The idea of needing thousands of reps and not hundreds for acquisition is Sabrina’s. She brought it up about a week ago in a comment, for those who remember. It’s not a complex idea. Sabrina simply said that, in her own experience, she feels as if her students need from 2000 to 7000 reps to acquire a structure.
This statement struck a deep chord within me. It made so much sense. I have been using CI for thirteen years now to varying degrees of success and all of a sudden this one comment comes along and sheds light on a lot of the confusion in my mind about the CI process.
I can see now that we are all making serious errors in what we assume to be necessary for the gains we expect. I feel that many of us have been assuming, quite falsely, that if we just lay the CI on thick in high school that the kids should be able to do things like pass the AP exam after three or four years.
(I shouldn’t use the AP exam as any kind of accurate measurement of gains. I apologize for that. The AP exam is a game for the privileged, it is a ruse connected to financial status and a way to further the myth of privilege in our society, and it is bullshit. So I retract my statement connecting real gains to the AP exam.)
Whatever markers we use to measure gains (an idiotic idea in my own mind and not necessary), we need to realize what kind of time is really needed for real gains. We need to quit fooling ourselves about that, foolishly thinking that if we just get “good enough” at the method, we will get the gains we want.
There we go again, worrying about being good enough. Good enough for whom? I’ll drop that line of inquiry, as we have hit on it here heavily in past few months.
So I am calling this great insight about actual time needed sBI – Sabrina’s Brilliant Insight – because whenever we come up with breakthrough things here we seem to like to label them with that funny little pattern of putting the person’s name in lower case in front of the upper case letters describing the idea.
I’m not trying to convince anyone about the veracity of the statement. I just want to say how it has affected my own impatience when I’m not laying on a thick layer of Ci in my own classroom at any given moment of class. I need to let that go a bit. I’m not getting it done in four years so I need to drop it.
The main thing sBI has affected in my own teaching is R and D. I can’t be reading novels like I used to with the kids. So I thought of cRD, described here in the last week. There are too many words in novels, and the acquisition game is so complex with novels, that I have redefined what R & D is for me in the light of sBI.