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The
Morality of Admitting so many Students to Classes they cannot Pass Atlantic
Monthly June 2008
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In the Basement of the
Ivory Tower
by
Professor X
The idea that a
university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An
instructor at a "college of last resort" explains why.
I work part-time in the evenings as an adjunct
instructor of English. I teach two courses, Introduction to College
Writing (English 101) and Introduction to College Literature (English
102), at a small private college and at a community college. The
campuses are physically lovely - quiet havens of ornate stonework and
columns, Gothic Revival archways, sweeping quads, and tidy Victorian
scalloping. Students chat or examine their cell phones or study
languidly under spreading trees. Balls click faintly against bats on
the athletic fields. Inside the arts and humanities building, my
students and I discuss Shakespeare, Dubliners, poetic rhythms,
and Edward Said. We might seem, at first glance, to be enacting some
sort of college idyll. We could be at Harvard. But this is not Harvard,
and our classes are no idyll. Beneath the surface of this serene and
scholarly mise-en-scène roil waters of frustration and bad feeling,
for these colleges teem with students who are in over their heads.
I work
at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a
goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those
I teach don't come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and
cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications
show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular
activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S.
News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal
academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work
and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that
dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.
Some of
their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old.
Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life
interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large
swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home
and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings.
I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before
they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon
health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and
municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance
at work.
My
students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but
because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students,
no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two
courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young
guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across
which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading
"Araby" or "Barn Burning," their boredom quickly
becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms;
they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had
been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
The goal
of English 101 is to instruct students in the sort of expository
writing that theoretically will be required across the curriculum. My
students must venture the compare-and-contrast paper, the argument
paper, the process-analysis paper (which explains how some action is
performed - as a lab report might), and the dreaded research paper,
complete with parenthetical citations and a listing of works cited, all
in Modern Language Association format. In 102, we read short stories,
poetry, and Hamlet, and we take several stabs at the only
writing more dreaded than the research paper: the absolutely despised
Writing About Literature.
Class
time passes in a flash - for me, anyway, if not always for my students.
I love trying to convey to a class my passion for literature, or the
immense satisfaction a writer can feel when he or she nails a point.
When I am at my best, and the students are in an attentive mood -
generally, early in the semester - the room crackles with positive
energy. Even the cops-to-be feel driven to succeed in the class, to
read and love the great books, to explore potent themes, to write well.
The bursting of our collective bubble comes
quickly. A few weeks into the semester, the students must start
actually writing papers, and I must start grading them. Despite my
enthusiasm, despite their thoughtful nods of agreement and what I have
interpreted as moments of clarity, it turns out that in many cases it
has all come to naught.
Remarkably
few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely
fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they
cannot write a coherent sentence.
In each
of my courses, we discuss thesis statements and topic sentences, the
need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desirable,
what constitutes a compelling subject. I explain, I give examples, I
cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening, when the class is over and I
come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task,
as I'm sure my students do. I envision the lot of us driving home,
solitary scholars in our cars, growing sadder by the mile. . .
I
wonder, sometimes, at the conclusion of a course, when I fail nine out
of 15 students, whether the college will send me a note either (1)
informing me of a serious bottleneck in the march toward commencement
and demanding that I pass more students, or (2) commending me on my
fiscal ingenuity - my high failure rate forces students to pay for
classes two or three times over.
What
actually happens is that nothing happens. I feel no pressure from the
colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare
occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don't mention
all those students who have failed my courses, and I don't bring them
up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf
between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger
implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to
classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I
are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces - social
optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal
right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and
the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards
while admitting marginal students - that have coalesced into a
mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen
that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the
colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States
of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of
irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the
adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst
students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.
Recently, I gave a student a failing grade on her
research paper. She was a woman in her 40s; I will call her Ms. L. She
looked at her paper, and my comments, and the grade. "I can't
believe it," she said softly. "I was so proud of myself for
having written a college paper."
From the
beginning of our association vis-à-vis the research paper, I knew that
there would be trouble with Ms. L.
