Should we as a society include memory techniques in the school curriculum?
If so, at what age?
What techniques should be taught?
(More specifically)
Imagine memory sport was going to be introduced in the public school system. The hypothesis being that it would help empower kids to learn by improving mental organizational skills, encode information more quickly, and perhaps even make learning more creative and fun instead of by repetition. (Do you agree?)
I also believe that the systems taught should be very adaptable for the kids to customize themselves and use in different classes/areas of their lives. (Do you agree?)
I’m assuming that for instance it makes a lot more sense to teach kids a PAO, or even a PO system instead of a 2-card system?
Maybe cards doesn’t make sense, and instead we should stick only to numbers?
I’d love to have a discussion around the merits of this. If there are any posts already, let me know.
I guess the issue already starts with teachers having to teach things that they don’t use themselves. Secondly, if you don’t tie it directly to the subject but rather use memory sports, you are not really showing the usefulness of the method.
It’s a bit like arguing that we should teach Latin in school because then students will have an easier time learning French, Spanish, etc. If all you do is translating 2,000 old texts, you’re not really showing that connection to the students.
I feel this is how this sport will get its due importance. If propagated from the grassroot level , that is the schools I think we contribute a lot back to the society.
We not only make learning easy for kids but also help them utilize the potential of their brain to a much higher capacity.
I think it can be introduced at the lower levels like kindergarten / Montessori . Its just that kids of this age group are to be handled differently than their elder counterparts. And the advanced techniques , I believe age of 7 plus is ideal.
I am just starting on learning these methods that use ‘observation-association-location-imagination’ stories/journeys to encode words/ideas to memory.
I am also working at teaching these to my 12 year old daughter. So far we have worked on the concept of each of the above, and have decided that ‘weird’ associations are better than ‘pain/violence’ association. We have also memorized the ‘roads of thought’ as put forth by Ernest Wood.
It is my opinion that to make these have usefulness and meaning, the place to start is in vocabulary-definitions in both the primary language and in a second language. Memorizing for the sake of memorizing doesn’t make sense to me.
I think the 4th grade would be a great age to introduce these concepts, along with learning to type.
I sometimes think our society is afraid of letting ‘weird imagination’ loose on kids to recall things.
How many here would be willing to give once or twice a year, free 4 hour mini intro sessions to students? The school districts aren’t going to do it in my opinion.
In a way, it already is. PEMDAS, mind mapping, visualization, linking, and many more are all forms of mnemonics that are taught in schools.
The bottom line is wondering if something you are adding to the curriculum is worth adding, and in the case of almost any sport the answer is no. The skills needed for that sport can be added, but the sport itself will generally not be of use.
If you ask me, there is one main goal to school. The encouragement and guidance of development in children so they can grow up to be functioning adults who can fulfil a benefitial role to society. Mnemonics can be a useful part of this, memory sports do not.
I do not, at least not for schools around here. It might be different in other countries.
Mnemonics can have their place, and they already do. Memory sports does not. It is very similar to how running as a movement is important, but it is not important for children to be able to run a marathon or a 4-minute mile. If they like running, they will pick that up. If they don’t, they will do other things.
As for making learning creative and fun, there have been huge steps in that. Though on the subject of technology. Memory sports is far from the only way to make education less repetitional.
That brings me back to the goal of education. We no longer live in a memory society, we live in a digital society. If I had to choose, I would much rather pick education that reaches out to the digital world, because that is what the world is today.
I do not.
Children are eager to learn, but they are also great at figuring things out. Sure you can be super enthousiastic about mnemonics and the many years you spend perfecting your craft. Let me tell you, a child who has just learned to write will be able to memorize way more through that skill than you could do with your memory. The memory made by the child is just external.
Teaching systems that take years to build will need some absolute great argumentation as to why we should teach them. Why is it so important to internalize mnemonic processes if an external process is way more effective?
The time is also a big thing here. All time spend on A means less time for B, and thus you have to wonder about what is more important. I hate to break it to you, but memory sports is not important.
While your statement is true, in that numbers are more important than cards in daily life, I do want to ask you why we should teach this? The only number I had to memorize as a kid was my parents’ phone number.
Sure you might say that the skill of PAO benefits creative thinking and compartimentazation of information, but other things like reading and art also do this.
Are we?
Lets tackle the first bit. Learning made easy. Mnemonics does this, memory sports does not. Memory Sports is build on the idea of internally memorizing immense sets of mostly unrelated information. This does not make learning easy. It still requires recall, it requires a lot of effort, and it requires immense preparation. We don’t make learning easy, we make it different.
Kids learn by playing, teens learn by socializing, all benefit from minor mnemonics but only a tiny minority will be turning to advanced memory techniques.
As for the potential of higher brain capacity. I have seen zero reason to believe this. It is just like those brain training games, it looks nice and you will improve on various skills,it just doesn’t magically make your whole brain improve.
