Category: education

Walking and Learning in Rats

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Yesterday I blogged that walking on a treadmill made studying flashcards enjoyable. I also felt my retention was noticeably better than when I studied sitting or standing in one place.

Thanks to Matt Weber I learned of a rat experiment that supports the idea I was more retentive. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting (hours) change in synapse properties caused by a certain type of electrical stimulation from electrodes. Leung et al. measured the amount of LTP produced by the electrodes when rats were in one of four states: (a) walking, (b) immobilized, (c) short-wave sleep, (d) rapid-eye-movement sleep. They found clear LTP in all four states, but the LTP was much larger (50% larger?) when the rats were walking during the stimulation. During the other three states the LTP was about the same.

The walking and immobilization conditions must have differed in many ways. Perhaps immobilization was uncomfortable. Perhaps it required more handling. And so on. Comparing just those two states, you might wonder if (a) walking produces changes that cause things to be remembered better or (b) any of the other walking/immobilization differences made things worse (e.g., the shock of handling reduces learning). The fact that immobilization and the two sleep states produced similar results argues against the second sort of explanation.

Walking Creates A Thirst For Dry Knowledge

Seth Roberts12 Comments

A few weeks ago I got a treadmill for my Beijing apartment. Two days ago I was walking on it (I try to walk 1 hr/day) while watching Leverage to make the activity more palatable. But Leverage bored me. It was too simple. So I took out some Chinese flashcards (character on one side, English and pinyin on the other) and started studying them. I was astonished how pleasant it was. An hour of walking and studying went by . . . uh, in a flash. In my entire life I have never had such a pleasant hour studying. The next day it happened again! The experience appears infinitely repeatable. I’ve previously mentioned the man who memorized Paradise Lost while walking on a treadmill.

I’ve noticed before that treadmill walking (by itself boring) and Chinese-character learning (by itself boring) become pleasant when combined. So why was I astonished? Because the increase in enjoyment was larger. The whole activity was really pleasant, like drinking water when thirsty. When an hour was up, I could have kept going. I wanted to do it again. When I noticed it earlier, I was using Anki to learn Chinese characters. Now I am using flashcards in blocks of ten (study 10 until learned, get a new set of 10, study them until learned . . . ). The flashcards provide much more sense of accomplishment and completion, which I thinks makes the activity more pleasant.

My progress with Chinese characters has been so slow that during the latest attempt (putting them on my wall) I didn’t even try to learn both the pinyin and the meaning at the same time; I had retreated to just trying to learn the meaning. That was hard enough. I have had about 100 character cards on the walls of my apartment for a month but I’ve only learned the meaning of about half of them. No pinyin at all. In contrast, in two one-hour treadmill sessions I’ve gotten through 60 cards . . . including pinyin. For me, learning pinyin is much harder than learning meaning.

It’s like drinking water when you’re thirsty versus when you’re not thirsty. The walking turns a kind of switch that makes it pleasant to learn dry knowledge, just as lack of water creates thirst. Not only did studying dry materials become much more pleasant I suspect I also became more efficient — more retentive. I was surprised how fast I managed to reach a criterion of zero mistakes.

I had previously studied flashcards while walking around Tsinghua. This did not produce an oh-my-god experience. I can think of three reasons why the effect is now much stronger: 1. Ordinary walking is distracting. You have to watch where you’re going, there are other people, cars, trees, and so on. Distraction reduces learning. If the distractions are boring — and they usually are –Â the experience becomes less pleasant. 2. Ordinary walking provides more information than treadmill walking (which provides no information at all — you’re staring at a wall). The non-flashcard info reduces desire to learn what’s on the flashcards. 3. On these Tsinghua walks I had about 100 flashcards which I cycled through. Using sets of 10, as I said, provides more sense of accomplishment. I’ve also had about 20 Chinese-speaking lessons while walking around. The walking made the lessons more pleasant, yes, but it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as the treadmill/flashcard combination. And because lessons with a tutor are intrinsically more enjoyable than studying flashcards, the increase in enjoyment was less dramatic.

As I said earlier I think there’s an evolutionary reason for this effect: The thirst for knowledge (= novelty) created by walking pushed us to explore and learn about our surroundings. One interesting feature of my discovery about treadmill and flashcards is that it may take better advantage of this mechanism than did ordinary Stone-Age life — better in the sense that more pleasure/minute can be derived. In the Stone Age, novelty, new dry knowledge, was hard to come by. You could only walk so fast. After a while, it was hard to walk far enough away to be in a new place. Whereas I can easily switch from flashcards I’ve learned to new ones. An example of a supranormal stimulus.

Sanity in Education

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The head of the Baltimore school system, Andres Alonso, is fond of saying this:

Kids come as is and it’s our job to engage them.

