Here are a couple of items currently on my night table. I think they're worth buying. (Or stop by my office and I'll lend you a copy...IF you promise to give it back!)
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
Peter C. Brown, Henry L Roediger III, and Mark A McDaniel
Harvard University Press, 2014
I am a huge devotee of the counter-intuitive. During our resident teaching conferences I like to ask questions like this: “When evaluating a young child with fever of unknown source, should you be more reassured when Tylenol reduces the fever than when it doesn't ?” (The right answer, by the way, is “no”). Scientific investigations that merely confirm what most people would guess are rather boring, and generally speaking less than influential on clinical practice. It is the startling study result that grabs us.
In that spirit, Brown and colleagues have put together an engaging tour of learning theory. The sub-title could have been “Everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong.” Who would quibble with any of these truisms… that it is helpful to reread the textbook chapter (or your notes) before a test… that making learning easy and fun also makes it more effective…that when learning math, it’s best to really nail down one skill before moving onto the next….or that when memorizing, drilling the same material over and over is the ticket, because practice makes perfect?
According to the authors, each of these tropes is simply myth.
To the contrary, studies tell us that a state of moderate performance anxiety consolidates learning more effectively than a state of ease. This is why listening to a speaker from the back row of the lecture hall transfers far less information than case-based learning (and why “lecturing” is forbidden at the Zucker/Northwell School of Medicine). Additionally, education science tells us that while combining disparate skills in active problem solving may seem more chaotic than tackling one new discipline at a time (Anatomy, Physiology, Pharmacology), the former gets objectively better results including more retention of new knowledge and greater competence in applying that knowledge in context.
Among the tenets of education at Zucker is that “assessment drives learning.” In a sense, this is the counterpoint to those who oppose too much testing, complaining that it encourages “teaching to the test” and stifles creativity. Once again, the evidence says otherwise. In well-conducted comparative studies, students who were subjected to low stakes testing throughout a course (the pop quiz) ended up performing significantly better in the final exam than a comparison group whose experience was the same in all other respects.
The authors note that, when asked, even highly motivated students don’t necessarily prefer the more effective methodologies. It seem that introspection doesn’t always provide the best answers when it comes to our own psychology, which is to say that the Socratic maxim “know thyself” is easier said than done.
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Leaves of Grass
The First Edition - 1855
Walt Whitman
Barnes and Noble Books, 1997
A point of clarification. I’m not actually reading Leaves of Grass for the first time. Rather, I’ve never stopped reading it since I was 21 and took an upper level course in the American Transcendentalist movement focusing as one must on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (author of “Self-reliance” and so many other essays); Henry David Thoreau (“Walden”) and, of course, the greatest American poet of all time and self-stylized bard of the New World, Walt Whitman.
Pop quiz: how many collections of poems did Whitman write? Oddly, the answer is just one. This one. Leaves of Grass, first self-published in 1851, grew over four decades from a thin folio of a dozen poems to over 400. The first poem (in almost every sense) is “Song of Myself”. It is the gateway, not only to this organic collection, but to Walt Whitman, a mythologic figure wholly created by Walter Whitman: poet, Civil War orderly, newspaper publisher and (as all residents of our Town should be required to know) Huntingtonian. Beyond that, it is a gateway to the 19th century movement known as Transcendentalism. When first published, Leaves of Grass drew little critical attention, except from those commentators who derided Whitman’s meandering style and loose poetical structures. Were it not for the fact that a copy arrived in the hands of the deeply respected Emerson, Whitman may never have achieved an audience. Most were nevertheless baffled by the elder’s effusive praise of the new poet and his claim that this was an original, authentic, sinewy and quintessentially American voice.
What were the Transcendentalists trying to say, exactly? Theirs was a protest movement, against European academics and tastes, against philosophies and aesthetic constructs that put Man at arm’s length from the natural world and from personal experience. Transcendentalism was an American romantic movement that eschewed “authority” in favor of personal connection with nature, and unmediated judgments of what is beautiful and good and true. It is no wonder then that Emerson was thunderstruck from the first lines of Whitman’s first work, “Song of Myself”…
I sing myself
And celebrate myself
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease…observing a spear of summer grass.
In a world mediated not so much by academic authority or social convention as by Instagram and Twitter, the idea of stripping away the extraneous to achieve true communion, direct experience and self-knowledge seems as topical, and as attractive, as ever.
