In a way, I have a few of those ring boxes stored in a shoe box for motor neurons. While I am no neuroanatomy expert, I do have an organizational scheme for some of this information. So when I see motor neuron, I’ve already chunked a bunch of extra information and understanding with that one concept.
Let’s take a different example, that probably makes more sense to people. What if we were talking about baseball? Here, I’m the novice…
“On the sharply hit 6–4 bouncer, observe how the shortstop initiates the double-play sequence by executing a momentum-efficient, closed-hip gather before transferring through a high-spin, wrist-pronated pivot to the second baseman, who—already positioned in a shallow, anti-handoff depth aligned with probabilistic spray charts—finishes the turn with a sub-0.4-second pop-release optimized for arm-slot continuity and downstream kinetic-chain stability to complete the 6–4–3 twin killing.” – chatGPT
To be clear, this is nonsense to me. I read that first line and have to stop at “double-play” and ask:
Two runs?
Two hits?
Two bases?
Two outs?
That’s a ring box that I’m going to have to memorize.
As educators, we are helping students to organize their knowledge not just so that they can regurgitate it on a test but because organized knowledge changes the way that we perceive the world. We are able to hold onto more so that we can reason and problem-solve with more information at our fingertips.
Well-organized knowledge also fundamentally changes the way that we process the world. A chess master sees the next move instead of scattered pieces, my husband sees safety violations when he walks into a warehouse, I see possible test anxiety, sleep patterns, and study habits when a student chats with me about how they’re doing.
But it is critical that we recognize where students are so that we are not forcing them to memorize those isolated bits of information. With careful scaffolding students can build. This is related to the concept of expertise reversal: the idea that novices need someone to help them make sense of things. They learn best when they are given that foundational knowledge, when they are explicitly taught. Experts, with the foundation laid, expand their knowledge best when they are given the opportunity to reason and problem solve. They learn best with more inquiry-related methods of teaching.
Final note
I’ve been throwing around the words expert and novice, which turn out to be relatively jargon-heavy words. What do they actually mean? In this context, it’s all relative. I am a relative novice when it comes to Roblox. My son is a relative expert. I need him to explain to me what we’re doing and how to play a game (don’t worry, we play together and parental settings are very much on). He gets frustrated by that because he wants to get in there and explore. As educators, our job is to take our students from that state of relative novice to relative expert, building on areas where they already have organized knowledge.
This is hard work. This is the hard work of education. But if we do this well, we have the opportunity to create more equitable classrooms where we don’t leave some of our students behind because we were tossing them ring boxes while the rest of the class was sitting happily with their shoe boxes.
Too far?
