16. The approval or disapproval of a group of boys and girls often
brings about a very rapid change in physical, moral, or mental habits on
the part of individual children. Why?
17. Why should drill work be discontinued when children grow tired and
cease to concentrate their attention?
18. Why should reviews be undertaken at the beginning of a year's work?
How can reviews be organized to best advantage during the year?
19. What provision do you make in your work to guard against lapses?
* * * * *
V. HOW TO MEMORIZE
There is no sharp distinction between habit and memory. Both are
governed by the general laws of association. They shade off into each
other, and what one might call habit another with equal reason might
call memory. Their likenesses are greater than their differences.
However, there is some reason for treating the topic of association
under these two heads. The term memory has been used by different
writers to mean at least four different types of association. It has
been used to refer to the presence of mental images; to refer to the
consciousness of a feeling or event as belonging to one's own past
experience; to refer to the presence of connections between situation
and motor response; and to refer to the ability to recall the
appropriate response to a particular situation. The last meaning of the
term is the one which will be used here. The mere flow of imagery is not
memory, and it matters little whether the appropriate response be
accompanied by the time element and the personal element or not. In
fact, most of the remembering which is done in daily life lacks these
two elements.
Memory then is the recall of the appropriate response in a given
situation. It differs from habit in that the responses referred to are
more often mental rather than motor; in that it is less automatic, more
purposeful. The fact that the elements involved are so largely mental
makes it true that the given fact is usually found to have several
connections and the given situation to be connected with many facts.
Which particular one will be "appropriate" will depend on all sorts of
subtle factors, hence the need of the control of the connection aeries
by a purpose and the diminishing of the element of automaticity. As was
said before, there is no hard and fast line of division between habit
and memory. The recall of the "sqrt(64)" or of how to spell "home" or of
the French for "table" might be called either or both. All that was said
in the discussion of habit applies to memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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