Put your teenager's notes by their toothbrush
Bear with me here … you’ll see what I mean
This is the time of year where memorisation should be in full flow.
And yet,
Most teenagers are either memorising inefficiently,
Or they are not memorising at all.
Either way,
I rarely see students approaching their notes effectively.
And the ironic thing is,
Memorisation doesn’t need lots of time,
It just needs preparation,
To make it as frictionless as possible – more on this in a second.
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This newsletter can be viewed as a ‘Part 2’ in respect to a post that I put out a couple of months ago discussing how you make notes with memorisation in mind.
I will link ‘Part 1’ at the bottom of this newsletter.
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What does ineffective memorisation look like?
I really empathise with students,
There is so much to remember,
From so many different subjects,
That sometimes remembering it all can feel like an impossible task.
And when you feel like you have mastered one bit,
You have often forgotten most of it a few weeks later.
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The problem is most students approach memorisation in a similar way to how they approach a ‘normal’ revision session.
They sit down at their desk and they read.
Perhaps they will talk out loud,
Employ active recall,
Teach their teddies,
Or get mum to test them,
But in essence,
They spend 30-60 minutes re-reading the same bits of information again and again.
The problem with this is that this gives you the illusion of knowledge.
By the end of this process a student may well believe that they have memorised the content,
But in reality, they have only remembered it in their short-term memory,
Meaning that when they come back to it weeks later,
A good chunk likely won’t be there anymore.
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So how do you get information into your long-term memory?
Memorisation is often overcomplicated.
The way to get content into your long-term memory is by going over it in short-sharp bursts,
More frequently,
And then progressively spacing out the regularity that the content is repeated.
Instead of seeing memorisation as just another revision session at the desk,
It needs to be considered as a completely different entity.
Memorisation happens outside of the timetable.
And this is where a student, often desperately, needs their parent’s help.
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As memorisation is happening in addition to their ‘revision timetable’ (I realise some students won’t be following a revision timetable),
It could well be considered as a less formal,
Less consistent,
Exercise.
Which therefore means it is often ‘forgotten.’
Memorisation needs to be made as frictionless as possible by leaving notes in opportune places around the house.
This is something I strongly believe in.
Rather than a student’s notes residing in a drawer,
Out of sight out of mind,
We need notes scattered around the house in opportune places.
On the coffee table,
In the car,
By their tooth brush,
You get the idea.
I know this goes against a lot of individual’s home aesthetic,
But I know that doing this for a relatively short period of time will make such a difference.
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There are ways to elevate this practice.
- A record can be kept of when a student has gone over a sub-topic and how well they did which then determines when the next repetition will be.
- You can ‘interleave’ going over one sub-topic with going over a completely different sub-topic from a different subject to increase the ‘desirable difficulty’ level of the exercise.
But ultimately if we can just change the mindset from going over notes at their desk as part of a normal revision session,
To going over notes far more frequently in shorter bursts,
They’ll be off to a winner.
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I hope you all have a great week ahead,
Best wishes,
Joel
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P.S This is a newsletter about the first step in the memorisation process – Making Notes - https://joelfreedman.substack.com/p/mum-nothing-is-sticking-in-my-head