I couldn’t agree more. In Totto-Chan, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi described meeting the headmaster of her new school. They had a conversation lasting hours. She remembered it as the most anyone had ever listened to her.
The full English title of Totto-Chan is Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window. “At the window” is a Japanese term for failure — businessmen judged incompetent were seated near the window. At her previous school, Kuroyanagi had been a misfit and expelled — for, among other things, opening and closing her desk too often.

For Whom Do English Departments Exist?

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In an account of ghostwriting for students (i.e., term-paper factory) the following story stood out:

Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. . . . I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, “There’s nothing like that here.” I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.

Inconvenient human nature. He wanted to learn something the school didn’t formally teach. The school controlled something precious that he needed — time. The rest of his life was at stake, but it wouldn’t give it to him.

His college was like a diet without necessary nutrients. It stunted growth.

For whom do colleges exist?

Art Majors & UC Berkeley

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In a fascinating bit of intellectual history, Andrew Gelman says he started off in math but came to doubt he was good enough at pure math. This reminds me of something one of my Tsinghua students told me a few days ago. An art major at his high school (the top high school in Beijing) was accepted at UC Berkeley with a big scholarship on the condition that the art student compete for Berkeley in a college math competition.

Learning Chinese Characters

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I have 80 Chinese characters (flashcards for children) taped to a wall of my Beijing apartment. I add about five per day. I wrote about this earlier, before starting. So far it’s working. With almost no effort, no discipline, I know what almost all of them mean. I test myself a little whenever I’m in that room. This is a vast improvement over several previous attempts to learn the characters, such as studying flashcards the usual way or using Anki, a flashcard program.

I ruefully realize this is an application of something I thought of many years ago: the forces we can turn on and off are much weaker than pre-existing forces we can only take advantage of. Burning coal is a force we can turn on and off. Solar power is a pre-existing force we can take advantage of (and which almost everyone in Beijing uses to dry clothes). The sun shines no matter what we do. Deliberate studying we can turn on and off. We can study or not. In contrast, I am inevitably going to be in that room. Taping characters to the wall takes advantage of that.

Punishment of Difference

Seth Roberts8 Comments

When I was a boy, my family didn’t have a TV. (Which I now make up for by watching a lot of TV.) The strangeness of this was made clear one day at school. It was second grade. The teacher wanted to talk about something on TV. “Who doesn’t have a TV?” she asked the class. I raised my hand and a girl raised her hand. She didn’t have a TV because it was being fixed.

So I was especially disturbed by this video in which a few schoolchildren who differ from the rest of their class are blown up. Their fatal mistake is not cutting carbon emissions. The organization that made it took it down and issued a lukewarm apology (“live and learn”) that said nothing about ridiculing minorities. If I were teaching 10-year-olds, I think I’d show them the video, tell them how disturbing I found it, and ask them about times in their lives that they felt different from everyone else. It is a curiously teachable moment.

New Idea About Learning Chinese

Seth Roberts12 Comments

 I never considered taking a class to learn Chinese. Too boring, too time-consuming. I’ve tried hiring tutors and going through a textbook. Better but too close to taking a class. That didn’t last.

For maybe half a year I’ve used Anki (a flashcard program) to learn characters. This is better — at least it’s lasted half a year — but I don’t study it often enough.

A friend suggested labeling things in my apartment — put a card with the character for chair on a chair, for example. Another friend pointed out that there are children’s books with big characters (one per page). That suggested my latest idea: Put these pages on the walls of my apartment. So whenever I look at the wall it will be a kind of test. If I don’t remember the character, I can look on the underside of the card for the answer.

I’m excited about this: it might actually work, I now think. It doesn’t require being still, which I think reduces learning. It spaces learning (you learn in little bits throughout the day), which is surely better than massing it. It allows great amounts of repetition. And it takes advantage of natural curiosity (whenever I see Chinese — in a sign, for example — I wonder what it means) rather than requiring discipline. As far as I can tell it requires no discipline at all. If it doesn’t work I’ll learn something about education.

Yale President Defends Liberal Education

Seth Roberts13 Comments

The President of Yale, Richard C. Levin, spoke in support of a Singapore branch of Yale College like this:

There has never been a greater need for undergraduate education that cultivates critical inquiry. In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the qualities of mind developed through liberal education are perhaps more indispensable than ever in preparing students to understand and appreciate differences across cultures and boundaries, and to address problems for which there are no easy solutions.

I suppose President Levin uses a speechwriter but still . . . It reads like something a college student would write in answer to an essay question when they hadn’t done the reading. What does “critical inquiry” have to do with understanding cultural differences? The first and second sentences could have been written by two different people. What possessed Levin to imply that people without a liberal education — such as MIT and Caltech graduates — can only solve problems for which there are easy answers? Or did he fail to understand what he was reading?

Couldn’t he, like, hire a better speechwriter? Or is “liberal education” so hard to defend that no one can coherently defend it?