Learning in Minutes

Watching kids who have learned how to work something out on his or her own is refreshing. Christine was reciting each number in order from one to one hundred as part of her assessment. She got to the number sixteen, and something had distracted her. She sat there, not knowing what to do, when she got an idea. She started back at one and counted all the way through to fifteen. Then she could produce the number sixteen easily. She kept going to seventeen. I praised her, very impressed that she had worked out a strategy on her own. "That was a very good technique," I told her, something I say to the girl I tutor, Sarah, when she remembers to use a strategy I taught her for her homework assignment.

It is equally as refreshing watching a child learn quickly after being shown what to do. Arthur was writing capital and lower case Y's. "Can you show me that again?" I asked him, as I had seen him make three Y's in three different ways. "I don't really know the right way to do it," he admitted. "That's okay! I'll show you how I make my Y's," I encouraged him. I talked him through each step as I did it, using the class terminology: sky line, plane line, grass line, worm line. All I had to do was show him once, as he watched carefully, and he was writing uppercase Y's correctly. When he began lowercase Y's, he was having the same difficulty, and so I slowly showed him how I wrote mine, talking him through it the whole time. He wrote each line for the way in the correct order and correct direction, but he started a line above. I asked him, "Which line do you start on? The sky line or the plane line?" He answered, "the sky line," and so I asked him to look at the lowercase Y I demonstrated. "Oh, the plane line," he corrected and promptly erased his Y's and started making lines that start at the plane line.

Although it is remarkable to watch children grow and learn over the course of the year, as I discussed in my first blog post, it is equally remarkable to watch a child learn in just a matter of minutes. It is incredible to think how days prior, Christine may not have known what to do had she forgotten what number came after fifteen, and just five minutes prior, Arthur was writing Y's in the wrong order and from the incorrect lines. Whether it is self-taught or absorbed from a teacher's demonstration, children are capable of learning in minutes.