I read a post at OHMommy’s blog (Classy Chaos) today (Our Kumon story…) and though I rarely comment on her blog, it brought me back to a cool place today and I had to. I thought I’d share that here. I copied & pasted it directly from her comments section and then added a bit more as it came to me here.
“I don’t comment much but I wanted to speak up and say that this post made me smile today.”
I grew up in the 80’s in the country and Kumon was not an option for me. I hated math, until my Dad started making worksheets for me. He’d allow me to stay up one minute later for each math problem I’d do and get correct. I learned SO much by the repetition and was enthusiastic about it because of the reward.
I have a German degree, so repetition and memorization have been a huge part of my educational life and I absolutely agree with it. I dreaded it while in college because I had a professor who would make us translate entire stories from English into German and back again - often without dictionaries - grading us on our accuracy. It was hard. I cried. I learned so much from this professor, though. For me, repetition and memorization works.
Though, I also agree with Pauline that it’s not for everybody. Think about what you have learned through repetition and memorization, though. It’s kinda amazing to think about, for me, at least.
How do you learn?
