Ivy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ivybgreenflower) wrote2005-02-17 01:04 am
ivybgreenflower) wrote2005-02-17 01:04 am
Psych
Just demented ramblings, but does it seem like most of the cognitive memory devices on page 253 are weird? I mean, acronyms and acrostics make total sense. Categorical clustering is okay too. But that pegword stuff and the interactive images and the method of loci seem like someone was TRIPPING. OUT when they made these up. Seriously? WHO DOES THIS?
Method of Loci goes like this:
You take a mental tour through a bunch of random places... and stick stuff you're trying to remember in those places... and hope you don't get sirius-leeblack confused. Who has time to sit and sort out these things? To make up a whole freaking country filled with places you know and associate stuff and make it INTERACTIVE, like you don't just look at it, you have to like touch it.... what. EVER. If I were to try this I'd never get past the pick places stage. I'd get way too confused and spend way too much time, and write an essay about, like, St. Pete beach instead of some random term I put there mentally. Needless to say, Psychology made a lot more sense last semester.
Also, Mr. Wilcox gets a bit heavy handed with his essay material. "HEY IT WOULD BE COOL IF YOU STUCK THIS IN THE ESSAY TOO!" and suddenly you have two pages of notes for an essay that you have to memorize. MEMORIZE, people. At least his teaching style makes sense, though, and sometimes I even remember stuff. It's all good.
Mrs. Miranda knows as much about the AP Test as I do about the mating customs of people living in remote non-yam tribes of Africa. I was paired up with Brady. He's lovely to work with in that when he talks it makes sense and he has half (or more) of a brain. The problem is that he and I both got the same wrong ideas about what she wanted out of the chart. And of course, the ever-eager-to-please sophomores dutifully filled their charts with useless information, because they are gullible and they think that if they just study hard enough, everything will be okay. Um, whatever. Yes, studying is a part of it. KEYWORD: STUDYING. Not drawing maps, coloring them and keying them and labelling them. Not doing hundreds of verbose definitions for vaguely important people/things. Not rambling for hours about stuff that's in a different book, so OF COURSE we can't find it in ours. Not reading it to us. That's an insult. And not pairing up Russia with Latin America. It's one thing to compare and contrast; it's quite another to just randomly stick stuff together. "DATES AREN'T IMPORTANT! WHO CARES ABOUT DATES!" and then "OMG 328483787382 POINTS OFF WHERE ARE THE DATES YO?"
Oh, sigh.
While we're on the subject of teachers who don't make sense...
My Spanish class consists of four very irritated people. There are a crapload of natives not with us because we're the nonnatives and we're not cool enough. There's AP Spanish Lit, and I take my hat off to them, and then Spanish III. Spanish III and my group of four have bonded nicely.
The problem with our teacher is that her idea of preparation for the AP test is teaching us how to... conjugate regular ar verbs in the present tense, and teaching us that words that end in A get la and words that end in O get el. I SWEAR TO YOU, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE LEARNING. We are above this. We thought so anyway. We've taken Spanish since we were in the 6th grade. I am on my- let's see- sixth and final year of Spanish classes, and this is how far I have gotten? AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES SOMETHING SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH THIS? How is this preparing us for a test that even native speakers have trouble with? We don't need any more conjugating. We know enough to see that a verb's been conjugated and we'll get the jist of it. We need to know what the rest of the words in the sentence mean. We don't HAVE dictionaries, two weeks, and other students to help us on the exam. We have 20 minutes of Spanish rambling and like, ten minutes to try to cobble together some sort of response in a language we don't speak. I sigh. I used to speak more Spanish than I do now, which is SAD.
I have no complaint whatsoever about my math class except that it is math. My teacher is beyond great, and somehow she manages to incorporate:
-Stories of her own life
-Random stories from students
-Real Math Skillz
-Notes That Make SenseTM
-Time to check, go over, and personally help with homework problems
-Tests that are actually easier than the work we've done up until them
-STUFF THAT MAKES SENSE
all in 50 minutes. I will miss her next year. :(
This is getting long-winded, and the general message of this entry is this: My history teacher is nuts, Spanish sux, and everything else is cool, yo.
It's all good.
