When learning doesn’t fade away

Our tutoring consultant has an encouraging experience with his own memory.

For most students, school is a matter of learning a subject well enough to pass quizzes and tests, then putting it aside the following term in order to concentrate on something new.  Especially with mathematics courses this is unfortunate: they tend to build on each other.  This semester’s Algebra II teacher will expect (against experience) that you will remember what you learned long ago in Algebra I.  It can even happen within a course.  Our tutoring consultant has faced several students lamenting that once, a month ago, they actually understood trigonometry well, but after switching to a different bit of the curriculum for a while a review test had caught them out.  It doesn’t help them to point out that relearning is easier and faster than learning, and that it will be more firmly embedded the second time around.

But what about after graduation, when we are no longer faced with classes requiring us to remember things?  In a previous post we saw some value in learning, even if the specifics were forgotten.  And much does seem to be lost, for all practical purposes.  We remember that we knew something once, but nothing more.

Well, not always.  For reasons that we need not go into here, our tutoring consultant recently pulled out a set of textbooks for a foreign language he’d studied in High School and the first year of college.  He hasn’t looked at the language for many years and expected to remember no more than basic greetings and maybe a simple verb conjugation.  Instead, he found himself reading through the paragraphs easily.  He wasn’t translating to English in his head at all, and he could answer the questions at the end without thinking.  He protests that he is by no means fluent (and never was), but apparently an enormous amount of what he once learned is still there.  (Contrast this with his review of some mathematical subjects from grad school, when his own notes seem as strange and unfamiliar as if they had been written by a stranger.)

Why this difference in retention should be so is a puzzle to us.  (Perhaps it isn’t, to neuroscientists or learning specialists).  It’s not that this language is more recent than other subjects, in fact the reverse is true.  It might be that several years of nearly continuous practice embedded it more firmly than many a one-semester subject.  It might be that language is learned–and forgotten–differently than mathematical subject.

In any case, this is tremendously encouraging to us.  There are many subjects we’ve learned and (apparently) lost over the years that we’d love to have in our hands once again.  Maybe they’re still there, in our heads.