When I
give out this assignment, I usually bring the class to the college
library for a lesson on Internet-based research. I ask them about their
computer skills, and some say they have none, fessing up to being
computer illiterate and saying, timorously, how hopeless they are at
that sort of thing. It often turns out, though, that many of them have
at least sent and received e-mail and Googled their neighbors, and it
doesn't take me long to demonstrate how to search for journal articles
in such databases as Academic Search Premier and JSTOR.
Ms. L.,
it was clear to me, had never been on the Internet. She quite possibly
had never sat in front of a computer. The concept of a link was news to
her. She didn't know that if something was blue and underlined, you
could click on it. She was preserved in the amber of 1990, struggling
with the basic syntax of the World Wide Web. She peered intently at the
screen and chewed a fingernail. She was flummoxed.
I had
responsibilities to the rest of my students, so only when the class
ended could I sit with her and work on some of the basics. It didn't go
well. She wasn't absorbing anything. The wall had gone up, the wall
known to every teacher at every level: the wall of defeat and
hopelessness and humiliation, the wall that is an impenetrable barrier
to learning. She wasn't hearing a word I said.
"You
might want to get some extra help," I told her. "You can
schedule a private session with the librarian."
"I'll
get it," she said. "I just need a little time."
"You
have some computer-skills deficits," I told her. "You should
address them as soon as you can." I don't have cause to use much
educational jargon, but deficits has often come in handy. It
conveys the seriousness of the situation, the student's jaw-dropping
lack of ability, without being judgmental. I tried to jostle her along.
"You should schedule that appointment right now. The librarian is
at the desk. "
"I
realize I have a lot of work to do," she said.
Our
dialogue had turned oblique, as though we now inhabited a Pinter play.
. . .
At our
next meeting after class in the library, Ms. L. asked me whether she
could do her paper on abortion. What exactly, I asked, was the
historical controversy? Well, she replied, whether it should be
allowed. She was stuck, I realized, in the well-worn groove of
assignments she had done in high school. I told her that I thought the
abortion question was more of an ethical dilemma than a historical
controversy.
"I'll
have to figure it all out," she said.
She
switched her topic a half-dozen times; perhaps it would be fairer to
say that she never really came up with one. I wondered whether I should
just give her one, then decided against it. Devising a topic was part
of the assignment.
"What
about gun control?" she asked.
I
sighed. You could write, I told her, about a particular piece of
firearms-related legislation. Historians might disagree, I said, about
certain aspects of the bill's drafting. Remember, though, the paper
must be grounded in history. It could not be a discussion of the pros
and cons of gun control.
"All
right," she said softly.
Needless
to say, the paper she turned in was a discussion of the pros and cons
of gun control. At least, I think that was the subject. There was no
real thesis. The paper often lapsed into incoherence. Sentences broke
off in the middle of a line and resumed on the next one, with the first
word inappropriately capitalized. There was some wavering between
single- and double-spacing. She did quote articles, but cited only
databases - where were the journals themselves? The paper was also too
short: a bad job, and such small portions.
"I
can't believe it," she said when she received her F.
"I was so proud of myself for having written a college
paper."
She most
certainly hadn't written a college paper, and she was a long way from
doing so. Yet there she was in college, paying lots of tuition for the
privilege of pursuing a degree, which she very likely needed to advance
at work. Her deficits don't make her a bad person or even unintelligent
or unusual. Many people cannot write a research paper, and few have to
do so in their workaday life. But let's be frank: she wasn't working at
anything resembling a college level.
I gave
Ms. L. the F and slept poorly that night. Some of the failing
grades I issue gnaw at me more than others. In my ears rang her
plaintive words, so emblematic of the tough spot in which we both now
found ourselves. Ms. L. had done everything that American culture asked
of her. She had gone back to school to better herself, and she expected
to be rewarded for it, not slapped down. She had failed not, as some
students do, by being absent too often or by blowing off assignments.