-Ivyette @ 1:32 AM P.S. If you find this essay annoyingly long on your friends list comment and I'll lj-cut it. <3
Method of Loci goes like this:
You take a mental tour through a bunch of random places... and stick stuff you're trying to remember in those places... and hope you don't get sirius-leeblack confused. Who has time to sit and sort out these things? To make up a whole freaking country filled with places you know and associate stuff and make it INTERACTIVE, like you don't just look at it, you have to like touch it.... what. EVER. If I were to try this I'd never get past the pick places stage. I'd get way too confused and spend way too much time, and write an essay about, like, St. Pete beach instead of some random term I put there mentally. Needless to say, Psychology made a lot more sense last semester.
Also, Mr. Wilcox gets a bit heavy handed with his essay material. "HEY IT WOULD BE COOL IF YOU STUCK THIS IN THE ESSAY TOO!" and suddenly you have two pages of notes for an essay that you have to memorize. MEMORIZE, people. At least his teaching style makes sense, though, and sometimes I even remember stuff. It's all good.
Mrs. Miranda knows as much about the AP Test as I do about the mating customs of people living in remote non-yam tribes of Africa. I was paired up with Brady. He's lovely to work with in that when he talks it makes sense and he has half (or more) of a brain. The problem is that he and I both got the same wrong ideas about what she wanted out of the chart. And of course, the ever-eager-to-please sophomores dutifully filled their charts with useless information, because they are gullible and they think that if they just study hard enough, everything will be okay. Um, whatever. Yes, studying is a part of it. KEYWORD: STUDYING. Not drawing maps, coloring them and keying them and labelling them. Not doing hundreds of verbose definitions for vaguely important people/things. Not rambling for hours about stuff that's in a different book, so OF COURSE we can't find it in ours. Not reading it to us. That's an insult. And not pairing up Russia with Latin America. It's one thing to compare and contrast; it's quite another to just randomly stick stuff together. "DATES AREN'T IMPORTANT! WHO CARES ABOUT DATES!" and then "OMG 328483787382 POINTS OFF WHERE ARE THE DATES YO?"
Oh, sigh.
While we're on the subject of teachers who don't make sense...
My Spanish class consists of four very irritated people. There are a crapload of natives not with us because we're the nonnatives and we're not cool enough. There's AP Spanish Lit, and I take my hat off to them, and then Spanish III. Spanish III and my group of four have bonded nicely.
The problem with our teacher is that her idea of preparation for the AP test is teaching us how to... conjugate regular ar verbs in the present tense, and teaching us that words that end in A get la and words that end in O get el. I SWEAR TO YOU, THIS IS WHAT WE ARE LEARNING. We are above this. We thought so anyway. We've taken Spanish since we were in the 6th grade. I am on my- let's see- sixth and final year of Spanish classes, and this is how far I have gotten? AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES SOMETHING SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH THIS? How is this preparing us for a test that even native speakers have trouble with? We don't need any more conjugating. We know enough to see that a verb's been conjugated and we'll get the jist of it. We need to know what the rest of the words in the sentence mean. We don't HAVE dictionaries, two weeks, and other students to help us on the exam. We have 20 minutes of Spanish rambling and like, ten minutes to try to cobble together some sort of response in a language we don't speak. I sigh. I used to speak more Spanish than I do now, which is SAD.
I have no complaint whatsoever about my math class except that it is math. My teacher is beyond great, and somehow she manages to incorporate:
-Stories of her own life
-Random stories from students
-Real Math Skillz
-Notes That Make SenseTM
-Time to check, go over, and personally help with homework problems
-Tests that are actually easier than the work we've done up until them
-STUFF THAT MAKES SENSE
all in 50 minutes. I will miss her next year. :(
This is getting long-winded, and the general message of this entry is this: My history teacher is nuts, Spanish sux, and everything else is cool, yo.
It's all good.
-Ivyette @ 1:32 AM P.S. If you find this essay annoyingly long on your friends list comment and I'll lj-cut it. <3
Kindergaten.
Love, luck, and lollipops
-meeeee
Re: Kindergaten.
no subject
no subject
I kind of liked our class. Observing los Hispanicos in their natural environment versus the gringos was muy interesante.
There's a group of obnoxious Portuguese kids at my school, and that's the closest thing I have to the Spanish foreigners who make the hallways multicultural. But now I can't tell what the HECK they are saying. Portuguese is like Deutsch-Spanish. It confuses me, since ESTOY hispañola. Remember?