On Teaching

Written on Saturday, April 02, 2005 While I was doing some spiritual reading this morning, I occasionally re-read certain important passages, which got me thinking about the value of repetition. It’s amazing how helpful it can be to simply repeat something, especially if we are engaged in a learning process of some sort. This morning I wanted to understand the significance of what I was reading, so I just re-read the passages several times, and the more I repeated the reading, the better I understood. It’s almost a mathematical formula: the more you repeat something, the better you learn it. After I had thought about this for a few moments, I looked up the word “repeat” in the American Heritage Dictionary, and was surprised to discover that it derived from the word for “strive after”. I also noted that the words “compete”, “appetite”, and “perpetual” derive from the same root. So, when I repeat an activity in order to better learn or understand it, I am striving after understanding because I have a hunger, or appetite, for it. In a sense, I am competing with ignorance in order to defeat it, or perhaps I am competing with myself to see how much I can learn. I constantly compete with myself in order to become a better teacher, and I can use these thoughts about repetition in order to improve my work in the classroom. I simply need to remember how important repetition is in any learning process. Whether it’s understanding a poem or learning how to use a gerund in writing, repetition is always an enormous help. Often it’s as simple as that: just repeating the action a few times can bring a surprising amount of mastery.