She simply was not qualified for college. What exactly, I
wondered, was I grading? I thought briefly of passing Ms. L., of
slipping her the old gentlewoman's C-minus. But I couldn't do it. It
wouldn't be fair to the other students. By passing Ms. L., I would be
eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I
nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The
New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the
nation's colleges? In my mind's eye, the front page of a newspaper spun
madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:
THIS IS A C?
Illiterate
Mess Garners ‘Average' Grade
Adjunct
Says Student ‘Needed' to Pass, ‘Tried Hard'
No, I
would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.
We think
of college professors as being profoundly indifferent to the grades
they hand out. My own professors were fairly haughty and aloof, showing
little concern for the petty worries, grades in particular, of their
students. There was an enormous distance between students and
professors. The full-time, tenured professors at the colleges where I
teach may likewise feel comfortably separated from those whom they
instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight
hours, tend to be younger than mine. Many of them are in school on
their parents' dime. Professors can fail these young people with
emotional impunity because many such failures are the students' own
fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.
But my
students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted
to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that
we all have screwed up. I'm working a second job; they're trying
desperately to get to a place where they don't have to. All any of us
wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my
own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I
mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering
careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time
jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents
of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and
of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and
tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are
filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily
atop filled garbage cans.
During
breaks, my students scatter to various corners and niches of the
building, whip out their cell phones, and try to maintain a home life.
Burdened with their own assignments, they gamely try to stay on top of
their children's. Which problems do you have to do? … That's not
too many. Finish that and then do the spelling … No, you can't watch Grey's
Anatomy.
Adult education, nontraditional education,
education for returning students - whatever you want to call it - is a
substantial profit center for many colleges. Like factory owners,
school administrators are delighted with this idea of mounting a second
shift of learning in their classrooms, in the evenings, when the
full-time students are busy with such regular extracurricular pursuits
of higher education as reading Facebook and playing beer pong. If
colleges could find a way to mount a third, graveyard shift, as Henry
Ford's Willow Run did at the height of the Second World War, I believe
that they would.
There is
a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at
every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for
at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who
run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need
college - but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of
synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our
bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our
medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs
and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with
the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great
literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic
interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don't think that's
such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a
route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound
ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man
make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will
a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of
the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot
get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to
have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker
Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath's
"Daddy"? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don't hold.
But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I
can't shake the sense that reading literature is informative and
broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose
I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick
Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors' prison. . .
Sending
everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is
all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help
with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots
of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it - try to
imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme
of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle
hasn't been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I
encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The
zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its
rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway
between my shoulder blades.
For I,
who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes,
am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college:
that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of
work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they
are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to
place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply
raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of
them, much less for college.
I am the
man who has to lower the hammer.
We may
look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, but we are academic button
men. I roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword
and grade book, "a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed
with dying cries."
I knew
that Ms. L.'s paper would fail. I knew it that first night in the
library. But I couldn't tell her that she wasn't ready for an
introductory English class. I wouldn't be saving her from the
humiliation of defeat by a class she simply couldn't handle. I'd be a
sexist, ageist, intellectual snob.
In her
own mind, Ms. L. had triumphed over adversity. In her own mind, she was
a feel-good segment on Oprah. Everyone wants to triumph. But not
everyone can - in fact, most can't. If they could, it wouldn't be any
kind of a triumph at all. Never would I want to cheapen the
accomplishments of those who really have conquered college, who were
able to get past their deficits and earn a diploma, maybe even climbing
onto the college honor roll. That is truly something.
One of
the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the
literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have
already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far
proven impossible. My students don't read much, as a rule, and though I
think of them monolithically, they don't really share a culture. To
Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal
Farm? No. If they have read it, they don't remember it. The
Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte's Web?
You'd think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works
of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn't work much better.
Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen - well, except for
one. They've all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it
multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest
narrative. The farmhands' early conversation illustrates foreshadowing.
The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up.
Everybody knows that one - perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that
she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she
needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement:
the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean
theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far
removed from reality. That's art holding up a mirror all too closely to
our own poignant scholarly endeavors.