Now, this all is not to say to remove mental aspects from education. Children need to do things that trigger the brain rather than the senses, but teaching memory sports is in my mind not the way.
As a wise man one said, “a man who only has a hammer will view every problem like it is a nail”, and that is a bit what I see happening. We hear stories of education failing (which it is not, other discussion though) and we look at our mnemonics-hammer to solve it. All while this might not be the right tool for the job.
If a kid wants to learn, go for it. My daughter loves it, and she is good at it. But that is her doing, not school, and it shouldnt be. If it is, why don’t we also teach children to become marathon runners? We already know running can be great for mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. The reason is simple.
You mention really important arguments and things to consider.
I do have a different opinion on two aspects though:
Memory Sports “vs.” mnemonics
When speaking for schools a decade ago, following your arguments I often tried to limit my examples of stuff that is supposed to be useful and applicable. Like you mention with running, if they enjoy it, they can pick it up as a sport. Most wont. Those still should know, that moving your body is beneficial and how to do it.
Today I changed my mind. Sticking to physical sports, of course we want to have those in schools. But why do we need to teach volley ball or field hockey (in the Netherlands at least) in schools? Few kids will pick that hobby up. Because it is more fun than just telling them to run around.
A task like memorizing a deck of cards is meaningless. But it is measurable and impressive. And I have seen many kids get super excited when they suddenly could memorize a sequence of 13 playing cards or so, when they could not have done that a few minutes ago. I do not see that, when I teach them to memorize 13 French words.
Getting a memory palace to be very useful does not take years. It does not take many months. It will take weeks for kids. Yes, neither them nor their teachers have that persistence. In the best case some teacher or invited external speaker as me spark some interest by doing a demo and having them experience for themselves that memorizing a list of 20 words is fun and easy with a memory palace. But without further stimulation that interest faints. With a memory sports programme, club, whatever in school, there is a reason to keep up with it. Not saying every kid has to follow it, just it being around and some of them having fun with memory will keep the awareness up.
The Brain aspect
I agree with “it just doesn’t magically make your whole brain improve.”
The brain training game industry totally oversold what was happening with those and I try to avoide being that way with mnemonics. Truth is, many studies till today show, that a well-designed, prolonged brain training can have effects. And believe the same about mnemonics.
Briefly: We know from many studies that cognitive engagement at a challenging level is important to become more flexible with your brain and keep your cognitive skills up and build a cognitive reserve for when ageing.
Memory is associative and so is learning. So I most disagree with replacing mnemonic training with external, digital memory aids. Yes, we should absolutely teach digital skills. We also need educators and people that are ware, that if you “google” a fact and expect to be able to google it again later, that you also reduce understanding. Also to have an idea, to be innovative, we need connections in our brains, not facts in the “cloud”. At least until AI is far enough, but if we leave that to AI instead as a genuine human skill, we might face serious issues.
I do guess we are actually not very far away on that aspect either.
Currently I am consulting and working with different ed-tech startups who use those things we know about mnemonics, learned from cognitive neuroscience, assume to know about how the brain learns in fun and evidence-based apps and learning tools. Here we do not need memory sports for achieving those goals. But memory sports is a way to make people aware of the underlying principles, aware of what is possible to achieve and also to make learning fun for some (see point 1).
Bonus point
A point I keep adding to my arguments and when speaking with teachers a bit more for the last few years: Memory Sports is a great way to achieve a growth mindset on learning.
Already from younger kids you will hear statements as “I am good at math, but not English.” “I am smart, but still not good at learning.” “I just can not memorize!”. Fixed mindset on learning. Bad.
In particular kids with learning issues can, with a patient memory sports trainer, achieve a lot by experiencing that is not true! “I can memorize that list! I did! Did you see that? I did it!”
We still mostly see gifted kids in memory sports. It rather offered as extracurricular activity for them than for those where teachers think, they need extra help with the “actual stuff” instead of something on top. I hope we will be able to change that.
My (limited) experience with teaching has shown me that kids actually can be told to just run around. Heck, I once got a group of kids to run circles by just turning on some music and telling them to run in circles as a group until the music stopped. It was a nice day.
On a more serious note, when they get older, I noticed that kids often need to be tricked into doing new things, and once they get into the puberty phase of life, they will often take the path of least resistance. The tricking often goes through ways we all probably recognize, like little acronyms (PEMDAS), mindmapping (brainstorming), or “treats” (you can bring one note with you on the test).
Now, you did mention a good point with the sports, and I definitly agree with a memory programme or club. Back in my school days we had a Magic the Gathering club as well, so why not a memory club? Mainly because these clubs (at least to my experience) are student driven, and memory sports are not as big as other interests. Sports that are added are generally picked by a group of teachers. For as far as I have seen this back-end of education, sports like volleyball and hockey are picked because they trigger a lot of points they want to focus on. They are “social sports”, with a lot of communication and teamwork involved. It would not surprise me that these are picked because few kids pick it up, that means that generally the gap between good and bad players is smaller, unlike sports like soccer.
