By: Megan Prats

9/10/2015

If I had a dime for every time a student told me, “I forgot.”, in a lesson I’d be a millionaire. It is no surprise that the student forgets information during the lessons because biologically speaking, our brains are not programmed to retain everything. Instead, the human brain must select the most effective information to store because it operates more efficiently that way. So, in short, “I forgot.”, is going to happen in the lessons. The question then becomes, how do you respond to, “I forgot.”? The answer, lead the student to the information that she forgot so that she can practice researching the information independently.

Because a good teacher is one that provides the student with the skill set that she needs so that one day, she can be successful independently, if you just feed the student the forgotten information, she will not learn how to find what she’s forgotten on her own. Thus, to “refresh the student’s memory”, you need to lead her to reliable sources where she can find the wanted information.

For instance, I’ve been working on composing a song with one of my drum set students and we spent some time discussing time signatures because that is the starting point of any song. I then asked the student, “What does the bottom number of the time signature mean?”, and his response was, “I forgot.” Thus, instead of just telling the student the answer, we went to the handouts that I made for him that would provide him the information that he needed to answer the question – Time Signatures and Rhythmic Notation – so that he could independently find the answer at a later date.

Now sometimes when the student forgets the information, you can immediately refresh the student’s mind if the student has too many information holes to navigate to solve the problem effectively. In these cases, if the student spends so much time researching all the absent information, the student will likely get lost in the sea of “new content” and thus will lose her focus from the original question. So, in these situations, it is important that you provide the student the less important information and allow the student to focus her attention on researching the information that is more pertinent for her to find independently.

“I forgot.” is going to happen. So when it does, in general you want to use this opportunity to develop the student’s research skills so that she can find the forgotten information independently.
If the student forgets too much information at once, you can feed her some of the less important information so that she can better focus her mental energies on a select few. But, the ultimate goal is for the student to be able to refresh her memory independently, no matter how much information she lacks.

© Megan Prats 2015