To read
the entire article, go to www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/college.
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How To Remember Before You Forget
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Want to Remember Everything You'll
Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
By Gary Wolf, WIRED,
04.21.08
The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland,
but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular
outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods,
strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea,
off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall,
well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.
"Kalt? Kalt?" one of
them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and
dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree
water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly
along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get
dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. "This is one of
the reasons I prefer anonymity," he tells me in English. "You
do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a
sensation."
Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has
been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts
recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into
geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program
called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the
world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular
among people for whom fluency is a necessity - students
from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on
English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do
not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin
boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
SuperMemo is based on the insight that
there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too
soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten
the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just
at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is
different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile
of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you
should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a
pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting
the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then
levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology,
but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for
us to employ with our naked brains.
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that
computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could
discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research.
It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules
information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users
can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for
Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the
tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our
lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of
self-knowledge
- introspection,
intuition, and conscious thought - but also
on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.
Given the chance to observe our
behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions
of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top
performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able
to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us
to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind
us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our
intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.
The reason the inventor of SuperMemo
pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to conceal his exact location and
shunning even casual recognition by users of his software, is not
because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid
random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on
himself. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's
like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he
appears to be one of the happiest people I've ever met. . .
How Supermemo
Works
SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information
you've learned and want to retain. For example, say you're studying
Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it
declines over time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks
this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your
knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90
percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word, your chance of
recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the
word, the rate of forgetting levels out. The program
tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the next time.
However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is
"one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory
research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in
1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under
the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to
Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The sorrrowful tone
is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people
continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if,
centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with
nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists
who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a
problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language:
how to remember what's been learned. But instead, the spacing effect
became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.
As a student at the Poznan University of
Technology in western Poland in the 1980s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by
the sheer number of things he was expected to learn. But that wasn't
his most troubling problem. He wasn't just trying to pass his exams; he
was trying to learn. He couldn't help noticing that within a few months
of completing a class, only a fraction of the knowledge he had so
painfully acquired remained in his mind. Wozniak knew nothing of the
spacing effect, but he knew that the methods at hand didn't work.
The most important challenge was English.
Wozniak refused to be satisfied with the broken, half-learned English
that so many otherwise smart students were stuck with. So he created an
analog database, with each entry consisting of a question and answer on
a piece of paper. Every time he reviewed a word, phrase, or fact, he
meticulously noted the date and marked whether he had forgotten it. At
the end of the session, he tallied the number of remembered and
forgotten items. By 1984, a century after Ebbinghaus finished his
second series of experiments on nonsense syllables, Wozniak's database
contained 3,000 English words and phrases and 1,400 facts culled from
biology, each with a complete repetition history. He was now prepared
to ask himself an important question: How long would it take him to
master the things he wanted to know?
The answer: too long. In fact, the answer
was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations,
success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it
was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary
vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated.
Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal
method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to
learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For
30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.
. .
The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much
if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important.
Perhaps the things we learn - words,
dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't
really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.
When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit
together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the
paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
The disadvantage of this comforting
notion is that it's false. "The people who criticize memorization - how
happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they
read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department
and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes,
children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every
time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't
escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process
of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's
all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain
is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make
associations, data must be loaded into memory.
Once we drop the excuse that memorization
is pointless, we're left with an interesting mystery. Much of the
information does remain in our memory, though we cannot recall it.
"To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about
forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that
gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research.
The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can
prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a
'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become
inaccessible. But they are not gone." . . .
During the years that Wozniak struggled
to master English, Bjork and his collaborator, Elizabeth Bjork (she is
also a professor of psychology; the two have been married since 1969),
were at work on a new theory of forgetting. Both were steeped in the
history of laboratory research on memory, and one of their goals was to
get to the bottom of the spacing effect. They were also curious about
the paradoxical tendency of older memories to become stronger with the
passage of time, while more recent memories faded. Their explanation
involved an elegant model with deeply counterintuitive implications.
Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be
characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength
and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to
recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your
mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some
memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength.
Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel
that it's gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for
months or years. Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength
but low storage strength. Perhaps you've recently been told the names
of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be
easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few
days, and a single repetition a month from now won't do much to
strengthen them at all.
The Bjorks were not the first
psychologists to make this distinction, but they and a series of
collaborators used a broad range of experimental data to show how these
laws of memory wreak havoc on students and teachers. One of the
problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice
is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other
words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more
the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to
signal we're learning well - easy
performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective
feeling that we know something - are
misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in
the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the
extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do
the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost
sinister."
The most popular learning systems sold
today - for
instance, foreign language software like Rosetta Stone - cheerfully
defy every one of the psychologists' warnings. With its constant
feedback and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brilliantly creates
a sensation of progress. "Go to Amazon and look at the
reviews," says Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone's CTO, when I ask him what
evidence he has that people are really remembering what they learn.
"That is as objective as you can get in terms of a user's sense of
achievement." The sole problem here, from the psychologists'
perspective, is that the user's sense of achievement is exactly what we
should most distrust.
The battle between lab-tested techniques
and conventional pedagogy went on for decades, and it's fair to say
that the psychologists lost. All those studies of human memory in the
lab - using
nonsense syllables, random numbers, pictures, maps, foreign vocabulary,
scattered dots
- had
so little influence on actual practice that eventually their
irrelevance provoked a revolt. In the late '70s, Ulric Neisser, the
pioneering researcher who coined the term cognitive psychology,
launched a broad attack on the approach of Ebbinghaus and his
scientific kin.
"We have established firm empirical
generalizations, but most of them are so obvious that every 10-year-old
knows them anyway," Neisser complained. "We have an
intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little
confidence that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural
behavior." Neisser encouraged psychologists to leave their labs
and study memory in its natural environment, in the style of
ecologists. He didn't doubt that the laboratory theories were correct
in their limited way, but he wanted results that had power to change
the world.
Many psychologists followed Neisser. But
others stuck to their laboratory methods. The spacing effect was one of
the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely
because it was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same
year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer
of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly
700 undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the
optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be
remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study
something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet - as
Neisser might have predicted - that
insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment
of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.
Obviously, computers were the answer, and
the idea of using them was occasionally suggested, starting in the
1960s. But except for experimental software, nothing was built. The
psychologists were interested mainly in theories and models. The
teachers were interested in immediate signs of success. The students
were cramming to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was
somehow too abstract, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a
useful way. What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a
tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for
mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he
should actually recall the things he learned.
The day I first meet Wozniak, we go for a 7-mile walk down a
windy beach. I'm in my business clothes and half comatose from jet lag;
he's wearing a track suit and comes toward me with a gait so buoyant he
seems about to take to the air. He asks me to walk on the side away
from the water. "People say that when I get excited I tend to
drift in their direction, so it is better that I stand closer to the
sea so I don't push you in," he says.
Wozniak takes an almost physical pleasure
in reason. He loves to discuss things with people, to get insight into
their personalities, and to give them advice - especially
in English. One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one
language and one currency so this could all be handled more
efficiently. He's appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone.
He's baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years
he kept a diary in Esperanto.
Although Esperanto was the ideal
expression of his universalist dreams, English is the leading
real-world implementation. Though he has never set foot in an
English-speaking country, he speaks the language fluently. "Two
words that used to give me trouble are perspicuous and perspicacious,"
he confessed as we drank beer with raspberry syrup at a tiny beachside
restaurant where we were the only customers. "Then I found a
mnemonic to enter in SuperMemo: clear/clever. Now I never misuse
them."
Wozniak's command of English is the
result of a series of heroic experiments, in the tradition of
Ebbinghaus. They involved relentless sessions of careful self-analysis,
tracked over years. He began with the basic conundrum of too much to
study in too little time. His first solution was based on folk wisdom.
