geography Articles

In previous posts, I wrote a bit about memorization and how we may be shying away from it too much. We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. Education needs to be about much more than rote memorization, but having memorized facts and vocabulary at your disposal is also part of being an educated person. I've also found in my tutoring experience that students who have not memorized their arithmetic facts or Spanish vocabulary cannot dream of doing well in the related classes. There is some basic knowledge that you need just as a pre-requisite, and the fastest way to get it under your belt is to purposefully try to memorize it. The same goes for SAT and GRE vocabulary - sometimes memorization has to be a big part of your strategy towards improving someone's score.

Our education system being the way it is, most of us are not that familiar with the process and practice of memorizing large amounts of information. Sure, we've all made a few flashcards in our careers, but have most of us excelled at really challenging memorization tasks? I remember mostly failing at my attempts to memorize the periodic table or all the countries in Africa when I was in school. How can we become better memorizers, and is it really as boring as it sounds?

Human memory is actually a fascinating thing if you think about it. It consists of a series of nodes and connections to those nodes, in theory anyway. It is a vast network (which makes sense when you realize your brain is a network of connected neurons). Some researchers say that everything you've ever heard or experienced is still marked or recorded somewhere in your brain, it's just that usually it is activated at such a low level and so disconnected from everything else, that you cannot find it in order to re-activate it. The process of memorizing then, is a process of raising the activation level of different ideas by repeating them over and over, and of building strong connections, cues, or pathways to those ideas so that you will be able to retrieve them later. Once you've used a new word hundreds of times in context, it will become so familiar to you (so highly activated) and so interconnected with the others words you commonly use with it, that you will usually have no trouble recalling and using it. For new words or concepts, however, it is a fun game of trying to build connections and keep the idea actively buzzing in your head until you have a chance to use it and incorporate it into your daily systems of usage and knowledge.

How can you build associations or pathways to new items? One way is to organize the items somehow. Many people use strategies such as building a visual image that is composed of the items, or in which each object or visual element in the picture stands for one of the items. Of course there are mnemonic devices like acronyms, rhymes, songs, and stories (just as any doctor or medical student how they remember the bones of the body or the symptoms of a certain disease). In trying to learn lots of new Korean vocabulary, I have been coming up with little logical associations that help me retrieve the correct item. I find this to be quite a creative process and sometimes kind of fun or amusing! Memorization doesn't have to be all drudgery - it can actually be kind of creative and can incorporate many arts like music, visual imagery, poetry, etc.

Have fun with your memorization tasks, and post your ideas here as comments! Happy memorizing.

We can probably all agree that certain things are not taught (or at least learned) enough in American schools. I think one of these subjects is geography. We are probably lacking in this area because of our aversion to memorization tasks - there aren't many other ways to learn geography than by memorizing place names and locations. First of all, a little rote memorization never hurt anyone, especially when it was not coming at the cost of other educational experiences. Training your memory is very useful for life, and setting out to memorize some body of knowledge and then achieving your goal can really build confidence. Finally, knowing about geography helps you make friends! In this global age, we should all educate ourselves to be familiar with the peoples and places around the world.

I have met so many people from around the world at my university, at conferences, summer institutes, and during my own travels. It really makes you feel like a "dumb American" to realize that you don't know a single thing about the country that someone comes from. Where is it? What is the capital and the other major cities? What is the terrain like? How about the weather? What is the history of the place? If it is rich or poor, how did it get to be that way?

When you travel, you find these things out, sometimes as a shock. "Wow, Mexico has high mountains and old, colonial silver mining towns - how cool." "Budapest has caves, and it's freezing cold inside them! But they are filled with mineral water you can experience at the many spas there." "Korea has the hardest rain I've ever seen, and it continues for a whole monsoon season." "Who knew that Ethiopian food bears a certain similarity to Indian food? This 'sambussa' looks a lot like a 'samosa' I might get at my favorite Indian place. Oh yeah, I guess they are not that far away from each other..." Etc, etc, etc.

