“THE IMPORTANCE OF REPETITION UNTIL AUTOMATICITY CANNOT BE OVERSTATED. REPETITION IS THE
KEY TO LEARNING."
At school, learning is a lot like riding a bike; we fail endless times. The difference between the two is that, for the most part, when we fail at school, we do nothing to correct our mistakes. Why should we? It's not like our grade will change--is the mindset most of us have.
What I've realized through the Innovation Academy is how intrinsically motivated we've become. It's like we're learning how to ride a bike all over again, because despite failing endless times, we correct our mistakes and try again.
It's all about repetition. S p a c e d repetition, a concept we recently learned in class. The more times you do something over a long period of time, the more natural it becomes and the better you get it.
Thus, as you can see, after only a semester of having an independent project, we've modified its structure twice. Who knows? It may take up to three semesters to find a structure that really works, but that's ok, because the idea is that we learn through each "repetition".
Finding a proper system that allows us to keep track of our blog entries has also been a big problem ever since we started the year. For a while we thought that setting a fixed number of blog entries a month, eight in our case, was the best way to make sure everyone was keeping up with their blogs. At the end of the month we would check to see who had kept up with their eight blogs. This system didn't work because there were weeks in which we weren't reflecting at all, and weeks were we were blog binging.
We wanted a balanced system, and after trying several throughout the year, I feel like we just found the right one.
In class we have a chart on the board where we receive two checks a week, one on Monday and one on Thursday. Therefore, every week you have to have at least two blog entries, the one due on Monday which reflects on Thursdays class, and the one due on Thursday which reflects on Mondays class.
If I've learned anything it's that finding "systems" that work takes time, it took us an entire semester to find one for our blogs. But every time we "fell" of our bike, every time we realized that a structure didn't work for us, we simply got back up and tried again, using what we had "learned" from our previous fall to avoid falling the same way.
As you may have realized, for each of these projects it's not that we we learned what worked and what didn't work in the blink of an eye, we learned through experience and failure. You can say that we fell off the bike hundreds of time--we even scraped our knees--but every fall taught us something different about the way we work as a class and individuals. And like I did when I first learned how to use a bike, instead of quitting after the first fall, I got back up, together with the class, and tried again.