"It is a common intuition," Wozniak later wrote, "that
with successive repetitions, knowledge should gradually become more
durable and require less frequent review."
This insight had already been proven by
Landauer and Bjork, but Wozniak was unaware of their theory of
forgetting or of any of the landmark studies in laboratory research on
memory. This ignorance was probably a blessing, because it forced him
to rely on pragmatic engineering. In 1985, he divided his database into
three equal sets and created schedules for studying each of them. One
of the sets he studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the
third at expanding intervals, increasing the period between study
sessions each time he got the answers right. . .
All of his early work was done on paper.
In the computer science department at the Poznan University of
Technology, "we had a single mainframe of Polish-Russian design,
with punch cards," Wozniak recalls. "If you could stand in
line long enough to get your cards punched, you could wait a couple of
days more for the machine to run your cards, and then at last you got a
printout, which was your output."
The personal computer revolution was
already pretty far along in the US by the time Wozniak managed to get
his hands on an Amstrad PC 1512, imported through quasi-legal means
from Hamburg, Germany. With this he was able to make another major
advance in SuperMemo - computing
the difficulty of any fact or study item and adjusting the unique shape
of the predicted forgetting curve for every item and user. A friend of
Wozniak's adapted his software to run on Atari machines, and as access
to personal computers finally spread among students, so did SuperMemo.
After the collapse of Polish communism,
Wozniak and some fellow students formed a company, SuperMemo World. By
1995, their program was one of the most successful applications
developed by the country's fledgling software industry, and they were
searching for funding that would allow them to relocate to Silicon
Valley. That year, at Comdex in Las Vegas, 200,000 people got a look at
Sony's new DVD technology, prototypes of flatscreens, and Wozniak's
SuperMemo, which became the first Polish product shown at the great
geek carnival, then at the height of its influence. In Europe, the old
communist experiment in human optimization had run its course. Wozniak
believed that in a world of open competition, where individuals are
rewarded on merit, a scientific tool that accelerated learning would
find customers everywhere. . . .
"Piotr would never go out to promote
the product, wouldn't talk to journalists, very rarely agreed to meet
with somebody," Biedalak says. "He was the driving force, but
at some point I had to accept that you cannot communicate with him in
the way you can with other people."
The problem wasn't shyness but the same
intolerance for inefficient expenditure of mental resources that led to
the invention of SuperMemo in the first place. By the mid-'90s, with
SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability
to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80
phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time
for programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he
disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was.
The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his
time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a
time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals,
he never attends conferences or scientific meetings. . .
The Baltic Sea is dark as an unlit mirror.
Wozniak and I walk along the shore, passing the wooden snack stands
that won't be open until spring, and he tells me how he manages his
life. He's married, and his wife shares his lifestyle. They swim
together in winter, and though Polish is their native language, they
communicate in English, which she learned with SuperMemo. Wozniak's
days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading
and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting
period, and then a second creative period. He doesn't get up at a
regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks. If excitement over
his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts to
sleeping in the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental
reading, he attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer
screen, stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his
comprehension falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the
queue. SuperMemo graphs a distribution of priorities that he can adjust
as he goes. When he encounters a passage that he thinks he'll need to
remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced
repetition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain
indefinitely.
"Once you get the snippets you
need," Wozniak says, "your books disappear. They gradually
evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge."
As a science fiction fan, I had always
assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be
because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask
questions, and our machines would give oracular - or
supremely practical - replies.
Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his mental
life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to
make his mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which
he programs a computer but for which his computer is programming him. .
. .
By projecting the achievement of extreme
memory back along the forgetting curve, by provably linking the distant
future - when we
will know so much
- to
the few minutes we devote to studying today, Wozniak has found a way to
condition his temperament along with his memory. He is making the
future noticeable. He is trying not just to learn many things but to
warm the process of learning itself with a draft of utopian ecstasy.
Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com) wrote about futurist Ray
Kurzweil in issue 16.04.
To
read the entire article, go to www.wired.com/print/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak.
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