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| [a] Entrance RF |
As we move toward the conclusion to this long introduction, we might remember what I wrote on Tuesday. You see, Jimbo already has a deeply nuanced sense of how historiographical orientation works. It is just that he understands subtlety much better with regard to professional football than with Japanese historiography. And here's another clue. Jimbo is much more invested in the success, failures, and even multiple interpretations of his home state Minnesota Vikings than he is in the emperor of Japan, the reign of the Sun King, or even in the arguments about the actions of northern generals during the first two years of the (American) Civil War. For the latter, he reads his books and takes his notes. There is little passion, though. It is as though it is all school to him.
It is quite otherwise with his Minnesota Vikings. That is personal...and passionate.
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| [b] Multiple RF |
When he hears critical commentary about his team, he immediately tenses, reflects warily (he is a smart and discerning guy; there is no "my team right or wrong" in ol' Jimbo), and answers with his own perspective. He "reads" the orientation of the criticism and shapes his own commentary in response. He uses multiple "sources" for his arguments, and he is adept at "seeing through" the happy positivism of Bears and Packers fans.
This is child's play for Jimbo. Handling Packers' fans is something he has been doing since he was, well, a child. He can't say the same for Japanese history.
Still, Jimbo has a top-notch mind (perhaps even a top-knot one), and the quizzes will help him to bridge the gap when it comes to studying history. Slowly, Bud Grant and the Meiji Emperor will begin to cohere in his thinking, allowing him to transfer his formidable skills to new areas that, at least initially, are less viscerally passionate for him. He might even start to make comparisons between Mike Tice and the Taishō emperor, although this might be too great a stretch...and possibly a little too mean.
The purpose of my quizzes, in short, is to bring "life" and "school" just a little bit closer.
A while ago, I heard an interesting little tidbit about testing. It seems that frequent testing (and even testing oneself) carves new neural pathways—it is a way to embed what we have learned in bits and fragments into long-term memory. I doubt that you consider this "new," but really think about it. If we have various ways of etching things into our short-term memory, how do we make the leap so that we will actually remember things for a long time? Every teacher (and student) wants to avoid that school room debacle known as "memorizing for the test." No one gains from a student who memorizes a list, spits it back, and forgets it three hours later. No one.
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| [c] Enhancement RF |
And if you are a teacher, you don't want to be on the other end of the ubiquitous "I forgot it all five minutes after it was over" anecdote.
My own goal is to have large swaths of information ready to be called upon when a student reads, say, a newspaper article about Japan (or social theory...or whatever I am teaching) in the future. I want a combination of detail (chronology, geography, events, and people) that is so rich that any article—even about plastic food factories or local corruption—calls to mind whole armfuls of information that makes my former student understand the news with more subtlety than most readers ever could. In turn, the new information from the article makes her even stronger, and more likely to interpret wisely in the future. This is a virtuous cycle of learning that needs to be cemented in twenty-first century academic work.
Quizzes enhance it.
Let me explain.
To begin, I ask very similar geography and chronology questions all term long. By the fifteenth (or twenty-fifth) time that students are asked for the location of Lake Biwa or the Sea of Okhotsk, they pretty much have it down. It is no longer a matter of thinking or reflecting. They just know, and in almost precisely the same way that they know that 9 x 7 = 63. They don't even have to pause before they give the answer. It's just there.
The same goes for the traditional dates of Japanese historiography. A good student can spout off "1185-1333" like a mnemonic rocket when asked for the (traditional) dates of the Kamakura period. That kind of repetition makes the basic information child's play. It also plays another role, though. By making students repeat the core information several tens of times, it actually opens up space to challenge the certainty about such easily memorizable terms. Instead of making students into relentlessly boring memorization machines, it gives them such a certain sense of the traditional dates that we can start to poke and prod them, making students realize that almost everything easy to memorize ("1776!," "1789!," "1868!"—trust me) is probably flawed.
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| [d] Period RF |
In short, the very powers of neural plasticity allow students to understand the real strength behind historical narratives in a way that should make college professors take notice. Once they have the absolute certainty about easily memorizable traditional dates, we have the luxury of getting to the heart of the matter(s). We can start considering dates such as 1150-ish for the beginnings of the Kamakura political order. If you know your Japanese economic sources well enough, you could even make a case for 750-ish for the beginnings of the "period."
That stuff isn't easy to memorize, is it?
Nope. Not at all...and that is precisely the point of quizzes. They allow me to ingrain "times table"-style certainty with the traditional information, but also to develop subtle skills about the much more nuanced tidbits of historical knowledge that only a fine student of the past ever could know. In short, it allows me to "check up" and to make students "study for the test" and truly integrate the principals of historical knowledge necessary to doing the very highest levels of interpretation possible.
Quizzes allow me to do all of that. I'll finish the explanation tomorrow.
Good stuff.
This is one part of a multi-post introduction. Click below for the other posts:
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| [e] Integrated RF |
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