosophy.

Small schools can still have the same amenities as mega-schools if the districts create shared facilities, such as cafeteria, stadiums, sports arenas, gyms, band rooms, vocational education shops, special-needs or advanced placement teachers, administrative staff, etc. With shared facilities, construction costs are reduced. Support staff might actually be cut if many facilities were shared. For academic instruction in low-enrollment subjects, like calculus, a small band of roving specialty teachers could service several small schools.

There is no justification for extra administrators. The principal and staff that now serve a school of three thousand can just as readily service five schools of 600 each. The core of quality education lies in the teachers, who will do their best if they have autonomy and  competition.

In summary, educational policy wonks and legislatures should stop pursuing controversial and flawed choice options and consider these two models. Both offer more choice, do not discriminate against the poor and minorities, do not undermine public schools, easily pass court challenge, and are likely to produce better educated children. The public does not have to embrace subsidies of private schools to get more school choice.  

Districts may be slow to implement such reforms, because in many districts, the superintendents and their boards have comfortable cozy relationships. But once parents have access to better options, they will elect the kind of board members who demand real change.

Sources:

http://opsb.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Section-HA-only-Final.pdf

https://legiscan.com?LA/text/SB432/id/1408901/Louisian-2016-SB432-Chaptered.pdf

Readers interested in my efforts to improve a child's success in school might be interested in my e-   book, "Better Grades, Less Effort" at Smashwords.com or "Memory Power 101" at bookstores   everywhere.

  

The One Best Way to Remember Anything

As explained in my memory-improvement book, "Memory Power 101," the most powerful way to remember something is to construct a mental-image representation. All the memory books I have read make the same point. The professional memorizers, "memory athletes" who can memory the sequence of four shuffled decks of cards in five minutes, all use some form of mental imaging that converts each card into a mental-picture representation.

Now a recent experiment documents the power of mental images in a study involving seven experiments that compared memory accuracy with whether or not a drawing was made. College-student volunteers were asked to memorize a list of words, each of which was chosen to be easily drawn. Words were presented one at a time on a video monitor and students were randomly prompted to write the name of the object or make a drawing of it. Each word presentation was timed and a warning buzzer indicated it was time to stop and get ready for the next word display. At the end of the list, a two-minute filler task was presented wherein each student classified 60 sound tones, selected at random, in terms of whether the frequency was low, medium, or high. Then a surprise test was given wherein students were asked to verbally recall in one minute as many words as they could, in any order, whether written or drawn.

In the first two experiments students remembered about twice as many when a drawing representation had been made than when just the word had been written. Three other experiments demonstrated that drawing was more effective because the encoding was deeper. For example, one experiment was conducted like the first two, but included a third condition in which the subjects were to write a list of the physical characteristics of the word (for example, for apple, one might say red, round, tasty, chewy, etc.). This presumably provides a deeper level of encoding than just writing or

drawing the word. Results revealed that drawing was still more effective than either writing a list of attributes or writing the word.

Another highly important experiment was conducted that compared drawing and writing with just making a mental image without drawing it. Again, drawing produced the best results, although more words were remembered when mentally imaged than when written.

A follow-on experiment substituted an actual picture of the word instead of requiring the student to actively imagine an image. Here again, best results occurred with drawing, with seeing pictures being more effective than writing the word.

In a sixth experiment, drawing was still superior to writing even if the list of words was made longer or if the encoding time was reduced. In the last experiment, drawing was still beneficial in a way that could not be explained solely by the fact that drawings are more distinctive than writing a word.

The benefits of drawing were seen within and across individuals and across different conditions. The researchers concluded that drawing improves memory by encouraging a seamless integration of semantic, visual, and motor aspects of a memory trace. That makes sense to me.

The processes involved here that account for better memory are 1) elaborating the item to be remembered, 2) making a mental image of it or an alias for it, 3) the motor act of drawing the image, and 4) the reinforcing feedback of thinking about the drawing.

The implications of studies like this have enormous practical application for everyday needs to remember. The principle is that whenever you have something you need to remember, make a mental-image representation of it and then draw it. For example, if you have to remember somebody named "Mike" make a mental image of the person speaking into a microphone (mike). Then roughly draw Mike's main facial features alongside a microphone. There are all sorts of formal schemes for making mental images, even for numbers, as explained in my book. This present study indicates that the making of a mental image is powerfully reinforced when you try to draw it.

To some extent, this memory principle is used in elementary school, where drawing is a huge part of the curriculum. As students get older, teachers abandon drawing and usually so do the students. Perhaps educators need to revisit the idea that drawing has educational value at all grade levels.

Source:

Kluger, Jeffrey, (2016) Here's the memory trick that science says works. Time, April 22. http://time.com/4304589/memory-picture-draw/

Wammes, Jeffrey D. et al. (2016. The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 69 (9), 1752-1776. DOI:10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494