Literary Luminary...Stacey LaFountain...Blog 4
“Less obvious are the reasons to practice skills when it appears you have mastered something and it’s not obvious that practice is making you any better. Odd as is may seem, that sort of practice is essential to schooling. It yields three important benefits: it reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer”. (P. 108)
I feel that this passage is important because you can relate it to math. During work everyday I push into a math classroom. Here we practice everyday material that we have learned through the year so far. These skills that we are practicing are something that we build upon during everyday class when we learn new material. A perfect example is now we are learning about proportions and proofs. We have already covered proofs in class and are not applying that knowledge that we have with the knowledge we have just learned.
“Mental processes can become automatized. Automatic processes require little or no working-memory capacity”. (P. 111)
Reflexes come to mind when I read this passage. Little children are not born with the knowledge to put their hand in front of their face if a ball is thrown in that direction. Most of the time a child gets hit in the face and learns that they need to put their hand up. Their reflexes are something that they learn over time by doing.
“The difficulty is that there is only so much room in working memory, and if we try to put too much stuff in there, we get mixed up and lose the thread of the problem we were tying to solve, or the story we were trying to follow, or the factors we were trying to weigh in making a complex decision”. (P. 114)
I had this problem just today. Driving the child that I nanny home we were talking about his day and the different things that went on. He started on one topic of conversation and then switched half way through. I was paying attention to what he was talking about and completely forgot the other subject. When he went back to the subject a minute later I could not remember what he had told me. Even though I was listening attentively to him I could not recall anything that he had said.
"Their reflexes are something that they learn over time by doing." Your exactly right! This reminds me of when I was a little girl. I was walking on a dock and looking in over the water. My mother called out to take a step backwards otherwise I'd fall in but I didn't listen. Needless to say, I fell into the water but because of this memory, I learned not to step too close to an edge! I don't even have to think about it anymore because it is an automatic process.
ReplyDelete-Alex
I feel like some teachers don't understand that there is only so much room in ones working memory. Sometimes it seems like there is information overload going on in the classroom. I believe teachers need to give students breaks or time for the students to process the new information. Even if this time is the teacher asking the students if they understand what was just given to them and clarifying the new information.
ReplyDelete-Melissa Lochner
I agree with you melissa, I always think teachers forget that we have other classes going on and they think our lives revolve around their material. Just this week I have two papers due this blog and about 200 pages of reading not exaggerating. They wonder why kids are stressed and tired and have a bad attitude their brains are just overwhelmed.
ReplyDeleteNatalie