Thinking back to your school and university years, do you remember cheating on exams and tests?
I have never been one to cheat, to be honest, a little miss goody two-shoes. I thought of cheating as despicable. Especially at school. Later, at university I tried, but it never worked out for me: I felt a bit too self-conscious about simply reaching for the cheat sheet. I never managed to actually use it.
“Cheating is what lazy people do. It’s the easy way out.”
I did learn the value of cheating eventually, though. It was on Statistics course. Our professor allowed us to refer to lecture notes during interim tests. However, she surprised us during the final exam by making it mandatory to solve all the problems on our own, with no permission to use any materials. Imagine my surprise when I realised I actually didn’t need them. I remembered most of the material because of the previous tests, because of how much I had used the materials before.
If you are my student, you know that I often encourage you to cheat. Particularly when dealing with a subject that lacks reason or logic, so it becomes necessary to memorize it (specifically verbs, forms, and structures). Reporting verbs followed by gerunds or infinitives? Cheat. Irregular forms of verbs? Cheat. Just keep cheating until you realise that you don't need those tables anymore, because you remember.
So, I open the list of verbs and structures for you to refer to while you are talking or completing the tasks.
Why?
I am inviting your visual memory to come help you learn.
Visual memory is necessary for most academic tasks, including reading, spelling, reading comprehension, and copying text from one source to another.
Four visual memory skills are crucial for success in reading and writing in particular.
Visual sensory memory includes information that comes from any of the five senses (hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste). This type allows you to recall information, like a word or image, even if it was shown for a short time. Like looking up the structure and then copying it.
When you need to repeat a sentence or arrange story events, visual working memory comes in handy for remembering information briefly. Those questions about your weekend? Of course I care, but I also want to activate your memory.
Visual spatial memory allows you to create a picture of the information in your mind. This is necessary for many skills, such as understanding sequences of events, recalling text and images in a story, and remembering the correct spelling of a word.
Visual sequential memory helps you to remember the sequence of letters, objects and events in the correct order. This is essential for spelling and comprehension of text.
All of those are crucial to our ability to function and interpret the world. We employ short-term and long-term visual memory every day, often using it to read, write, and spell. Cheating is one way you can improve your visual memory at the lessons, as well as recounting the events of your day in as much detail as possible and matching words and pictures, quizlet flashcards and the pictures I try to include - all of those are there to help you improve your visual memory.
Want more? Check out this test.