Chapter 14 Flashcards
(12 cards)
Write an equation poem—several unfolding line that provides a sense of what lies beneath a standard equation.
Write a paragraph that describes how some concepts you are studying could be visualized in a play. How do you think the actors in your play might realistically feel and react to one another?
Take a mathematical concept you have learned and look at a concrete example of how that concept is applied. Then step back and see if you can sense the abstract chunk of an idea underlying the application.
Can you think of a completely different way that concept might be used?
TRANSFERRING IDEAS WORKS!
I took fishing techniques from the Great Lakes and tried using them down in the Florida Keys this past year.
Completely different fish, different bait, and a technique that had never been used, but it worked great.
People thought I was crazy and it was funny to show them that it actually caught fish.
Stage a Mental Play
Imagine yourself within the realm of something you are studying—looking at the world from the perspective of the cell, or the electron, or even a mathematical concept.
Try staging a mental play with your new friends, imagining how they feel and react.
IT’S NICE TO GET TO KNOW YOU!
Learning organic chemistry is not any more challenging than getting to know some new characters. The elements each have their own unique personalities.
The more you understand those personalities, the more you will be able to read their situations and predict the outcomes of reactions.
What is one of the problematic aspects of procrastination, and how can you counter it? How does it interact with transferring? Why can phones prevent you from learning?
One of the most problematic aspects of procrastination—constantly interrupting your focus to check your phone messages, e-mails, or otherupdates—is that it interferes with the transfer.
Students who interrupt their work constantly not only don’t learn as deeply, but also aren’t able to transfer what little they do learn as easily to other topics.
You may think you’re learning in between checking your phone messages, but in reality, your brain is not focusing long enough to form the solid neural chunks that are central to transferring ideas from one area to another.
How does transferring help us learn?
Transfer is beneficial in that it often makes learning easier for students as they advance in their studies of a discipline. As Professor Jason Dechant of theUniversity of Pitsburgh says,
“I always tell my students that they will study less as they progress through their nursing programs, and they don’t believe me.
They’re actually doing more and more each semester;
they just get better at bringing it all together.”
Transfer—Applying What You’ve Learned in New Contexts
Transfer is the ability to take what you learn in one context and apply it to something else. For example, you may learn one foreign language and then find that you can pick up a second foreign language more easily than the first.
That’s because when you learned the first foreign language, you also acquired general language-learning skills and potentially similar new words and grammatical structures that transferred to your learning the second foreign language.
What is the Feyman technique? How did Charles use it to help him understand?
Feynman technique, which asks peopleto find a simple metaphor or analogy to help them grasp the essence of an idea.
The legendary Charles Darwin would do much the same thing. Whentrying to explain a concept, he imagined someone had just walked into his study.
He would put his pen down and try to explain the idea in the simplest terms.
That helped him figure out how he would describe the concept in print.Along those lines, the website Reddit.com has a section called “Explain likeI’m 5’ where anyone can make a post asking for a simple explanation of acomplex topic.
How did Einstein’s theory of relativity get created? How can you use that information to help you learn a complex concept?
Einstein’s theories of relativity arose not from his mathematical skills (he often needed to collaborate with mathematicians to make progress) but from his ability to pretend.
He imagined himself as a photon moving at the speed of light, then imagined how a second photon might perceive him.
What would that second photon see and feel?
Simplify and Personalize Whatever You Are Studying
We’ve alluded to this before, but it’s worth revisiting now that we’ve got better insight into how to imagine the ideas that underlie equations.
One of the most important things we can do when we are trying to learn math and science is to bring abstract ideas to life in our minds. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, forexample, treated the microscopic scenes before him as if they were inhabited by living creatures that hoped and dreamed just as people themselves do.
