We teach for mastery. Either you know the material or you don’t, which means that cramming for a test doesn’t really happen in our home school. Even preparing extensively for the ACT, SAT, or CLT seems like too much to me. Practicing a few tests to familiarize yourself with the format and what’s expected is completely understandable, but taking a whole semester or year to focus solely on how to take these tests has always seemed like cheating. Which explains why I’m hesitant to offer an SAT prep class as part of Scio Academy.
If this is true, then what’s the point in studying?
Our brains are fascinating. They can absorb so much great and not so great information. The problem with kids isn’t that they don’t learn, it’s that they often don’t learn the right things. Yes, there are right and wrong things to learn, but that’s another blog post entirely. However, even if you understood every part of long division when you first encountered it in 4th grade, you probably don’t remember each step now, years later. It takes a trigger to set your brain in motion on the right path.
Studying is the trigger for our brains. It is the reminder of the material that we have learned and further cements the material into our conscienceless. Notice, I said cement in, not paste on until the test is over. The purpose of studying and studying well is to strengthen the knowledge that you already have. You do not study for a test by learning new material. Rather, new material is learned through repetition, writing, and reciting. It is through studying that we keep our brains from dumping that material.
How do we study?
If studying is a reminder to our brain that the causes surrounding the civil war are important, then let’s learn how to retain information. I used to study for my college exams by laying my notes in the passenger seat of the car and asking myself essay questions about the material while I completed the 45-50 minute drive to campus. I would spend the entire 45 minutes composing the most spectacular speeches that the world will never know. Classical educators will see instantly that rehashing the material into an impromptu speech is a practice of the rhetoric stage. This worked for me.
As a parent educator, I strive to help my children discover what works for them. What method helps them pull up that material, develop ideas from it, and build competency?
How do we teach our home school students, who often don’t have a formal testing schedule, to study?
Schedule events that require using studying skills:
- Give traditional assessments.
- Discuss what your student is reading and learning often.
- Host a speech day each semester where you pull a topic out of a hat.
- Have your older student present his work to dad and field questions.
- Science fairs, mock trials, speeches, and classes are all great ways for students to have to show the material that they’ve learned over a long duration.
Learning to study is not just for tests. It's for life. How do you help your child build good study habits?