Chapter 1 Summary- Bob Gill

Chapter 1 Summary: “Why Don’t Students Like School?” Brains are basically not designed for thinking unless the cognitive conditions are right. Students can take pleasure in mental effort only if they are successful. (No Success = No Like) People are naturally curious, with brains designed mainly to see and to move efficiently. Thinking is slow, effortful, uncertain and unreliable, contrary to moving and seeing. The “candle and box of tacks” riddle made me believe they could be right. Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.” Machines can easily beat people when it comes to math and science. A computer chess game can beat 99% of the population, but the most powerful computer can’t drive a truck or walk on a rocky shore. The technique we use to get through the day with our unreliable brains is using memory, which is more reliable than thinking. Most of the situations we face are ones that we have solved before. Our memory is full of strategies that tell us what to do (like an autopilot). When someone says “think outside the box”, they mean to turn off your autopilot and do something “out-of-the norm”. This can be very exhausting.
Even though thinking is slow and effortful, people still like to think. Content is important to arouse interest (crossword puzzles vs. Algebra) but interesting content can still be presented in a boring and dull way. There is pleasure in mental activity, but if the activity is too easy or too difficult, the person loses interest. If students frequently get work that is too difficult, they will start to dislike school. So should teachers make the work easier for these students, or is there a way to make thinking easier? The way to make thinking easier takes a combination of these things; information from the environment (our surroundings full of problems, things to see and things to hear), adequate space in working memory (our consciousness that holds stuff we are thinking about), and facts and procedures in long-term memory (a storehouse of factual information about the world).
These are some of the strategies a teacher can do to help students experience success and make school more enjoyable: Check your lesson plans so that they are not just a list of teacher explanations that lack challenge for the students. Create lesson plans that start with information you want your students to know at the end. Make sure your students have appropriate background knowledge to complete the activity. Slow the pace if needed to avoid memory overloads. Make the material relevant to students. Develop questions that arouse the student’s curiosity to find the answer. Don’t give all students the same amount of work because all students differ in ability. When you find something that works, do it again and again. Keep a diary of your successes.