Author: christopherlmcdonald (Page 3 of 3)

Like many my age, I have moved around a lot. This has meant many different schools and a typical assortment of jobs for someone not clear on how important experience is for competing in the job market. Who knew that you needed experience in a field to get into the field?

At the same time, I do not regret these experiences, and I have been able to use the skills from entry-level positions in projects as diverse as plumbing and archives. The most important factor? I knew people who cared enough to give me a shot. Thanks to their generosity, I know how to speak German, plumb a kitchen, build an archive, and identify enough plants to keep me alive for a little while outside. Needless to say, I want to learn more.

Time to become a teacher!

An Exploration of Memory (Part 2)

September 24, 2021 / christopherlmcdonald / 0 Comments

On September 21st, I could only remember some lines of the poem. The ones which were most difficult for me to memorize last Friday, like the second stanza, were the easiest to recall this time around. The final stanza seemed strangely opaque, even though the last two lines did return to me after a little thought. Overall, my memorization technique of brute force appears to have been insufficient to lock the poem in mind for the long term. Thinking about the poem allowed me to recall through rhyming associations, and for some reason “easy wind” and “downy flake” emerged over time, but I had no mental structures within which to place the images. Were I to have waited longer, I would likely have forgotten much more of the poem.

After noticing how limited my brute force techniques are, I began my first attempt with the method of loci. Following the instructions, I decided to use a building I know quite well: my workplace. Because of all the time I have spent searching for items in various nooks and crannies there, locations and pathways are easy to construct and recall in mind. For the sake of brevity, I have started with just twenty locations. In the future I plan to add more.

Basement bathroom mirror
Recycling room
Parking elevator door
Upstairs lobby sign
Lobby bench
Showroom front desk
Cash tray drawer
Showroom supervisor’s cupboard
Hallway dead end door
Mezzanine keypad
Moen no-charge parts
Delta tub spouts
Aluminum roof stacks
Grohe cartridges
Shower rods in the corner
American Standard Amarilis cartridges
Toto Washlet adapters
Lunchroom fridge
Lunchroom locker
Lunchroom television

To test how well these work, I placed the first twenty digits of pi into the locations (3.1415926535 8979323846). With each one, I used dramatic, interactive imagery to ensure that they remain vivid. For example, with the first location, I imagine bashing in the mirror with a giant, metallic number one:

Broken Reflection by Ryan McGilchrist CC BY-SA (augmented as per license)

I also tend to associate colours with my numbers, meaning they stand out clearly from the surrounding. Although it took nearly 30 minutes to construct the route, using it was easy. Unlike with the brute method approach, I felt generally calm as I traced the digits. Each time their images came to mind the moment I arrived at the relevant place, almost as though I were simply finding them rather than remembering them. What a breeze!

EdTech Reflection 1: Open Education Resources

September 21, 2021 / christopherlmcdonald / 0 Comments

Tutorial

Navigating the open education resources tutorial was not just informative, it also provided me with some tools to use as a teacher. Following the advice of the tutorial, I have started a document recording resources available to use under creative commons licensing.

In my case, I have used Excel to produce the document, mainly because of its versatility for searching and organizing functions. Four headings have proven useful: Date Found, Attribution (info), Topic, and Related Metadata. As materials accumulate, I will be able to sort the line items according to each column.

Excel provides a range of ways to sort, which allows me to select which column and method of sorting I will use.

The end result will shift the order of items, allowing me to organize and search my resources in a variety of useful ways. Later on, I may add more details to the “Related Metadata” in order to make specific resources even easier to find.

I look forward to using these resources for future lesson plans, especially in the context of up-and-coming projects like my unit on Plumbing and Society. This unit will be useful for combining practical and social questions. In theory, this will allow more students to participate in meaningful ways in their communities.

One area worth exploring, for example, is the significance of backflow prevention for ensuring clean drinking water. Knowledge of the technology can help students grasp the concrete factors that make it such an important issue, especially for Indigenous communities in Canada. This knowledge can also raise awareness of a process many largely take for granted.

Creative Commons Resource

Cbrieeze. Vacuum Breaker Diagram. CC BY-SA

This diagram shows one of the most common ways of preventing water from siphoning back into your system. The valve closes automatically when water begins to flow in the opposite direction of normal. For my class, I will pair this diagram with a few different vacuum breakers and show students how to assemble the part in a broader system.

An Exploration of Memory (Part 1)

September 17, 2021 / christopherlmcdonald / 0 Comments

Introduction

Since I was little, I have always struggled to remember names. They simply do not stick for me. Even after I have presumably mastered someone’s name, having known it for a year or more without fail, I only need a few months for it to fall out of mind again.

The problem is: this phenomenon is not confined to names. I have spent around ten years acquiring post-secondary degrees, and yet my recollection of facts learned during that time is spotty at best. Certain features seem to stick, but I cannot for the life of me recall much detail after a certain amount of time. Those topics I continue to engage with remain, but everything else falls away much like uranium decays into lead.

Thankfully, my fate is not sealed, at least not according to Boris Dresler and Boris Nikolai Konrad. When they scanned the brains of 23 world-class memorizers and compared them with 23 ordinary folks, they found little to no difference between them. What this suggests is that anyone can train their memories to superhuman levels. Perhaps even someone like me can succeed!

I am going to put these questions to the test: Can a person who struggles to remember things learn to memorize more efficiently and effectively? Will I be able to improve my short- and long-term memory abilities by adopting the techniques of memory athletes? What techniques will be most effective?

To test these, I will document my progress, starting by documenting a baseline of my abilities and recording my progress each following week. While the experiment will be far from scientifically rigorous, since the way I measure progress will probably evolve over time, documenting the journey will provide some useful qualitative markers of what it’s like to learn how to memorize.

Baseline

Finding the tests to try took some time, but I came up with three. The first two come from an article devoted to mental fitness. The last one I made up after reading through a few posts from a website devoted to memory athletics.

Test #1:

I started with a short term memory test based on letters. The screen provided a series of letters for a period of three seconds, increasing the number I needed to memorize with each consecutive trial. After looking at them for three seconds I had to record the ones I remembered.

I managed to recall 100% of the letters up to ten letters, but the twelve-letter trial confounded my abilities. For some reason I recalled the last seven instead of the first five.

Test #2:

Next I tried a picture-based quiz, which tests your ability to recall a page of images after thirty seconds of viewing. With twenty images in total, I only managed to recall four. The experience was familiar. I locked up and felt unable to concentrate on the images or place them in my memory. Needless to say, I performed terribly!

Test #3:

Finally, I tried to see how long it might take me to memorize a short, beginner poem without any training. For some this might be an easy task, but I struggled to concentrate (I was trying to memorize after a long day of studying). Thankfully I managed to memorize the text to a rough level in 14 minutes, 41 seconds, and 10 milliseconds.

The poem was easier to reproduce in writing than by recitation. The punctuation is probably wrong, but the wording seems correct. What was most difficult were the middle stanzas. The last one took the least amount of time, perhaps because of the repeating lines. I seem to struggle with long sentences more.