Teaching kids how to learn - Part 2
How I taught a classroom to use Anki Cards
This is part two of the story. BelowI jump right in to the middle of the lesson I taught to a middle/elementary classroom last week. TO best follow-along you will want to start with the first part of the lesson to be found here.
My plan is for the next post on this newsletter to be an update on how Everest is progressing towards the National History Bee. Then I plan to write about how to handle failure when kids are in competitions. Onto the post.
The Anki Solution
Anki software measures how well you remember everything you have used in Anki. It can predict based on your past performance how long it will take until you forget a specific card, and then it can bring back that card when you have a 10% chance of forgetting it. That allows you to maximize the number of things you remember per unit time spent trying to remember them.
You should be able to get through a card in 5-10 seconds (or less). So you can get through 30 cards in two-and-a-half to five minutes. Getting started is fast. Eventually you will need to review cards as well, so you need to block the time for the review cards as well. Generally you can expect to need one minute per day per new card introduced per day. Or said more simply, if you want to add 30 new facts to your memory per day, indefinitely, you need to commit 30 minutes per day to doing cards. That will give you ~11,000 new facts per year. Jeopardy has tested about 200,000 facts, but there are about 20,0000 that represent 80%+ of the questions. You can learn them all in about two years at 30-minutes per day.
If 30 minutes per day is too much, then you can do five facts per day (~2500 facts/year), or even 365 facts per year with a minute a day. Decide how much time you want to commit and stick to it. The key is consistency. But once you commit to it you can be confident those facts will stick, and they will stay with you forever.
The only questions are:
How much time do you want to spend
What facts do you want to learn
What to learn
You can choose to learn anything.
I gave the kids each a small notebook and pen, “If you hear something you want to remember, add it to your book. Then when you get back to your computer, add it to your Anki deck. Many adults hear something they want to remember and then they forget it. That does not have to be you. If you add it to your Anki deck and do your daily reviews, you will remember it forever. It is your new superpower. Adults can use their notepad on their phone, but you don’t have phones, so you get a physical notepad.”
I show them some things I have added to my virtual notepad (in a file called “add to anki”):
Samuel chase only Supreme Court justice to be impeached
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the only person on Jeopardy who had a clue where the answer was himself, and he got the question wrong (he thought it was a trick question)
Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle were good friends, but got in a fight when Houdini tried to convince Doyle that the mystic that was talking to Doyle’s dead mother was a fraud
Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster, “lived by the sea, died by the sea and was buried at sea”, was a reference to Francis Drake
Robert E Lee married George Washington’s grand daughter
James Madison and Zachary Taylor were 2nd cousins
The Golden 13 were the first black American officers in the navy, and it happened due to a push by Eleanor Roosevelt
Nothing special, just cool things I had heard in the last week that I decided I did not want to forget, and now I never will.
But what about Quizbowl?
The workshop was for Quizbowl. It is good they can use Anki to remember anything, but they are also responsible to their teammates to learn things that can help the team win. Let’s talk probabilities.
Quizbowl Distributions
At the middle school level here are the distribution of the QB questions:
The big three:
Science: 22.5%
History: 21.6%
Literature: 17.6%
Other Categories:
Geography: 10.4%
Pop Culture/Sports (TRASH): 7.7%
Fine Art: 6.8%
Current Events: 6.8%
Math: 4.5%
RMPSS (Religion/Mythology/Philosophy/Social Science): 2.3%
There are four people competing at any given time, plus two alternates. You want those four people to have good coverage of all the categories. Everest (my daughter) is already very strong in history. One of the older kids is strong in Science. He likely needs to double down in science, or maybe split it with someone (science is a big, important category). That still leaves a lot of open categories. If you want to compete for a spot on the “A-team” you will want to choose one or more of the other categories and nail it.
The kids chatted a bit about what categories they might be interested in. I picked one kid, “What do you think?”
“I really like Fine Art.”
“Awesome. Let’s talk about how you learn the Fine Art Category.”
I opened up QBReader on my laptop and had the screen projected so the kids could see it. They were already familiar with QBReader for playing practice games.
“Let’s go into the Frequency Lists”
Within the Fine Art Category there are sub-categories for:
Visual Arts
Auditory (mostly composers)
“Other Fine Arts”
Architecture
Dance
Film
Jazz
Musicals
Opera
Photography
Misc Arts
Let’s start with visual fine art. Choose difficulty “middle school”
The most frequent answer in actual competitions is “American Gothic”
“Do you know anything about “American Gothic”?”
