When Learning, Quantity Can Lead to Quality
Education gets a bad rap when envisioned as one teacher lecturing rows and rows of passive students. The learning process involves so much more than that. Most of us, whether we’re talking about academics, arts, or sports, learn by doing. In fact, in order to learn most quickly, we should increase our active practice. Eric Scott, CEO of Dolphin Micro Custom Software, shared an insightful educational fable on Quora a few years ago: ******* A pottery teacher split her class into two halves. To the first half she said, “You will spend the semester studying pottery, planning, designing, and creating your perfect pot. At the end of the semester, there will be a competition to see who’s pot is the best”. To the other half she said, “You will spend your semester making lots of pots. Your grade will be based on the number of completed pots you finish. At…
Don’t Be Wrong About What You’re Getting Right
Good SAT and ACT prep demands review of everything… even questions you’ve answered correctly. I’ll never forget one of my first times tutoring in a public library. I was sitting at a small table in a spacious “learning zone” in the library’s basement. It was prime time tutoring hour––right after school in the middle of the week––so mine wasn’t the only session happening down there. As I worked with my student, I couldn’t help but see and overhear the other sessions around me. And boy, were they shocking. At another small circular table against the wall, a tutor sat across from her student––she was huddled behind a laptop, and he was buried in his SAT book. She was typing away as he finished a set of math problems. At some point, he muttered, “Done.” She peeked tentatively over her laptop screen, craned her neck forward to look at his answers,…
Stop Saying “I’m Bad at Math”
Many students become convinced somewhere along the line that they are “bad at math,” or that their brain isn’t wired for math. In some cases it is just a matter of finding the subject uninteresting. But, at its worst, this self-definition can have deep impacts on a student’s ability to achieve. Certainly, skills in all areas differ from person to person—-very few of us are going to win a Fields Medal—-but how much truth is there to the idea that otherwise talented students are inherently “bad at math?” Well, it turns out that the typical student is about as bad at math as they are willing to be. Of course, students vary widely in their math aptitude, including grades in their math courses and scores on their standardized tests. Surely, that implies something about math ability, but research is showing math aptitude may have a lot more to do with…
Embracing Mistakes for Bigger Brains… and Test Scores
When did making mistakes become so popular? When I was growing up, I learned that the road to success was built on, well, successes. Now, entrepreneurs are exhorted to fail faster while students are being given permission to make mistakes as a natural part of learning. What changed? Actually, for those in the know, nothing about the educational value of mistakes has changed; we’ve just caught up to the experts. Thomas J. Watson Jr. of IBM fame knew the score back in 1961: Would you like me to give you a formula for… success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all… you can be discouraged by failure — or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that’s where you’ll find success. On the far…