I have a history background
and I should know better. But here's the
deal:
I can never remember the difference
between
longitude and latitude. To me,
longitude should be like going long and
it should be wide and
latitude should be a ladder going up.
So
I think longitude are the lines that go
this way and latitude is that way.
Actually I'm thinking now I'm wrong.
I don't know. See, already I'm
forgetting it and I think
maybe five minutes ago I tried to
relearn it. I've already forgotten it.
I bring this up because this is
actually a common phenomenon.
We get two corresponding things confused
often through a process called
"interference." You see it all the time.
I know a lot of adults who don't know
the difference between an
x-axis and a y-axis. Now, the x-axis
is the independent variable the y-axis
is the result of it (the
dependent variable). But when you see the
equation y=mx+b
you often will think
that the
y is the driver of it. Sometimes
you just get confused with the x and the y
and
what goes where. Right? You see this
all the time.
It's why certain people can never
remember which one represents Yen
and which one represents Yang. This is a
really common phenomenon.
It happens every time that you teach
two things
that are related to each other; that are
often complementary
but in a way that doesn't necessarily
make sense, in terms of
the vocabulary. You have this
interference thing that goes
on back and forth where it becomes hard
to remember which
one is which. The truth of the matter
is it's easy to get
two different things that are related to
each other confused.
I should know because i'm a twin and
when I say "a twin" I mean I have
somebody identical who looks like me. I'm
not a baseball player. I wish
I was a Twin. That would be awesome to be
on the Minnesota Twins but the bottom
line is I get it. People confuse me
all the time with my brother. Even as an
adult when we've gone out
it happens. The same thing is true with
fiction and non-fiction.
On the surface fiction could sound
like
"fact" and non-fiction would sound like
"not fact" and therefore
you get confused. As a second-grader
or a third-grader
you're getting lost on which one is
which. I know I didn't
really truly get the difference between
fiction and non-fiction
until maybe the fifth- or sixth-grade and
even then I kept getting it tripped up.
I just kept using it and using it
until I finally
got it. Again those two ideas are
opposite but they're very easy to get
confused.
This happens anytime you have two
binaries where the language
doesn't necessarily make sense from the
get-go.
If you compare, for example,
synchronous and asynchronous,
synchronous sounds like synchronized
swimming. We get it. We know it.
It's "in the moment." Asynchronous is just
making it not true.
Adding an "a" to it. So, of course
asynchronous and
synchronous will not cause a
lot of interference.
So what do we do about this as educators?
How do we avoid
interference? Well it actually works to
teach
one concept first and then teach the
opposite concept
way later. I'll give an example.
The x-axis and y-axis. I noticed that
students really struggled with this when
I taught middle school.
So when I taught 8th grade math, linear
equations,
x and y, we would really not get into
that until the
second quarter. Actually end of second
quarter, almost third quarter.
So the very first week of school I
taught students about the
x-axis and we actually learned it
through science.
It was the independent variable now
they asked, "Is there anything
related to x? Is there a dependent
variable?" And I said, "Yeah but we won't
get into that until
way later." So I did a concept
attainment lesson. I taught the
vocabulary
and they solidified the idea that the
the piece that you control
in an experiment, in any kind of an
equation, is
this thing of x. Then we would solve
for x and we practiced that
and they had a real deep conceptual
understanding and
a good vocabulary understanding of the
x-axis;
so that they can then later on learn
about the y-axis.
There was no confusion. I said,
"Remember how you learned the x-axis? We
have that down.
There's this opposite thing now called
the y-axis."
It's important because we we tend to to
think,
"Let's teach all of those things together
and see how they interact with each
other."
But what that can do is that can create
confusion. So the more we can do this--
isolate those two complementary ideas
and teach them
separately and then put them together in
a composite way --
the better off we'll be in terms of
avoiding interference.
so there we have it this is not
something that happens all the time
but if you can think of moments where
students are confusing two different
terms
just separate those things out um you
know
early on in the year and later on in the
year focus on
understanding the vocabulary and the
concept of one first and then
teach the other one later and you'll
find that it's going to work a lot
better.
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