Automaticity

Automa-Ti-Ti-Ti-city: 3 T’s of Learning Skills to an Automatic Level

Imagine you had to sound out each word, letter-by-letter, to read this paragraph. You probably wouldn’t know what the paragraph said when you finished! Devoting so much attention to the decoding process would keep you from thinking about the meaning. To learn by reading, you need to be able to read words automatically. Similarly, to learn higher levels of math, skills of lower level math need to be automatic for you. For example, it helps for your basic math facts to be automatic when you are learning algebra. 

Let’s look at 3 T’s of building automa-ti-ti-ti-city:

• Tiny Chunks

• Top Speed

• Today (daily)

  Tiny Chunks

  Modern brain science has shown that our brains learn best in tiny chunks. For example, it’s more efficient to learn your multiplication tables building automaticity one or two facts at a time than by going through a whole set of flash cards with 78 different facts all at once. [Watch for my article on using regular playing cards to learn math facts.]

  Top Speed

  To make skills automatic, you need to practice them at speed, repeatedly, until you can do them as fast as possible. Automatic means instant recall. Sticking with the example of multiplication facts, you can push yourself to write them as fast as possible, then do them fast while standing on one foot, then write them fast while standing on one foot and singing “Happy Birthday”! When you can do that, you know the facts are truly automatic. This may sound crazy, but I have actually done it. Thanks to my friend Peggy Wilber for the challenge.

  Today

  Daily practice is required to push learning to an automatic level. Our brains are pretty good at forgetting things we don’t need to know. If you don’t use a skill regularly, your brain’s “secretary” figures you don’t need it, and deletes it from your mental “hard drive” to make room for more important information. The way to tell that secretary not to delete something is to access it every day. You have to practice daily to avoid forgetting and to maximize your learning.

  If you want to build an automatic skill, build it in Tiny Chunks which you practice at Top Speed, Today and every day. That’s automa-ti-ti-ti-city! 

  This is written with learning arithmetic facts in mind, but it applies to each math objective you have to learn. In particular, you should learn definitions and properties and theorems to automatic level so that you can apply them to problem-solving.

Copyright © 2019 Alie Benson, all rights reserved.