Back to the clubs. I do think schools can work with that, especially in the age range of 12-18, but perhaps even on the later pre-teen ages. Back when I was like 13/14, we had a “unique hobbies” day at school. We had many presentations, workshops and trials on subjects like astronomy, improv, lockpicking, smaller martial arts, web design, you name it. Memory Sports could perfectly well fit in there, rather than to make it a larger aspect of the curriculum.
There are a lot of ways to trigger cognitive engagement and work with technology. Memory is simply no longer a part of that. Surely one needs a basic understanding of how to learn and the importance of knowing, but I don’t see memory sports specifically appearing on that list.
I totally agree to the importance of fixed vs growth, but it is not per se memory sports that have to get them there. Sure it can appear in education, and as I mentioned, there is no reason to totally block it from schools. But the main post was on really adding it to the curriculum, that to me would feel like a wasted effort. Teach it to a hundred students, and maybe one uses it.
I also think this is up to the kids themselves. You won’t see many of the athletic kids who prefer to do over to think, even if you offer memory sports classes.
I don’t have the background to speak from experience on this. But I believe a working understanding of mnemonics applied to education somehow could be greatly beneficial. I don’t have an evidence to support this, just a hunch. If anyone has any published articles to cite related to mnemonics and education I would certainly be interested.
I do believe that mnemonic techniques show an incredible possibility. I don’t believe the benefits of mnemonics or memory sports is that it helps us memorize words or numbers.
It may help to develop the ability to think “broadly” and creatively by expanding the types of associations in the mind. (A hunch that came to me when reading “Learning How to Learn” by Barbara Oakley)
It may help students apply natural strengths into areas they have not yet mastered. I hypothesize that by linking numbers and language through phonetic codes like the major system it may actually help students who excel in math to excel in language and vise versa at a young age, simply by allowing some of those neurons to fire together.
-One of the strongest ways to improve memory is simply to allow more and more neurons to fire together. I wonder if you could even encode memory using an understanding of sports, or the emotions of sports, or any topic or experience into other topics… I guess I believe the more association the better most likely in terms of retention, confidence, using areas of strength to improve weaknesses and by making learning more engaging.
Maybe mnemonics can improve education by making it more engaging and fun. I believe kids naturally love mnemonics and learning through story and metaphor. That is based on my time working with kids in experiential outdoor education camps. Many of the kids I worked with had learning challenges and I wonder if there is any potential to help kids with some learning challenges by using other creative means to engage them, such as mnemonics.
I think mnemonics can be “baked in” to school books even. For instance: What if instead of having page numbers on a book, it had a “road map” with a built-in method of loci so you were learning topics with built in locations. What if each topic was presented in the book by a different character. There are books that use this technique already, and video games certainly do by taking you through walkthrough with characters and different worlds and acts.
Turning things into theatre, into games, or into stories or emotions are all forms of mnemonics…
I think sometimes we force a by rote approach onto kids when it’s proven to be less effective. I even think we expect ourselves as adults to learn from some boring lecture and black and white slides for instance, instead of more creative methods (which may be considered juvenile).
It may seem silly, or unprofessional, but I think adults learn the best in this childlike way as well. I think it’s just that we’re a bit more inhibited and expected to be able to read some long document and pick out the important things. I for one would like to see that as a cultural shift.
I’m sure there have been lots of studies already done on education and mnemonics and techniques memory athletes use. I don’t have access to a pub med account, but I hope to find a way to do some more research soon and I hope that research is continued in this field so we can make decisions based on evidence instead of anecdote and cultural norms. For instance I think the only reason mnemonics and creative learning methods aren’t taught more in school is because of a history of school being a kind of punitive, puritanical experience where kids are being seen more as future factory workers than individuals. I agree it has gotten better but I think there is still a long way to go.
As a society we seem to believe in science in some realms but not others, in my opinion. Medicine seems to require scientific studies and proof that a treatment is effective. I don’t believe this attitude is held in all areas in our society however. I believe our treatment of drug users in Canada is still highly punitive for cultural and political reasons rather than what is proven to be effective. I also believe this attitude holds up in schools. I believe we have seen superior results in education with the removal of testing, and yet tests remain and important part of the North American educational experience. So I do not believe we are doing everything we can to improve and innovate in education and then implement what the studies suggest.
Very happy to see the engagement on this post, very interesting points and I agree with many of them.
Great idea.
Sometimes when I read books I don’t use bookmarks and I don’t focus on the page number, but on the content. The following time I open the book I have to find my position based on the content. I think, in my case, it helps for retention and memorization.
