Sep 09, · In April , St. Louis opened its doors to the world for what was officially called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, but was widely known as Jul 20, · A college application essay may be as short as words, but those words can mean the difference between a “maybe” and a “yes” when it comes to getting admitted. The essays tell the admissions committee how and why one student is different from all the others. You want to be the student that stands [ ] Sep 25, · 1. Sal Khan shows the limits of rote trivia in his book, “The One World Schoolhouse.” He offers the example of the Louisiana Purchase. When I studied it, I was forced to memorize the year (), the amount of land required (, square miles), or
The St. Louis World’s Fair: Photos - The Atlantic
Mike boastfully reads books per year. He listens to audiobooks at 3x speed whenever he drives and swears he can remember it all. All around, his strategy for learning is simple: shove as much information into the mind as possible.
He listens to podcasts while making pivot tables in Excel and stopped taking the subway to work because the train noise made it impossible to hear the audiobook narrators.
I know many people like Mike, and I used to be just like him. Mike is so busy preparing for the future that he never steps into it. The satisfaction of binge consumption brings instant gratification, so why try anything else? The problem is that shoving information into your mind can create the illusion of knowledge, especially when you rush it. True learning requires contemplation. And implementation. And a commitment to reflecting on great ideas over and over again.
Measuring your learning with a scorecard of consumption is anxiety-inducing. Essay louisiana purchase call it the Water in a Cup method—and anybody with a lick of common sense or the initiative to read a few research papers will see how misguided it is. Faster is better, so he no longer consumes ideas at human speed. The core assumption is that delivering more information is the best way to help people learn more.
In school, most of that information is delivered through lectures, which focus on cleanly packaged ideas that are, ideally, easy to memorize and regurgitate. Only when you remove the scaffolding of sliced carrots and pre-packaged portions do you confront the limits of your knowledge.
They found that attention spans started to lapse after minutes, no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter. By the end of class, essay louisiana purchase could only stay focused for minutes. If we embraced the benefits of active learning, our classrooms would look nothing like they do today. The average classroom is set up for passive listening, essay louisiana purchase. Desks are lined up in punitive rows that are designed to limit interaction between students.
My favorite college professor, Mrs. Cahill, saw how classrooms limited the integration of knowledge and rebelled against their architecture. We rearranged the entire classroom at the beginning of every class. That way, we could have the kinds of small group conversations that traditional classroom arrangements prevent. Her class was also less about consumption and more about conversation, essay louisiana purchase.
Before arriving, essay louisiana purchase were responsible for reading 10 pages and writing a word reflection on them. Class always began with small group conversations, in which we discussed the reading from the night before.
By ungrouping and regrouping into different groups, we gained different perspectives on the reading. In other classes, I slouched in my chair and watched the seconds tick for 90 minutes.
Time was precious because each conversation was so short. Only at the end of class, when we came together for a group discussion and a short lecture to fill in our gaps in understanding, essay louisiana purchase, did we do anything that resembled a traditional approach.
Schools assume that learning is inevitable if students read enough books and spend enough time in the classroom. Systems are easy to scale when they use this reductive, cookie-cutter mindset.
But without knowledge of the geopolitics of the time, these facts are nothing more than trivia. Differences between classrooms were much greater before the invention of textbooks. But the invention of textbooks standardized direct instruction, moved it into the classroom, and downplayed individualistic teaching styles, essay louisiana purchase.
For the first time, authors had more legitimacy than the teachers essay louisiana purchase taught their textbooks. No longer were teachers the ultimate authorities on a subject who taught whatever they wanted. Instead, essay louisiana purchase, they served as informational middlemen who transferred ideas from authoritative writings to student minds.
Every student could now study the same material, no matter where they lived. In tune with this post-industrial mindset, fuzzy and hard to quantify educational methods like apprenticeships and the singular teachings of local sages were overtaken by national benchmarks and one-size-fits-all curriculums, essay louisiana purchase. Like the factories they aimed to prepare students for, essay louisiana purchase, schools acted like a conveyor belt where every pupil moved at the same essay louisiana purchase. The group was led by Harvard president Charles Elliot, and those ten men decided that every American should learn the same things at the same age and often, in the same way.
These men determined that America should have eight years of elementary education followed by four years of high school — where students would initially focus on English, math, and reading before learning chemistry and physics toward the end of high school. Your job is to make sure they learn. They focus less on consuming as much information as possible and more on cultivating the deepest possible understanding of the ideas that resonate with them most.
