I’m going to try devoting my Thursday blog posts to the topic of All Things Academic: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and the other school subjects.

A home school mom of four writes:

The learning material that I struggle with is just that: motivation verses memorization. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around alternative methods to memorizing times tables and science facts and history dates. It just seems like there should be better ways to learn/teach.

Kids (and all people) learn best when information is relevant and interesting. Random facts that don’t connect with anything the student finds familiar or meaningful are tedious to memorize and soon forgotten.

But it’s also the case that the motivation to learn comes from already having some knowledge. That’s because, if you don’t know much, then most new information will seem random, disconnected, and “boring.”

It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of dynamic; which came first, the motivation to seek knowledge, or the knowledge itself?

In education, we talk abut The Matthew Effect, after the biblical verse, The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Kids who learn to read easily enjoy reading more, which motivates them to read more often, which makes them better at reading…which makes them enjoy it more…and so they read more often…etc, etc…

And this dynamic is true in all kinds of subject matter. We tend to be most interested in things we already know something about, and we’re often most motivated to seek knowledge in our areas of expertise.

For this reason, it’s important to push kids a bit, and expose them to topics and subjects they’re not naturally motivated to learn about.

So, believe it or not, rote memorization can often be a hook into motivation. Memorizing the states’ capitals just might make a kid feel some satisfaction, and then some interest, in actually knowing more about some of those places. She might then perk up with greater curiosity when she reads one of these place names in a story or hears it on the news, and then she might investigate on her own.

Having said this, I am not at all a fan of rote memorization of times tables or other math “facts,” and I’ll give you a better idea for teaching those next time.

[I've decided to decorate Thursday's posts with images of man-made objects, which seem toconvey the peculiar beauty of the logical human mind. This is a nine-cylinder radial engine from a WWII fighter plane at the Army Museum in Paris]

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    Last reviewed: 11 Nov 2011