clair073

A reader of this blog, Bruce Hopkins, recently told me about his new web-site portal for web-sites on memorization techniques. This site ( bruce.hopkins@memorymethods.com ) is a wonderful resource. I just checked a few of the links and was pleased with what I found. Much of the information I already know, being the “Memory Medic,” but I learned some new things.  For example, the site that explains the “phonetic system” for memorizing numbers ( http://www.got2know.net/ ) convinced me that you don’t always have to create words that are nouns. I have always thought nouns were essential, because they can be represented in a visual image. For example, I represent the number one with “tie,” but this site also suggests “the, do, and it.” While the latter three words have no visual image, they can be used to construct acrostics. That brings me to the site’s supposed best feature: it claims you can type in any long number and get an acrostic. But I could not get the interactive part of the ...

I probably need to explain a couple of learning principles mentioned in the original post on jazz-band teaching and learning. One principle is operant conditioning, which is inherent in band classes. It will truly pay off to find creative ways to employ operant conditioning in academic-course classes, because it is the most powerful teaching technique I know of. I assume they teach this in colleges of education, because kindergarten teachers do a version of it all the time with the “gold-star” reward paradigm. Fully implemented, the idea is that little successes bring little rewards, and as the desired behavior becomes established, the bar is raised for further reward, or positive reinforcement as the psychologists call it. A repeated process of “successive approximation” can lead to astonishing results in short order. I think that something like this is operating in band class. The reward in jazz-band, and that includes orchestra band class, is the immediate gratification a student ge...