Their neverending springtime harvest reminds me of the way my approach to travel changed after some trial and error, essay louisiana purchase. I once went on a month-long Euro Trip during which I tried to visit as many cities as possible. In four weeks, I visited Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Interlaken, Innsbruck, and Salzburg.
Though I got to survey these cities, my international game of hopscotch made it hard to cultivate meaningful experiences. Upon returning home, I vowed to avoid trips like that in the future.
Instead, Essay louisiana purchase vowed to spend more time in the cities I visited. The meaningful parts essay louisiana purchase a culture, essay louisiana purchase, like books, only show up when you give them time. They hide parts of their personality and only reveal themselves once you stop, slow down, and commit to them for a little while, essay louisiana purchase.
I noticed this recently when I spent a month in Oaxaca, a small town in southern Mexico. This time, essay louisiana purchase, I tried to behave less like a tourist.
Only after a few weeks did I discover the kinds of local rituals that fly-in essay louisiana purchase rarely participate in. Most memorably, a local recommended a Temazcal ceremony—we sat in a clay sweat lodge for 75 minutes where, in pitch black, we listened a shamanic lectures and rubbed local foods like mezcal and cacao and oranges and some kind of THC-heavy substance all over our bodies. Each day also brought us closer to a woman named Petra, who prepared a new Oaxacan dish for us every day and explained the history behind each one.
On my flight home, I realized that places can be as complicated as people are. Though you can pick up the gist pretty fast, relationships need time to blossom. In school, writing essays was the closest I got to that deeper experience. If going 3x speed is like country-hopping, writing an essay is like being an expat. To that end, schools are right to see essay writing as one essay louisiana purchase the most effective methods of learning.
Syllabuses, too, are useful because they force you to focus on a single topic for longer than you naturally would. The research on spaced repetition shows that listening to audiobooks at 3x speed is a terrible way to retain information. Spaced repetition yields exponential benefits for increased effort. So, at least at first, you gain more from a piece of information every time you return to it.
Your ability to remember something improves every time you review it, and the more you do it, the less time it essay louisiana purchase to do so. Taken all together, racing through ideas at 3x speed is precisely the opposite of what the research says you should do.
At the risk of oversimplification, humans have two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. When you read books at 3x speed, you make it hard for your mind to transfer knowledge to long-term memory, which is more stable and lasting than short-term memory.
The science of memory reveals why writing is such an effective way to learn, essay louisiana purchase. Putting ideas into your own words forces you to internalize them.
Rather than memorizing disparate pieces of information, writing helps you deduce their logic and bring them together into a coherent whole. Moreover, the process of brainstorming, typing, and editing our words acts essay louisiana purchase spaced repetition. Since humans crave novelty, returning to the same ideas can be a painful experience.
Though I realize the effectiveness of spaced repetition, I have no interest in returning to the same flashcards over and over again, maybe because it reminds me so much of school. Our intuitions for effective learning sometimes deceive us. Learning is most effective when we implement spaced repetition, sometimes without even realizing it.
They can also come from returning to similar states of consciousness over time. Like writing, direct experience makes essay louisiana purchase inevitable. But in practice, there is. You have to figure things out for yourself. Language learning provides another example, essay louisiana purchase. You can pick up trivial knowledge by banging your head against a classroom wall for 10 years, essay louisiana purchase.
Or, you can immerse yourself for a year and walk away fluent. Conversations with native speakers are far more effective than learning in a classroom. Same goes for anything that resembles a lecture, like an audiobook. Everything flows together, essay louisiana purchase. Though he originally listened to audiobooks at their standard speed, he caved to the urge to listen to each one faster once his stack of unread books grew to an anxiety-inducing length.
First, it was 1. Then 1. And now, 3x. Should he crank it up to 5x? How about 7x? At some point, the quest for speed breaks.
Louisiana Purchase - Thomas Jefferson Achievements - One Minute History
, time: 1:00Essay Fountain - Custom Essay Writing Service - 24/7 Professional Care about Your Writing
A nine-part series chronicling the turbulent history of one of the most extraordinary landscapes on earth. Beginning when the land belonged only to Native Americans and ending in the 20th century Jul 20, · A college application essay may be as short as words, but those words can mean the difference between a “maybe” and a “yes” when it comes to getting admitted. The essays tell the admissions committee how and why one student is different from all the others. You want to be the student that stands [ ] 1 day ago · Essay about no homework policy body! Examples of argumentative essays 6th grade! Persuasive essay topics tagalog phrases to use in essays informative essay first grade, really good descriptive essay water crisis in pakistan css essay pdf. Purchase a dissertation essay on shri krishna janmashtami in hindi. Healthy lifestyle food essay
No comments:
Post a Comment