|
Table of Contents A young college student I know, facing an exam in physics, sat up cramming the whole night before the test. By dawn he had mastered one hundred and fifty definitions simply by repeating them over and over until he "had" them. When I met him on the street a week later, I asked him how he had made out. He laughed. "Oh, I passed with flying colors. But if you asked me for-one of those definitions now, I couldn't tell you, if my life depended on it!" This is a common example of the misuse of the process of repetition in remembering. If this student had set himself the task of learning just five new definitions a day, and had repeated them once every day for a week, and then once each week for a month, he would have injected his hundred and fifty definitions into his brain gently, painlessly, and permanently. Every educator knows that cramming a head with knowledge is like loading a cannon. The powder is good for one blast, at examination, and then disappears into air. |
|||
|