“No”
“Great. That is the first thing you need to know if you want to be the fine art expert (visual)”
I copied and pasted “American Gothic” from the frequency list and dropped it into the database. I selected “middle school difficulty” and “Answer only” (from where the text would appear). We looked at the first example question:
The background of this painting depicts the Dibble House in Eldon, Iowa. This painting's name comes from a window seen between its two central figures, one of whom wears an apron and the other of whom is wearing overalls. The artist's sister and his dentist were the models for the people in this painting. A pitchfork is held by the right figure of, for 10 points, what painting by Grant Wood
Now skip to the end of the question. Before you learn everything about American Gothic, you need to learn the basics. The stuff at the end of the question is likely to appear every time the question is asked. What is at the end of this question? The fundamental things you need to know about American Gothic?
Painted by Grant Wood
A pitchfork is held by the right figure
Going back on sentence:
The artist's sister and his dentist were the models for the people in this painting
One more sentence:
This painting's name comes from a window seen between its two central figures, one of whom wears an apron and the other of whom is wearing overalls
Let’s look at another answer:
A figure on the left of this painting wears a cameo brooch that may depict Persephone over a polka-dotted brown apron, and looks uneasily toward another figure. A strangely ornate window in the Dibble House in Iowa inspired the background of this painting, for which the artist’s dentist modeled as a man wearing denim overalls and holding a pitchfork. For 10 points, name this painting of a stern-looking couple, created by Grant Wood.
What are the key points here in reverse order:
created by Grant Wood
painting of a stern-looking couple
artist’s dentist modeled as a man wearing denim overalls and holding a pitchfork
A strangely ornate window in the Dibble House in Iowa inspired the background of this painting
A figure on the left of this painting wears a cameo brooch that may depict Persephone over a polka-dotted brown apron, and looks uneasily toward another figure
Notice the stuff at the start of the clue is different between the two questions. The first started with “Dibble House in Eldon, Iowa”. The second mentioned Dibble House in the middle of the clue, but started with “Persephone”.
But both ended the same way: Grant Wood, stern-couple, pitchfork, dentist.
Let’s look at two more to be sure:
The subjects of this Regionalist painting wear a pink cameo brooch and round silver glasses. The Art Institute of Chicago houses this painting, whose background includes a red barn on the right and a green shaded window on the left. The artist's sister Nan stands next to a man in overalls, who holds a pitchfork in front of a farmhouse with an ornate window. For ten points, name this painting by Grant Wood.
Clues in reverse order (I will bold the repeats)
painting by Grant Wood
pitchfork in front of a farmhouse with an ornate window
The artist's sister Nan stands next to a man in overalls
The Art Institute of Chicago houses this painting, whose background includes a red barn on the right and a green shaded window on the left.
The subjects of this Regionalist painting wear a pink cameo brooch and round silver glasses.
And the last one:
In this painting, the colonial print and flowers on the woman’s dress symbolize domestic care and the traditional role of women in society. The two figures in this work were modeled after the artist’s dentist and sister. The man has a cross look on his face and symbolizes hard labor by holding a pitchfork. For 10 points, name this work by Grant Wood, which symbolized America in the 1930s
symbolized America in the 1930s
work by Grant Wood
The man has a cross look on his face and symbolizes hard labor by holding a pitchfork
The two figures in this work were modeled after the artist’s dentist and sister.
colonial print and flowers on the woman’s dress symbolize domestic care and the traditional role of women in society
So what can we learn?
If you want to get the answer right on the first clue there is a LOT you can put into your Anki deck. And if you are the Fine Art Specialist, you likely should know all of the things you can know about American Gothic, because you can be confident it will come up a lot. But for now, we can go with breadth over depth. You want to know enough that you will get it 100% of the time at the last line. I recommend you choose 3-5 facts to add to Anki (but likely start with three)
With three facts you can add ten new “answers” every day for thirty cards total. In a month you will know the “last line clues” to the 300 most common answers.
That’s a lot!
And in building the cards you will likely “kind of remember” a bunch of the earlier clues anyway, just by the old fashioned method of having read them a few times when you were making the cards.