Fortunately, there are fun ways to learn about geography, at least to whet your appetite before you embark on some nice memorization and quizzes. I love Peter Menzel's gorgeous photo books, Hungy Planet: What the World Eats, and Material World: A Global Family Portrait. They have huge pictures of families from many different countries around the world, showing us the food they typically eat in a month (in the case of Hungry Planet), or all the possessions in their home (Material World). You can spend hours looking at these pictures, which are accompanied by facts about each country and some interview excerpts from the family members.

If you're the competitive sort, you can try these challenging quizzes that are on facebook as well as this website: http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq. (I just tried it and made it to Level 10 of 12 with 359,945 points. Can you beat me?)

Happy reading and happy clicking!

Are you wondering about how normal learning occurs as you try to help your student or perhaps yourself acquire new concepts?

First, let’s think about what is normal. Normal is not a single state. In reality, every person is unique. Our brains all have the same basic structure but each person seems to be wired slightly differently. That is both wonderful and frustrating for someone trying grasp new ideas.

In the beginning of life: As a child develops the parents and family members surrounding the child are the first instructors. Whether this teaching is done with intention or happenstance, everything that occurs around the child provides stimulus and occasions for learning. Most of this learning is by imitation. That is the moral behind the maxim to parents, “watch what you say, little pictures have big ears.” It’s also why the admonition “do as I say, not as I do” creates tension in a household.

By now, since you are on a tutoring website, I think it safe to assume that you are well beyond the early development stages of infancy and toddlers. Your needs for your learner are confounding you both and you are looking for someone with the knowledge, skill, and patience to bring to fore on this learning hurdle.

Maturing and learning: Multiple modes of learning and intentional learning are now an ever-present reality. Classes in single subject areas; math, reading, English, spelling, vocabulary, foreign languages, geography, history, religion, literature, politics and government all expect a student to master specific concepts and facts. For each person there will be some subjects that are easily mastered, and others that seem to forever confound the individual.

At the most basic level we know that everyone learns through sight, sound, and action. These three primary modes of learning, visual, auditory-oral, and kinesthetic can be shuffled around to enhance the learning process for most people. However, each person has an optimum learning combination as their mode of acquisition. Some learn best first by seeing, then hearing, and finally by doing. Others learn best first by doing, then hearing explanation, and finally by reading about the concept. Successful tutors will ask the parent or guardian, or the student directly which modes are primary, secondary and tertiary to best accommodate the learning process.

While I was raising my own children I learned that each had unique strengths as well as special challenges to learning some concepts. One child was a kinesthetic, visual, oral/auditory ordered learner. The other child was auditory/oral, visual, kinesthetic learner. As each ran into a roadblock in their learning I adapted a tool of learning to help them acquire the concept. Today, each has mastered a vocational field and continues to update their skills in their chosen vocation.

I consider it an honor to be able to work with anyone interested in learning. Your success mastering new ideas are the priceless rewards that are within reach when you decide to set up a tutoring relationship with me.

I will look at intelligence and multiple intelligences in my next post.

Sometimes, it is essential to provide students with additional perspectives, besides the tutor's. As I tutor more and more, I realize that even with the one-on-one benefits of tutoring, there is a need for interaction with other students. However, the problem is, there are no other students to provide this feedback when you are tutoring a student. I have found that creating relationships with other students is a remarkable enhancement to the tutoring experience.

I have used Pen Pals to meet this need. There are a variety of websites that offer pen pals for different purposes. If I am tutoring a student in Social Studies, Geography or History, a Pen Pal is an amazing resource for FREE and REAL information about the study topics. This is usually an exciting concept that is well-received by the student because they thrive with interactions with others and they think it's amazing to connect with people like them all around the world! Using the right resources for this is essential, so I suggest that tutors spend some time locating the right program for their needs. Usually, those that are dedicated to teachers offer the most security and less potential for spam and unwanted leaks of information to the Web. Additionally, these sites allow the tutor more access to hand-picking the pen pals for their needs. The greatest benefit for this type of tutoring lesson is the ability to focus on the writing skills of the student while not needing to create writing assignments for the sake of writing! This makes the students more likely to give their effort to their tasks AND it allows the tutor to challenge the student to become eloquent in their writing efforts because it is directed at a "friend". I encourage tutors to give this a try in Foreign Languages, Writing, History and Social Studies, ESOL... actually, the possibilities are endless! I'd love to know how YOU are using Pen Pals in your tutoring!