From birth, our memory begins to operate and operates non-stop throughout our lives. And from a certain age, everyone remembers everything or almost everything that happened to him in life and that mattered to his life.
Memory is not something specially schooled. All people have a memory, even if they have never been to school or read a single book. This is involuntary memory. We remember what is important to us without any effort, without any memorization, without any work.
At school, it is necessary to memorize many things that will not be remembered by itself: we need volitional memory, memory under compulsion, we need special efforts, memorization work. What should these efforts be? What to do?
One thing is absolutely clear: one must act only in accordance with the nature of memory. Any attempt to act against nature will eventually only lead to sighing and complaining, «I have a bad memory.» But it’s ridiculous to plant a tree upside down and then complain about bad soil!
Involuntary memory
Let us try to investigate the nature of involuntary memory, to notice its laws, in order to transfer these laws to volitional memory.
Let’s start, as always, with the most obvious: we easily and naturally remember what we really need. The suggestion to memorize the schedule of electric trains from the Belorussky railway station will seem almost a mockery, and we will need several hours of exhausting work to memorize a column of numbers that mean nothing to us. But imagine that you really need to get on the train in the evening, arrive at the station on time, and you will instantly remember the hours and minutes of train departure. A friend’s phone is remembered immediately, a random phone immediately flies out of his head. And if a man tells a girl that he is not to blame for not coming on a date, because he just forgot about him, then the girl can draw a completely logical conclusion: they do not like her. Favorite is not forgotten.
Our memory is arranged in such a way that it itself retains everything that is interesting to us, important, necessary for life, and it is not difficult to understand why it is so arranged. Otherwise, the head would be littered with thousands of unnecessary things. Memory holds only what you need!
To teach without trying to learn, to teach without purpose, without desire, is an empty occupation, a stupid waste of time and effort. Memory resists with all its might, it does not need what we learn — but we hammer in, hammer in … Could there be a more stupid way to practice?
This has also been proven in the experiments of psychologists. Subjects were asked to memorize a series of nonsense syllables and recorded how many repetitions it took. Then they tried to somehow interest them in the work: they arranged a competition or promised a reward. And people with the same memory needed almost half as many repetitions to memorize the same meaningless syllables.
Interestingly, many guys discovered this law through their experience and learned how to use it. They tried to mentally put themselves in a position in which today’s lesson is extremely necessary — and their memory sharpened immediately, and it immediately became easier and more interesting to learn even the most hated lesson!
Here is the story of Lera Troyak, who lives at Varfolomeevka station, Primorsky Krai:
«My name is Lera. I’m in eighth grade. The most boring subject for me is anatomy. Maybe not so boring as disgusting. You teach it and do not believe that you consist of everything that is written there. It became especially disgusting when the teacher cut off the frog’s head. I don’t even know how to rate this. Still, in order to cut off an innocent frog’s head to the laughter of heartless boys, one must be the most heartless. I then cried. After all, scientists, if they did this experiment, then only benefit from it, and we read about the experiment in a textbook, why else show it? Don’t we believe? And I got a C in anatomy. But then I read about “Teaching with Passion” and thought: maybe there is such a way that I could also like anatomy?
I thought: is this item of great benefit? And I decided: very big — after all, our doctors without anatomy could not cure people, they would not know where a person has a heart, where are the lungs. I imagined that my friend and I got lost in the taiga and she broke her leg, but I did not read the paragraph where it was written about this, and Luda remained a cripple. I inspired it so much that I was even frightened, and I almost learned this paragraph by heart and one more extra one (just in case). Then she went to her friend and did the task indicated in the textbook, trained on Luda to provide first aid. I didn’t even know before that it was possible to teach a lesson so interestingly. We found old magazines and read all the articles about fractures, dislocations and sprains, and then bandaged each other until the evening. Yesterday I got an A and I think that my experience was a success. Because I’m learning anatomy again today, although I know that they won’t ask me tomorrow. Now I want to always learn all subjects like this. What if you don’t learn how to read a map, and you need it at the moment, what if a foreigner comes up to you, and you don’t know English, and the Englishman will tell you everywhere how stupid people are in the Soviet Union: after all, one person judges a whole team … Teaching with passion! Troyak Valery.
And Vera Gubina from the village of Oktyabrsky, Sverdlovsk region, even learned to … “turn” into different people, depending on the subject:
“If I teach chemistry or physics, I am a chemist or physicist, but no one believes in my discoveries. And I need to prove, convince people. What if I’m wrong? I check my work again and again. If the decision is correct, I’m glad that everything is fine. When you study algebra or geometry, you can come up with many activities here: a designer (different for every day: an aircraft designer, a spaceship designer, etc.), a mathematician, an architect, and many more.
And here I am, deciding. We need to develop a new aircraft model, but for this we need to do a lot of calculations and solve problems.
I study zoology — I’m a doctor. I need to know the structure of all living beings, so that later I can conduct experiments on them that will help defeat human diseases. Or I am a biologist and I want to benefit humanity.
And so you can find an approach to each subject. Then everything that you learn will seem interesting, new and, most importantly, necessary. All these transformations help me a lot.”
Then this smart girl talks quite seriously — apparently, her experiments were not in vain and she learned to anticipate possible objections. Remarkable property! Vera Gubina says:
“Perhaps someone will say that such a serious matter as teaching has turned into a game. I think he will be wrong. After all, turning, the student receives strong knowledge. He is interested. He wants to study. And after all, he can choose a profession to his liking. He will go through a lot of professions. And one he likes the most. After all, these transformations helped me become interested in teaching, and I already know who I will be. I will be a civil engineer. Goodbye!»
Many guys, especially girls, when they do their homework, «turn» into teachers. Tanya Babiy from Yalta tells a lesson to her younger sister’s dolls, and then asks them:
“I called each student and asked a question on the topic, and then, already in the role of the “student” who answered, I answered the question. After interviewing all the students, I read all the homework again (out loud), once again answered all the questions at the end of the text and closed the textbook.
And Nadya Makhova from the village of Sverdlov, Moscow Region, even made a class magazine, wrote a class list alphabetically in it and “began to do a survey (that is, ask herself). For each answer I put the corresponding mark. So Nadia worked with varying degrees of success for several days, until she discovered:
“Earlier, this geography seemed like hard labor to me, but now, when I come home from school, I just want to do my homework faster and sit down for geography. And why? Yes, because when you do it like that, you think more that you are a teacher, not a student, and it becomes interesting to yourself … I will keep this magazine for a whole year so that I don’t lose my interest in geography again.
Both Lera, and Vera, and Nadia understood the first and main natural property of memory: it easily absorbs what a person needs, and does not want to absorb unnecessary things. Therefore, before starting a lesson, one must in any way convince oneself that it is urgently needed. And if for this you need to mentally “turn into” even a sea monster, do not be shy, “turn into”!
And later, when we get carried away with the subject and begin to understand it a little, all these transformations will become unnecessary, because we will begin to understand the logic of the subject itself, the order of topics, sections, chapters and paragraphs, and we will need to learn to study the subject itself, and memory ours will work flawlessly.