reading on auto pilot

Teri leaves this account of 'nonconscious reading':

I have wondered a bit on this topic, particularly because I do a WHOLE LOT of reading aloud to the kids and it's always curious to me what my mind can get away with while I'm reading.

I was a bit spooked one day to realize that ... I could be thinking about something else completely and still be chugging along, and the kids didn't notice a thing. Now, I had no idea what I'd been reading, and I obviously couldn't read with much animation or emphasis or expression, but it was going in the eyes, through the brain and out the mouth without disrupting the any of the other thoughts I was having.

This actually is quite handy, though, because it allows me to read ahead while I am reading so I can edit "on the fly" fairly smoothly.

Basal ganglia strike again...

Magister Green on guerilla teaching

re: memorization is a dirty word, Magister Green offers this advice:

I have found that using "automaticity" in place of "memorization" lets me get around the stigma of the latter word while retaining its basic meaning. And "automaticity" sounds cool, so people don't press.

Guerrilla teaching forever!

Guerrilla teaching or marketing --- !

Yerkes Dodson strikes again

THE Boston Red Sox haven’t given their fans much to cheer about this summer so we’ve had to take our pleasure where we could find it, for example, by watching Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees struggle to hit his 600th career home run — again and again and again.

Rodriguez hit his 599th home run on July 22, bringing himself and his fans to the brink of celebration. And then, for 12 long days, he not only failed to drive the ball out of the park and into the history books, he also went hitless for 17 consecutive at-bats. This wasn’t the first time Rodriguez has stood at the precipice, and then stood there some more: after hitting his 499th home run in 2007, he came to the plate an excruciating 28 times before finally hitting his 500th.

What made all this so frustrating for New Yorkers (and so delicious for Bostonians) was that everyone felt certain that Rodriguez would have slammed several homers in the past two weeks if only they hadn’t mattered so much. Watching him struggle to break the numerical barrier was like watching a man frozen with fear on the last step of a tall ladder: we knew, and he knew, that the last step was exactly the same as all the steps before it — so why couldn’t he just take it?

One of the ironies of human psychology is that desperately wanting something can make attaining that thing all the more difficult. When stakes go up, performance often goes down. In one study, subjects practiced sinking a putt and got better as they went along — better, that is, until the experimenter offered them a cash reward for their next shot, at which point their performance took a nosedive.

This is because we pay close attention to what we’re doing when what we’re doing matters, and though close attention is helpful when our task is novel or complex, it is positively destructive when our task is simple and well practiced. Golfers in another study were told either to take their time and think about their stroke or to step up and swing as quickly as possible. Although novice golfers did better when they took their time, expert golfers did worse.

The lesson from the laboratory is clear: thinking about tasks that don’t require thought isn’t just pointless, it’s debilitating. It may be wise to watch our fingers when we’re doing surgery or shaving the family dog, but not when we’re driving or typing, because once our brains learn to do something automatically they don’t appreciate interference. The moment we start thinking about when to step on the clutch or hit the alt key, our once-seamless performance becomes slow, clumsy or impossible.


The Weight at the Plate
by Daniel Gilbert
Published: August 4, 2010

Yerkes Dodson at Wikipedia
THE RELATION OF STRENGTH OF STIMULUS TO RAPIDITY OF HABIT-FORMATION
Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson (1908)
First published in Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, 459-482.

Why Memorize the Math Facts?

This is from Hoagies' Gifted Pages, and was written by Aimee Yermish, Educational Consultant

Why Memorize Math Facts?

I think there's a basic problem here that we as the parents of gifted children must come to terms with. Not all useful learning is intrinsically interesting. Our kids have a right not to be bored in that they should not be held down, but they do not have a right not to be bored such that they have a right to skip anything that isn't fun to learn. Math facts are boring. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that our precious children who don't tolerate boredom well shouldn't have to learn them. We have to teach our kids the difference between being bored because you are being taught something you have already mastered and being bored because the work is intrinsically boring but still important. We can turn our fertile brains towards making the practice fun and interesting, if we don't tolerate boredom well, but we don't get to just declare ourselves to be so brilliant that no one should ever make us do anything we don't feel like doing.

From AutoSkill, a provider of software (not an endorsement -- haven't yet looked into the products)

Why Automaticity in Math Facts?

The notion is that the mental effort involved in figuring our facts tends to disrupt thinking about the problems in which the facts are being used. Some of the argument of this information-processing dilemma was developed by analogy to reading, where difficulty with the process of simply decoding the words has the effect of disrupting comprehension of the message. Gersten and Chard illuminated the analogy between reading and math rather explicitly:

"Researchers explored the devastating effects of the lack of automaticity in several ways. Essentially they argued that the human mind has a limited capacity to process information, and if too much energy goes into figuring out what 9 plus 8 equals, little is left over to understand the concepts underlying multi-digit subtraction, long division, or complex multiplication (1999, p.21)."...Practice is required to develop automaticity with math facts.

"The importance of drill on components [such as math facts] is that the drilled material may become sufficiently over-learned to free up cognitive resources and attention. These cognitive resources may then be allocated to other aspects of performance, such as more complex operations like carrying and borrowing, and to self-monitoring and control (Goldman & Pellegrino, 1986. 134)."

I have a new academic therapy client, a delightful 4th grade boy on the spectrum. For various reasons, he missed a lot of 1st and 2nd grade. Academically, arithmetic is his weakest link. As nearly as I can determine, the only math facts he has to automaticity are adding and subtracting 0, 1, and 2 for even numbers, and multiplying by 1 and 2 for even numbers. Everything else requires him to actually do the calculation in his head or worse yet, his fingers. Calculation--> frustration--> anxiety--> decreased cognitive ability--> frustration--> anxiety--> decreased cognitive ability ...

I have three challenges: convincing him that putting the work in to getting to automaticity is going to be worth it, finding the methods that work most efficiently for him (flash cards aren't it), and keeping his anxiety low enough that he can learn.

Any and all suggests for the three challenges gratefully accepted.

fresh horses

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

A.N. Whitehead, An introduction to mathematics, 1911 New York: Holt, p. 41

He makes this observation while discussing mathematical symbolism:

One very important property for symbolism to possess is that it should be concise, so as to be visible at one glance of the eye and to be rapidly written.