I'm writing a essay arguing about something which I haven't decided, and telling more stories in the essay than talking abt the significance of the stories.. screwy once again.. need a lot more work on it..

This psyc professor talked about his research on learning and memory. According to his research, ok a bit hard to explain. Firstly, if you revise something after you learn it, you'll remember the thing better. That's quite obvious, that's why we all revise. The time between the learning and revising, however, determines how long you can remember the thing. And according to his research, the optimum gap between learning and revising is 10% of the time you want to remember the thing for. Which means if you want to remember something for 10h, you should do the revision 1h after you learn it, and after 10h, you'll still remember it. After that, not so sure, most likely you'll forget it.

So let's look at the education systems now. Quarter system. 10 weeks per quarter. Let's say there's 1 final exam that covers everything you've learnt in this quarter, and you study right before it, so there's about 10 weeks' time between learning and revision. Acc to his predictions, you'll be able to remember stuff in this course for 100 weeks, that's about 2 years. A levels system, 2 year syllabus, 1 final exam at the end. 2 years time between learning and revision. You'll be able to remember the stuff for 20 years.

I'm not sure how accurate this 10% thing is, but I certainly remember A levels stuff better than my psychology stuff last quarter. Is the British system better then? Americans have been surviving on this kind of quarter/ semester system since middle school? Do they learn less? I would say probably. Haha. But of course the 2yr syllabus also has many many assessments in the middle, so you study for the same thing over and over again, and remember it better. Then for science and math courses, you have to build further learning on foundations, so you'll always need to know how to solve x2 +2x + 1 = 4.. and because of all the practice, you'll remember it very well. Also when you forget something, say in a psychology course, when you relearn it the 2nd time, not revision, but totally forgot and have to relearn, it takes a shorter time to learn. So you did make some marks in your brain when you learn stuff.

Ok, enough about this psychology stuff. I think it's pretty interesting. =)

There's this guy in my Hum class. He's really smart. 1 of the few brilliant Americans I've met here. He's the only person other than my seniors recommending me to take Nesbitt, he even recommended her class to a computer engineer who wants to take a bio course. That's a bit crazy but anyway this smart guy got an A for her class. You know how you'll roughly know where the brains come from in a discussion class, like in 3f during gp, can see how sophisticated wang ning's arguments are.. These kind of people just ooze intelligence.. ok a bit gross.. Like how we want beef to diffuse some of her geniusness to us all.. haha. Anyway you get the point. So with him in our group for debate, we thrashed the opposition. Just amazed at how he puts all my unlinked, unrelated ideas into a coherent argument. If only he writes my essay for me, save all my trouble. Haha.

"You don't seem to know what you're doing, but you're doing a pretty good job of it" ~John about my Hum thesis
I wanted to quote some other people, but I forgot.. Not paying attention much in lectures..