Everything Lasts Too Long

I’m convinced that human beings learn more in the first few minutes of something (no matter what that “thing” happens to be) than at any other time.

As I sat in church listening to a half-hour sermon last Sunday, I got the gist of it in three minutes.  I learn more from a five-minute scan of my subscribed feeds — because the posts are concise and on a variety of topics – than I do in an hour of a typical one-topic workshop.  (For example, Monday’s post over at The Big Picture contained just six sentences and 10 heart-rending photographs and made more of an impact on me than a massive tome about famine in Ethiopia ever could have.)

This tendency seems to be even more prevalent among children.  The first math example I share with the students leads to more learning than the fifth example.  The first peer editor finds more meaningful edits than the second one, the first chapter in today’s read-aloud generates more discussion than the third, and the first round of Math Mayhem is way more exciting than the sixth.

So what should we do in light of all this?  I believe a key to successful teaching is to work to create more firsts.  Preschool teachers know that you can’t schedule anything to last for more than about 15 minutes (if you’re lucky!); I believe that all of us who teach, at all grade levels, should take the same approach.  Just because our older students might manage to stay seated throughout a 45-minute lecture (or writing time, or read-aloud, or math lesson) on one topic doesn’t mean they are learning much during the latter two-thirds of that time. 

On a related note, let’s also make sure our students learn the value of concise clarity.  A five-page essay is not necessarily better than a one-page essay; the days of more words being better, if it ever existed, has certainly passed.  To teachers of older grades: Start giving out more assignments with maximum lengths (no more than 200 words!) and fewer with minimum lengths (five pages, double spaced).

And to my pastor: would you ever consider trying two six-to-eight minute mini-sermons instead?

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