学习怎样学习

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2020年07月23日

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学习怎样学习

“与其用2个小时做这些作业，为什么不打盹15分钟，给大脑充电，然后用1个小时做完它呢？”FT专栏作家Simon Kuper说，这样一堂重要的关于如何学习的课，如果早有人教我该多好。Kuper还说，在离开学校后他悟出了好几个关于学习方法的心得。他要把这篇文章给女儿看，让她有种。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

phalanx 趾骨；方阵；密集队形

porousporous 多孔渗水的；能渗透的

slog 苦干，跋涉

epidemiology 流行病学；传染病学

oodles of 大量的

the Battle of Hastings 1066年，诺曼底公爵William the Conqueror在黑斯廷斯战役中击败了盎格鲁-萨克森贵族，随后进军伦敦并加冕为英格兰国王。

cognitive 认知的认识的

Eureka 有了！我找到了！据传，阿基米德在洗澡时发现了浮力原理后立即跑到大街上大喊Eureka.

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If only I’d been taught to learn

Techniques for remembering are essential study tools - taking a nap is another

* * *

I still remember the boy who, on his first day of school, had to be carried bodily into class by a phalanx of teachers and parents. As the other six-year-olds sat brightly at their desks, he sobbed: “I don’t want to go to school!”

Looking back decades later, he was quite right. My 12 years at school were boring and mostly pointless. I barely remember a thing I was taught after learning to read and count. I learnt more about how to write from George Orwell’s 14-page essay “Politics and the English Language” than in all my school years. Nor was I taught much by way of reasoning (which may, of course, be why I’ve ended up a columnist). I wasted the years when my brain was still fairly porous. This experience is probably common but it might all have been different if only someone had taught me one crucial skill: how to learn. Now that my daughter is seven, and setting off on the long slog, I’m planning to issue her with the crucial information beforehand.

Schools, like offices, are structured around the notion of facetime. The easiest thing to measure is that you are there, and so they measure that. In my day, 30 kids of different abilities and concentration spans were crammed into a room with sealed windows, while a teacher wrote things on a blackboard. We were taught stuff every day – but never how to absorb it. And yet the basics of how to learn are so simple that they can be transmitted in an 800-word column.

The main study tool I learnt as an adult is: nap. Scholars of sleep agree that a brief nap can recharge the brain. “A nap as short as 10 minutes can significantly improve alertness,” says Maurice Ohayon, director of Stanford University’s sleep epidemiology research centre. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Albert Einstein all knew this.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find out until I was grown up. As a teenager you need oodles of sleep, and many school mornings I was too tired to learn (especially aged 16, when I decided I could train myself to cope on four hours’ sleep). The lesson I never had was, “Instead of trying to do two hours of homework now, sleep for 15 minutes and then do it all in an hour.”

In my work flat in Paris today, my key pieces of office furniture are my sofa and blanket. But I grew up in countries where naps were considered proof of laziness instead of productivity boosters. The ignorance persists: according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management in 2010, only 5 per cent of American employers had an on-site “nap room” (often probably just a couple of sticky mattresses lying side by side).

Years after leaving school, I made my second belated discovery about learning: how to remember. (Memorising is another skill that becomes almost pointless after school but, again, it’s easy to measure, so schools measure it.) My breakthrough came at a picnic in Central Park, New York. My then girlfriend was complaining to a friend that whenever she mentioned a past quarrel to me, I couldn’t remember it. She always had to tell me what we’d quarrelled about, before explaining why I’d been wrong. The friend, who was a brain surgeon, asked the girlfriend: “Do you keep a diary?” “Yes,” said the girlfriend. “That’s why you remember,” said the brain surgeon. The girlfriend engraved the experience on her memory by repeating it.

It turns out you remember things through periodic repetition – and not through one night’s frantic cramming just before the test. For instance, if you want to remember that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, revise the fact for one minute every evening for a week, instead of for 10 minutes on the last evening. Periodic repetitions imprint it on your brain. This is the “spacing effect”, which the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in 1885. I discovered it too late.

Tej Samani, founder of Performance Learning, a British company that helps students to learn, has a favourite technique that uses the spacing effect. To remember the date 1066, for instance, write it on a Post-it note on your bedroom window. You will see it every day – and through repetition you will come to associate “1066” with “window”. If you think “window”, you remember 1066. Samani’s students have facts and formulas stuck up around their bedrooms. “I’m a huge believer in learning without putting too much effort in,” he says. “People judge success based on, ‘I did 15 hours of revision this week.’ Brilliant. How much of it do you remember? Maybe an hour.”

You often make the best discoveries in one sudden cognitive leap. I still remember the moment, aged 14, when I finally grasped, after months of exhausted incomprehension, that the third line on the graph represented the third dimension. Perhaps my daughter will have that same “Eureka” feeling when I make her read this column.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1. Talking about memory... when did the Battle of Hastings take place?

a. 1066.

b. 1215.

c. 1649.

d. 1688.

2. What is correct about nap?

a. When he was young, the writer often took naps in classes.

b. There is no scientific evidence that naps are productivity boosters.

c. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Albert Einstein slept only 4 hours a day.

d. Americans generally consider naps as proof of laziness.

3. What does the writer say about schools?