Ch. 6 QtC

Especially during the Teacher Project today, I realized how false of an idea I have had about how students will learn from me. I can present information in a certain way, but that is not necessarily the same way they will retain that information (if they even do at all!)  In fact, I will have to work to create connections so that the information I present my student is not lost but rather transported from short to long term (or the “barn”). With every piece of new information I present, my students will be encoding it and changing it depending on other stimulants.  If I can make something meaningful and of interest to a student, it is much more likely that they will remember it in the way I want them to.  A good example is the name exercise given to us—I will probably always remember how to pronounce “Sohn” because of the phrase “can’t make it to the Phone leave your message at the Tone.”  As an English teacher, I hope to be able to connect much of what we discuss in class to the real-life situations of my students.  If I can convince my students that the feud between the Mercutios and the Tybalts is not so far from their own situation, they will probably never forget the story line and meaning of Romeo and Juliet. Another effective way to aid in the storage of information in long-term memory I could use is making connections between new knowledge and prior knowledge. I want to be on the same page as the English teachers in different grades so that I can be familiar with what my students should have talked about last year. Ideally, I would also like to be on the same page as teachers across different subject areas so that I would be able to make connections between, for example, Spanish and English grammatical functions or History and literature! In the absence of prior knowledge, I will have to work extra hard to offer mnemonic devices or some other way of remembering trite information. Once I put in my part as a teacher, the rest is up to the students. Ultimately, I want my students to have the skills necessary to do well on assessments testing both recall and recognition.