From: WOODLAB@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: Dreams, Stories, and Learning
Organization: C.C.S.O.
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 18:01:44 GMT

In article <1993Jan5.235912.15273@tcsi.com>
miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.) writes:
 
>
>I'm beginning to wonder about the connection between dreams, stories,
>and learning.
>
>------- STORIES AND LEARNING
>
>I just read an article in Whole Earth Review that I thought was very
>interesting.  It's about a teaching technique that seems to be getting
>miraculous results -- things like 4-year-old retarded kids with IQs as
>low as 20 learning how to read.
>
>The gist of the technique is to build a little story around each new
>small cluster of material.  Letters of the alphabet are learned by
>building the letters out of some basic shapes, making up a strange
>and funny story that provides clues to pronunciation.  Before learning
>anything like the whole alphabet, words are built out of the letters
>learned, again with each couched in the context of some story.  Very
>little is done by rote.
>
>The results teachers are getting with this are so profound as to scare
>them -- some teachers are backing off from it, because the kids are
>"getting too smart."
>
>Oddly, the technique corresponds to one I learned from a course in
>Chinese characters: to build each character out of pieces, into a
>story, where each piece might have its own story (or be a primitive
>element.  The important thing was: the story had to be STRANGE.
>In some ways, the less logical, the better.  In fact, it's exactly
>the same technique.
>
>In some ways, this is not surprising.  Spoken stories had huge
>survival value in prehistoric times.  The Songlines in Australia
>served as a map and navigation system for the aborigines for
>thousands of years.  American Indian tribes had memorizers for
>their huge geneologies.  The ability of humans to remember vast
>quantities of narrative material goes relatively untapped in
>modern times.
>
>------- STORIES AND DREAMS
>
>Both American Indians and Australian Aborigines (and countless
>stone-age cultures elsewhere, I'm sure) are known to revere dreams.
>
>------- DREAMS AND LEARNING
>
>I also read recently that REM sleep is very important to retention
>of learned material.  There is something in dreams that helps us
>learn.
>
>------- STORIES, DREAMS, AND LEARNING: A PARADOX.
>
>Strange stories help us learn.
>
>Dreams are nothing if not strange stories.
>
>Dreams (in some way not yet understood) also help us learn.
>
>And yet, DREAMS THEMSELVES ARE HARD TO REMEMBER!
>
>
>------- AFTERTHOUGHT
>
>The purported inventor of the Chinese character (kanji) learning
>technique I mentioned above said that after a while, it didn't matter
>if you couldn't remember the stories after a while, as long as you
>used the stories to finally memorize the characters permanently.
>
>I wonder how much of what we "know" is imprinted on us through
>unremembered stories?  And how many of these unremembered stories
>are our own almost-immediately-forgotten dreams?
>
>Followups to alt.dreams, only please.  (Heisig's kanji-learning
>technique is a recurrent flame topic in sci.lang.japan.)
>---
>Michael Turner
>miket@tcs.com
I totally disagree with everything this article states - it's
purely communist infiltration of the press and publications.
Bye......
 
Zoe
The Champaign Cat Killer