Serendipitous impact of mindless cramming

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This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

Cramming

Every cloud has a silver lining. Even the worst learning habits developed at school can bring something good. One of the worst habits we take away from school is cramming. In cramming, we learn to pass an exam only to forget the whole material in weeks or months that follow. Hence the phrase: "Cram&Dump!". Cramming is almost useless from the lifetime perspective. Due to the fact that most of learning for exams has a form of cramming, schools are also almost useless when compared with the actual brain potential for true learning. Cramming is encouraged by the system of testing in which a big chunk of material is tested once, and helps the student advance to the next station at the assembly line. Schools teach kids that knowledge is disposable, easily crammed back, and cheap. As a result, schooling conditions the brain to underestimate the value of lasting knowledge and the cost of quality learning.

Paradoxically, my own case of the wasteful procedure of dumb cramming helped me develop what can mathematically be proven as the fastest lifelong learning technique available (at the moment of writing): incremental learning. Some familiarity with SuperMemo would be helpful to understand the paradox described below.

Active learning

Personal anecdote. Why use anecdotes?
I mentioned Timmy in the chapter on bullying. Timmy was a great inspiration. Timmy was precocious as a pre-schooler. He was one of the best straight A students in his primary school. I met him and beat him narrowly at the district level Chemistry Olympics. However, in high school, Timmy started flagging down. It was 1976-1977. We were 14-16 years old. Timmy was stressed out by high volumes of learning, by bullying, by his inability to score his best, etc. As he recalls four decades later, the fact that he lost his leadership was particularly painful.

I vividly recall Timmy before a test, resting against a school corridor wall, over a book, with his head bobbing up and down like a stressed caged animal in a zoo. This picture is a scary metaphor on the impact of schooling on sensitive minds. This type of behavior might have contributed to Timmy's being bullied. Timmy was reading and re-reading the same passages in a book in hope that some of that reading will stick for the test. Timmy was not focused on learning. He was cramming in the state of utmost anxiety. It was at about that time that I figured out that passive reading is almost useless for passing tests. I needed active recall after reading. I spoke to Timmy about this. He was not receptive. He was just too stressed. That active recall realization later helped develop SuperMemo. In 1982 (aged 20), I started formulating all my vital knowledge as questions and answers (in the form of flashcards). That dramatically improved my learning performance. In the meantime, Timmy did not improve his learning habits. The precocious kid tried twice to pass entrance exams to study medicine. He failed both. I failed to help Timmy. Most of all, Timmy was failed by the education system. By the time of his last exam, he was a nervous wreck. His educational dreams were shattered.

In contrast, I was slowly progressing through. My care-free attitude sheltered me from the impact of stress. By a whisker, I passed my entrance exams to study biology. Had I chosen medicine, like Timmy, I would have failed too. The bar of medicine was just too high. Interestingly, the prospect of digging into corpses in anatomy class was one of the factors that changed my direction. Interestingly, life of Morton Deutsch has been changed in a similar manner

Successful cramming

Personal anecdote. Why use anecdotes?
At the university, for subjects I enjoyed, I often used cramming to get excellent test scores. I would not use heavy cramming for boring subjects because I did not care about boring knowledge, let alone grades. I could not replace cramming with good learning because the volume of material was always too big to compete with other students. The volume was too big even if I enjoyed systematic learning in a given subject area. When studying biology, my cramming technique, at first, was similar to methods used by millions of students around the world. Most exams tested knowledge from one semester (roughly 4 months of lectures). I would make sure that I had a window of 2-4 free days before the exam. I would start from making notes about all things I needed to know for the exam. Those notes were necessary because I hardly ever attended any lectures. I did not attend lectures because they were boring, they were slow, I did not learn much, and I hated the disruption in the daily schedule. Most of all, I would never wake up early for lectures because I have always known the value of sleep for brain physiology. Instead of messing up 14-30 separate days for commuting, boredom, and tiredness, I would devote 3-4 days to intense cramming. I would enjoy this process from time to time, as some of the subjects were interesting.

Roots of incremental learning

Personal anecdote. Why use anecdotes?
Once my notes were ready, I would read them over and over again, like a typical crammer, in hope of remembering the material for the exam. I knew that I should better peek at a paragraph and try to recall it actively from memory. This would improve the performance in the exams. An even more important technique was to cross out paragraphs, formulas, or pictures that I was sure were crammed well enough. They only needed to survive in my memory for a day or two. All my notebooks from the time are full of irregular shapes marking memorized fragments and crossed out when cramming seemed complete. Other students did not have this habit. They were perfectionistic in a different way. Where I was perfectionistic in the use of my time for best learning effect, they were perfectionistic in keeping their notes clean. Their notes could thus (but would never) be reused in future years. Mine were disposable. In essence, this was a reflection of the disposability of knowledge after exams. This is how school conditioning works: Cram and dump! Even if students have long-term ambitions, there is not enough room or time for being more meticulous. The volume of knowledge and the pressures are high enough to leave students with little choice: cram and dump. There was a monstrous advantage to my method. Reading my notes slowly might take a few hours. However, the size of the material would shrink in each passage. This way, I could read 4-6 times until all passages were crossed out. I literally crammed all notes to perfection. For someone who wanted to preserve the integrity of his notes, this was impossible. Second reading would be dramatically more boring in comparison to the first one, and only the most stubborn crammers could do more readings of the whole material. They would tire more, and would never actually memorize every single bit of their notes. This simple cross-out technique, dating back to 1982, when I was 20 years old, laid the foundation for incremental learning. All pieces of information in incremental learning receive their special attributes used in the learning process. Most of all, they are classified for the quality of the associated memory trace. They come back for review in proportion to their importance or relevance to the studied subject. Unlike cramming, incremental learning is fun and it lasts.

Origins of SuperMemo

SuperMemo insert. What is SuperMemo?
Most of users of SuperMemo for Windows are aware of the existence of incremental learning techniques. SuperMemo can be seen as composed of two layers:
  • older layer, dating back to 1985, classical SuperMemo, based on the algorithm that we called computational spaced repetition, makes sure that memories stay with the student for ever
  • newer layer, dating back to 2000, based on incremental learning techniques, makes sure that large volumes of information can be processed and fed back to the memory engine of classical SuperMemo

The interesting bit is that the ideas at the core of incremental learning are older than the ideas related to spaced repetition. In my cramming notes used before exams, all pieces of information were marked by two values of a memory attribute: (1) To Cram, or (2) Crammed. The flip of the attribute value would occur at the moment of crossing out the note. I used my cramming techniques in the years 1982-1990 during my university exams, and once, in 1995, before my PhD exams.

In my PhD dissertation, in 1995, I outlined how global hypermedia might be enhanced with tools that employ more processing and memory attributes. For example, a processing attribute might define the priority of a piece of knowledge, while a memory attribute might define how well a piece is remembered.

I knew that those attributes would be vital for implementing fast learning technologies that would satisfy principles of constructionist learning proposed by Seymour Papert of MIT. I used Papert's own term "knowledge machine" to describe a tool that could make super-fast and super-efficient constructionist self-learning possible. Today, this "knowledge machine" is available as SuperMemo for Windows of which versions from before 2013 are free. That lofty concept started from mindless cramming for exams! Schooling can bring some good fruit too

Summary

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