Memory Tips & The Beauty in History

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Can you remember a poem that you learned in Elementary School? Or a Bible verse from Sunday School? How about that speech you did in 9th Grade History class? 

Today I’m going to mix things up and start us off with our segment on the GOOD as I talk about some helpful habits to assist you and your students in memorizing material or practicing physical skills. Following that, I have an intriguing conversation with David Mathwin, the Dean of Students and History teacher at Ad Fontes Academy in Centreville, Virginia, the place where I first heard and learned about Classical Education. 

For our TRUE and BEAUTIFUL segments, Dave will share with us his philosophy on teaching and how he uses elements of BEAUTY to inspire and instill in his students the TRUTHS of History and life. So put your thinking caps on and let’s delve in!

Our Favorite Resources:

• Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel
• Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning  by James Lang
• Home Education Series Bundle by Charlotte Mason
• The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis: A Commentary by Matthieu Pageau
• A Study of History, Volume 1: Abridgement of Vol. 1-6 by Arnold Toynbee
• The Histories by Polybius
• The Histories by Herodotus

 If you restudy something after failing to recall it, you actually learn it better than if you had not tried to recall it. The effort of retrieving knowledge or skills strengthens its staying power and your ability to recall it in the future. - Make It Stick, p. 203

. . . [it is often assumed that] a baseball player who practices batting by swinging at fifteen fastballs, then at fifteen curveballs, and then at fifteen change-ups will perform better than the player who mixes it up. But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes the better hitter." - Make It Stick, p. 206

Mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and improves your success in a later test or in real-world settings where you must discern the kind of problem you're trying to solve in order to apply the correct solution."  - Make It Stick, pp. 206-207

Here, too, is a subject which should be to the child an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas, should enrich the chambers of his House Beautiful with a thousand tableaux, pathetic and heroic, and should form in him, insensibly, principles whereby he will hereafter judge of the behavior of nations, and will rule his own conduct as one of a nation. This is what the study of history should do for the child. . . - Charlotte Mason, Volume 1: Home Education, p. 279

Next in order to religious knowledge, history is the pivot upon which our curriculum turns. History is the rich pasture of the mind – which increases upon the knowledge of men and events and, more than all, upon the sense of nationhood . . .” - Charlotte Mason, Volume 6: A Philosophy of Education, p. 273

How greatly is the reading of histories to be esteemed, which is able to furnish us with more examples in one day, than the whole course of the longest life of any man is able to do. Insomuch that they which exercise themselves in reading as they ought to do, although they be but young, become such in respect of understanding of the affairs of this world, as if they were old and gray headed and of long experience. Yea, though they never have removed out of their houses, yet are they advertised, informed and satisfied of all things in the world.  - Jacques Amyot via Charlotte Mason, Volume 6: A Philosophy of Education, pp. 273-274)

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true.  - Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p. 31

. . . beauty is a starting place for education. - Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, p. 31 

Half of the teaching one hears and sees is more or less obtrusive. The oral lesson and the lecture, with their accompanying notes, give very little scope for the establishment of relations with great minds and various minds . . . . The art of standing aside to let a child develop the relations proper to him is the fine art of education . . .” - Charlotte Mason, Volume 3: School Education, p. 66-67

Children have other ways of expressing the conceptions that fill them when they are duly fed. They play at their history lessons, dress up, make tableaux, act scenes; or they have a stage, and their dolls act, while they paint the scenery and speak the speeches. There is no end to the modes of expression children find when there is anything in them to express. The mistake we make is to suppose that imagination is fed by nature, or that it works on the insipid diet of children’s story-books. Let a child have the meat he requires in his history readings, and in the literature which naturally gathers round this history, and imagination will bestir itself without any help of ours; the child will live out in detail a thousand scenes of which he only gets the merest hint.  - Charlotte Mason, Volume 1: Home Education, p. 294-295

. . . give a child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information . . . - Charlotte Mason, Volume 1: Home Education, p. 174

1. Make flashcards or use an online program like Quizlet or X-tra Math to practice vocabulary or facts. Incorporate interleaving and space out your study times.
2. Think about a game you can implement in your classroom that will bring your subject to life for the students.
3. How can you practice saying less or masterly inactivity in the classroom? What can you replace some of your lectures with?