Your cards for American Gothic become:
Grant Wood’s most famous painting
This famous painting features a pitchfork
This famous painting is of the artist’s stern-looking sister and a dentist
If you wanted to throw in a few more I would add
This painting was inspired by a strangely ornate window in the Dibble House in Iowa
The figure on the left of this painting wears a pink cameo brooch that may depict Persephone over a polka-dotted brown apron
Notice that the answer to all of these questions is “American Gothic”.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You could create questions like:
Who painted American Gothic [Grant Wood]
What is the man holding in American Gothic [pitchfork]
American Gothic is a painting of the artists sister and what other person [Dentist]
That is a fine choice, and what I did a lot of Everest in the beginning. But I now think it is inefficient. While you may need to answer “Grant Wood”, “Pitchfork” and “Dentist” you are FAR more likely to be asked to answer “American Gothic”.
We know that because that is what the frequency charts tell us.
By studying this way you will likely still remember that Grant painted his dentist in American Gothic, but you won’t be forced to recall that while doing the Anki cards — which means it won’t slow down your anki card exercises. Eventually you may want to create cards for the reverse cards (especially for “Grant Wood” — who is the 32nd most common answer! [pitchfork is the 339th most common. Dentist is not in the top 1000])), but you don’t need to start there - nor should you.
Start with nailing the most common answers.
The problem is if you study the three “American Gothic” questions in a row like that you will not be making your brain work. You will just repeat the words “American Gothic” three times, maybe laugh and move on. You have not made the connections to Wood, pitchfork, and dentist.
So what you do instead is “thread”.
You study about ten things at a time. Duplicate the American Gothic Exercise with nine other high frequency topics. Either work down the list of the top ten in visual arts, or choose the top #1 from each of the Fine Art Categories. You still quiz yourself on “American Gothic”, but that is one of ten questions. It still should not be hard. When the question is, “This composer was deaf when he composed his 9th symphony” you aren’t going to guess “American Gothic” or “Migrant Mother” — and you don’t have to have a great memory to know it’s not “Louis Armstrong” or “Andy Warhol”. Effectively you have 30 questions that are multiple choice — one of ten possible answers.
It seems like it might be too easy, but that’s okay. You are still making your brain work to connect deaf → Beethoven. And it has the added benefit in that it is making you say the words “Beethoven” out loud at least three times during the Anki session. Your brain is learning that that name is important — and you are remembering how to pronounce it.
And then the card will come back in 2-5 days. When it does it will be mixed in with all the other review cards. Maybe its still easy for you. Great! You have succeeded in getting it to stick. Maybe it’s not so easy now and you miss it. That’s okay too. It just means it will come back a third time in a couple more days rather than being pushed out further than that.
In a month of this work you will have the top 300 most frequent answers nailed (for the last line clues). Now you have a choice. You can keep going broader — add 300 more every month — or you can go deeper and choose some of those answers and go back and add three or more additional clues. The cool thing is learning three additional clues now is a lot easier. You will already be comfortable with the name and the “stereotype”, so now you are just adding facts to something you already have in your brain — i.e., making more connections rather than learning something from scratch, which we know is something that humans are good at.
That’s it.
The rest of the session with the kids were used for more examples. I picked a few other kids. One wanted to learn the “math” category. The most common math answer is “prime numbers”. He knew what prime numbers were, but he was able to see what the common clues were for prime number definitions, and he learned terms like “Ambiguous factorization” is a reason why the number one is not a prime number, and that the Goldbach conjecture states that every even number greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes.
This whole post may seem a little too “inside baseball” — great if you want to do well on Quizbowl, but not so useful otherwise. But I think that’s not true. What is nice about the frequency lists on Quizbowl is that it helps answer the question “what should I learn?” and “what is important?”. Important is perhaps not the right word. Is it “important” to know about Beethoven, Alexander the Great, prime numbers and American Gothic? Probably not. But it is a very good proxy for what an educated person should know in our society. If you learn this stuff you will have a firm base for learning other other things — we know it is easier to learn things when you can connect it to existing things, and Quiz bowl frequency lists tell you “what are the most fundamental things to build your base with”.
I have also played with this method using the frequency lists for Jeopardy. But that will be for another post. Stay tuned.
In the meantime…
Keep learning,
Edward (and Everest)