So, I was reading random things online and stumbled upon this little story and it made me think. Why do we sometimes drive home from work or play basketball or fill out a form and have so little memory of doing it? Is our memory really that bad?
No, the story that I linked to above shows that when we see familiar pictures, it is almost like the visual center of our brain goes into standby mode and works from previous experience. In computer terms, it would be like the Windows pre-fetch which puts commonly used files in an area of memory that runs faster so the things you do run faster than things you do more rarely.
My thought was this: If the visual center of our brain does this, is there any other part of our brain that works similarly? Does a trained basketball player think less when shooting the ball at his home court since he has performed this action so many times before? Does a racecar driver go faster on a familiar course because he doesn’t have to take so long to think about the dynamics of each corner?
If that is true, it does lend justification to the old adage of practice makes perfect and it provides the reason for people getting better with repetition. They stop thinking about what they are doing since they already know the cause and effect.
You might be thinking: Great captain obvious, we already knew that, so what?
If you consider the human mind in that way, then this idea should be used when designing educational systems. Instead of having a high school basketball court be a smaller size than a professional one, they should all be the same size and use the same rules and as close to the same equipment as the professional ones (if we are to assume that the goal of high school basketball is to educate the players in the sport so that they can work as pro players).
Schools should teach what is current to the industry and accelerate past the basics and on to the practical education of students. I am not saying that we should just dump students into real world situations and let them sink or swim, but a little more practical realism would go a long way toward preparing our students for the work life that they will follow.
For one, they should get used to the schedule of the adult employed worker. They should be in school from 8 or 9 AM to 5 or 6 PM (as these are very common work hours) and be given an hour of free time around noon to eat or do work or whatever and an extra 2 15 minutes breaks throughout the day (again common work conditions).
Block schedules should also be implemented to teach students to keep track of their time in a frame of reference longer than 1 day. In the real work world you might have weekly meetings, daily meetings, Monday-Friday meetings or just about any other combinations. Classes should reflect this and should be constructed to reflect common workplace activities. For example, a common practice is a scrum where team members go over what they have worked on and what they will be working on. This can be done via a home-room system or something similar where you have to go and make some basic communications with an assigned group of peers to establish that concept of being accountable for your work getting done on a more immediate fashion than quarter or semester grades.
I personally think that reorganizing schools to be more like the real world will increase motivation of students and generally yield better results as a lot of the troublemaking that comes from students is a direct cause of lack of stimulation and a busy student won’t have as much time to go get into trouble.
Rigor should also be stressed, although we should not crush students under mountains of work unless it is to show that sometimes projects turn out to have heavy workloads.
I think that we should consider the fact that our students might be on auto-pilot and see what we can do to give them more unexpected stimuli to keep them engaged and increase the value of our educational system.
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