Weird Beats Normal

November 06, 2018 / Oskar Cymerman

“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be”

— John Lennon

Weird is good

Once, in the Dark Ages of my teaching a student said to me: You’re weird.

I was offended. The young professional me tried so hard to be the normal teacher every kid would like and learn from. Instead, I was weird.

I didn’t realize it then but now I know it was a compliment. Regardless of the motivations behind his statement - the student might have liked me and wanted to give me props or, more likely, thought my ways were strange - being called weird is often a good thing.

To be fair, on any day other than Halloween being creepy-weird or spooky-weird is mostly bad. But unusual, unorthodox, unconventional, outlandish, mysterious, surreal, supernatural, and sometimes seemingly-crazy have a lot of appeal with kids and adults.

Sure, we call things and people weird to communicate our disapproval of them. But consider Picasso’s art - cubism, surrealism, and fluid clocks. Weird but great. Benjamin Franklin took air baths - he’d spend his mornings butt-naked reading or writing. Not your typical morning routine but that dude’s face figures on a $100 bill all the while all others assumed they have to put in time at the Oval Office to get in your wallet. And just look at that lion’s mane Albert Einstein called his hair. His contemporaries were probably weary of small animals jumping out of there and yet, just inches underneath lied a brilliant tool that greatly contributed to our understanding of the universe.

Weird is where it’s at.

Weird is more memorable

I recently showed my chemistry students how to use a memory palace (method of loci) to remember 14 concepts for the vocabulary quiz. I told them that they will remember the concepts better if they strive to understand not just memorize them. If you’re a teacher I’m sure you’ve given that same speech ad nauseam too.

Two weeks later, the mean score was 70 percent.

On one hand, 70 percent is the average the educational system is built for. It is often used as the acceptability benchmark. It’s “good enough.” The 70% kid will be able to follow his boss’ directions and perform the job. He won’t be a societal parasite. He won’t stand out either but he’ll be a productive citizen. He’ll be normal. Check.

On the other hand, do I really want to look away and accept mediocrity as the norm?

I can’t. I won’t. It’s because too frequently normal participates but doesn’t create. A whole lot of normal and only a tiny bit of weird got us to today. It is the weird, not the normal that drives progress. So lets subtract normal, add weird, and innovate.

But it won’t be easy. Conditioned habits are hard to replace. Myths we buy into and keep retelling die hard. Many of my students did badly on the vocab quiz I mentioned before because they were “normal.” They studied the usual way. They did what they always do and they got what they always get. They averaged 70 percent.

This might be related to how we teach them - the methods we teach and don’t teach in class. A normal high school junior has undergone some 10 years of conditioning to do things a certain way in school; the regular way. Some are still stuck on studying the normal way - rereading textbooks and notes. Others use flashcards, which albeit less so, is still a primitive recall method that utilizes only written language. Only a few students visualize what they’re learning because somehow their imaginations pointed out the better path to learning - the not so normal way.

Most teachers don’t explicitly teach students to visualize the concepts they’re learning. After all, this is not the way we were taught ourselves. I myself only started preaching to my students to always turn written definitions into mental pictures about 3 years ago. This is especially important when we are dealing with abstract concepts such as the ones that appear in science curricula.

However, converting concepts into visuals can and should be done with all information a student (or anyone else) needs to understand and remember.

There are two reasons for this. One, letters and numbers are abstractions. Two, the human mind has evolved to process in images.

Our Minds Prefer Images

How did you learn that a tree is a tree? I’m no psychic but I bet it looked something like the following. You were about 2 and walking about your habitat with mom or dad or both and you saw this big thick brown stick with a whole lot of green on it. You pointed at it. That’s a tree honey! said mom. Twee! you repeated enthusiastically.

The next several times you saw a tree you’d point at it and say twee! Your little brain encoded the image and the name your language associated with it. And if you speak a different-than-English first language than your mind encoded the sound as something else. For example, prior to coming to the US it was “drzewo” to me - the Polish word for tree. But the image was the same as yours and barring a traumatic brain injury neither of us is ever forgetting what a tree is or what one might look like. We can imagine and describe one in crazy vivid detail on a dime and think nothing of it.

And crazy vivid is where it’s at when it comes to learning. But, it’s often perceived as weird.

Turn the Abstract Into the Understandable

Perhaps I should have but I did not make it mandatory for my students to create a memory palace for the vocabulary they were going to be quizzed on. I did not want to collect my students’ “palaces” and grade them. After all, the idea was for the kids to store them in their minds and use them to rehearse the quiz concepts.

As I walked around the room that day, I noticed that maybe one half of the students took my advice and worked on creating memory palaces on paper or the classroom dry erase tables. Others defaulted to lists or flashcards.

Oh well. I imagine unlearning flashcards or definition lists and replacing them with mental movies is similar to trying to walk backwards after doing it the normal way for 15 years. The difference is that walking forward is already more efficient than crabbing your way through the world while the old school flashcards and rereading are not the most efficient way to learn vocabulary. Visual methods are. Memory palaces are. But the student minds perceive these unfamiliar methods as weird. And they are right - they are weird. But weird is the way.

Even the students who followed my advice and created memory palaces defaulted to studying the old school way. Most did not go back to their mental palaces to rehearse the information. When I asked most admitted to not using their palace.

Perhaps they were unclear on how to use it or uncomfortable with it or unconvinced that it will help. Perhaps some used it but their visualizations weren’t weird enough.

Nelson Dellis, a six-foot-six 4-time US Memory Champion suggests adding the three ingredients - Sensory Overload, Grotesque Absurdity, and Moveable Attributes - to the visuals one imagines to make them more memorable.

