Maybe there are some good ideas buried in those textbooks, after all.

I was doing homework for my (summer school) speech class today, reading from a textbook about how to improve one's listening skills. The writing for the most part is efficient, scientific, and dry as dust. As I read, however, I realized that some of the ideas sounded familiar:

There are four major techniques [for remembering information]. The first is organization. Find a pattern, structure, order, plan, format, or framework.

Of course, I said to myself, because the mind feeds upon ideas. If you understand the overall structure of a thing, every detail of it will make more sense and you will be able to remember the whole more easily, because you will know how each piece fits within the whole. CM knew that: she didn't hold with the classical method, which taught facts first and ideas later; she started with ideas, and let the facts follow them. I thought to myself, "Ha! A CM reference!" and kept reading. The next sentence:

The second is association. Make the things you want to remember relate to each other or to categories you already understand. Group them, if possible.

Well, certainly, I said. Education is the science of relations, after all.

The third technique is vizualization. Picturing what you want to remember creates a strong, vivid memory of it.

This sounded quite prosaic and scientific until I got about halfway through and realized that all it means is use your imagination. I began to get curious. Were there any more good ideas beneath all that scientific language? I read on:

The fourth is repetition. When you repeat ideas, you burn them into your memory.

At this point I threw up my hands and laughed--or at least, I would have if I had been the sort of chap who does such things. An old truism, and one that sounds suspiciously like habit formation, to boot. I suppose I must reassess my position on textbooks a little. I still hold that they are mostly dead and require Miracle Max or a reader trained in CPR to breathe any life into them. After today, however, I must admit that they at least know where to go to find good ideas. Even if they do it unintentionally.