The other day a student came into school exhausted. She had had a dance class and CCD the night before and was so tired when she got home that she went straight to bed without studying for a test she was going to take the next day. She decided it would be better to get up at 3:00am and study until school started. I asked:
“Do you remember anything that you studied?”
“Yes, it is fresh in my head from studying all morning.”
“But will you remember it tomorrow?
“I don’t need to know it for tomorrow.”
She knows the rules of the game, and I am not mad at her for playing by them.
Sigh. It’s true, though. Can’t blame her!
It does make it hard when you try to hold them to the expectations that they remember it tomorrow and beyond. That just tells me I need to do a better job of helping them learn it rather than remember it.
That is true.
I study and for get what i studied for the next day because i think i don’t need to remember it after the test.
Someone asked me last week when was the last time as an adult I had to take a test with absolutely no resources or the web for help? The answer was I haven’t had to in ten years. Why when in real life we hardly take tests are they the default mode for demonstrating learning in schools? We reward those who have great short term memories at the expense of measuring actual learning.
It’s called bulimic learning.
It is important for us to gather this sort of assessment data…so we can prove tht for one hour of one day of the school year they did know this really important stuff.