Sure enough, all three ingredients are full of weird. Imagine what a pizza looks like. Then overload the senses by trying to imagine what it smells, tastes, feels, and sounds like. Make it grotesque by imagining the red sauce is actually scalding-hot blood that’s dripping from a dismembered cartoon rat that’s been tied to the pizza and tortured. And by the way, the rat is still moving - the poor thing is screaming and squirming while the red sauce is bubbling and sizzling all around like lava adding to its misery.

Now, try to get that image out of your head. If you imagined it in the first place, you can’t. You remember every gory detail. Maybe you felt sickened and compelled to make a PETA donation or maybe you thought WTF is wrong with you Cymerman! But the truth is - the human mind remembers weird stuff best - crazy, grotesque, emotionally-scarring, gross, graphic, absurd - take your pick, or better yet pick all of the above and teach your students to remember better.

So next time someone tells me I’m weird I’ll be ready. It’ll go like this:

Someone: Dude, you’re weird.

Me: How I roll homes. You better recognize!

Don’t fear the weird. Be weird. Teach weird. It beats normal and is unforgettable.

And check out Nelson Dellis’ book Remember It! for more gory, grotesque, and weird descriptions of many memory and learning techniques you and your kids can benefit from.

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categories / Learning
tags / teaching teens, parenting teens, deeper learning, independence, lifelong learning, simplicity, skills, success skills, learning, making life easier, kids

Writing the Wrongs

October 18, 2018 / Oskar Cymerman

I’m wrong a lot. I think we all are. I have a hard time admitting it because of pride. But pride never gets me anywhere. It just makes things more difficult and goals more impossible. Then I get angry. And then… I do it all over again.

Sometimes, I’m wrong due to self-righteousness. I convince myself that I know how something should be done or viewed and work too hard to convert others to my point of view.

But the truth is that everyone lives a different life - one filled with their own experiences. So regardless of who my audience is - my students, my colleagues, or my friends - I need to remember to respect and validate their unique life experience and to always respect their choice to accept or reject my views.

Other times I just get it wrong professionally. I get excited about something - a new app or a way to teach. Then I implement it and it bombs. Such feedback calls for analysis.

I also catch myself doing things for wrong reasons. I started blogging and writing thinking that I want to one day make enough money writing to do it full time.

But the truth is that I enjoy writing. It allows me to slow down my mind and to write some of the wrongs - to reflect on my shortcomings and failures and to become a more thoughtful person. I hope that each such reflection helps me improve in some small way. Maybe with time these little improvements can add up to something big but I need to remind myself to be patient.

I also want to help students, parents, teachers, and other professionals with my writing. I get excited every time I create a tool or a resource that helps someone learn, or teach, or gain a skill and that is enough. No amount of money can bring on this excitement.

It is the rare life experiences that have the biggest impact because they break up the routine of the daily grind and help us look at why we do what we do.

A recent Fleetwood Mac concert reminded my wife and I that we don’t make enough time and effort to plan such experiences.

A phone call from an Illinois middle school assistant principal and her student reminded me of the reason I write. She asked me if she can make photocopies of some chapters of one of my books so her teachers can use them in their classrooms. I said yes, as long as it helps kids learn.

It felt right. It felt good.

It was so easy yet it eluded me for so long. But I’m righting this wrong right now through my writing. From now on until forever the e-book (PDF) versions of my education books will be free.

Like them or hate them.

Use them or don’t.

Here they are:

Crush School: Every Student's Guide To Killing It In The Classroom (And Teachers Dig It Too)

Crush School 2: 10 Study Secrets Every High Schooler Should Know

Crush School Student Guide: Learn Faster, Study Smarter, Remember More, and Make School Easier

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Learning Ad Infinitum

October 11, 2018 / Oskar Cymerman

“The ratio of something to nothing is infinite. So just do something.”

— Peter Diamandis

Ad Infinitum, a Chicago-based Death Metal Band formed in 1999. It split-up shortly thereafter. The founders probably intended to play together forever. But nothing lasts forever the saying goes.

Individuals die. Objects perish. But if people and things can’t live forever, can ideas?

No one makes plans to just cross days off their calendar of life and then slip away into nothingness. We strive to leave something behind; to make an impact. We want our ideas to live on. We want them to be significant enough that someone takes notice.

There is no one formula you can apply to find significance. There are many ways to increase your odds but having ideas is an essential part of every such formula. Volume is key - the more ideas of various kinds you generate the more of them will be good enough to share. But you must accept the fact that most of your ideas will be bad so that eventually a few of them will be great.

You must keep the volume up. This is what I keep reminding myself of and keep telling my students. Keep the ideas coming. Write them down. Test a few that seem viable. Ask other people what they think. Figure out the first step you can take to put an idea to life. Invest time not money into this idea. If it doesn’t work you lost nothing but gained everything.

If you created it, got feedback on it, researched about it, tried it, and failed… you learned. You’re getting closer. Even inching forward is moving forward - it beats standing still.

The key is to start coming up with many ideas, try them out, see them bomb, reflect on what happened, learn from it, rinse, and repeat.

Most of your ideas will suck but they will make a big difference. The few that don’t will make all the difference.

Ask your professional self: What are my ideas to improve my process? What am I doing with them?

If the answer is nothing you might be standing still. If you’re okay with that stay as you are. But if want to do something then do something.

This is mostly a pep talk to myself but if you’re at a crossroads and are lost like me it might be helpful to know that quantity is what eventually leads to quality.

So whatever it is you what to do - do it often, ideate with it, experiment with it, reflect on it, keep improving it and getting better at it. Learn Ad Infinitum.

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tags / teaching teens, parenting teens, deeper learning, independence, lifelong learning, simplicity, skills, success skills, learning, making life easier, kids