Combating Summer Brain Drain - Part I

Imagine learning an entire new interface at work or going to training to learn policies or regulations and then taking two-and-a-half months off.

Imagine taking a semester course in Chinese, then not picking up your book for 10 weeks.  

What about how your new phone works, someone's name, the great book you wanted to quote to your colleagues?  Imagine getting distracted from any of these things for a whole season.  

It's laughable to think we would remember any relatively new information that we hadn't touched for 10 weeks.  Summer break, meet cognitive regression.

Taking two-and-a-half months "off" from learning, then expecting children to pick up where they left off is entirely unnatural.  The newer the information, the more likely it is to be lost. (Goodbye everything from April and May.)

The more complex the information, the more likely it is to be lost. (Goodbye most challenging information.)  

The bigger the struggle to wrap your head around something, the more likely it is to be lost.  (Goodbye major battles and tutoring dollars.)  

The only ways to retain information during a long “off” period is if the information actually changed the brain (Piaget called this assimilation/accommodation/organization) through high-quality learning during the year or to continue to work with the concepts until the brain has transformed around them. This doesn't have to be summer school or four hours of daily workbooks in the kitchen.

Stay tuned next week for Part II of “Combating Summer Brain Drain.”

Want to get a glimpse of students engaged in learning? Come visit The Fulton School where our students are at the center of all we do.