Short lessons

Well, I don’t have the reference – but I know that S. Suzuki found the same thing in regards to music instruction (and probably in other areas he did work in….)   I know there is an instance when he was working with a student trying to work on vibrato on violin (very quickly changing the pitch of a note to add depth to the sound.)  He had the student (for a baseline) do a single note vibrato for just as long as (s?)he could… say it was 30 seconds… the student was to stop as soon as he found his attention to it getting lost.   Then he had the student for a couple of weeks practice the vibrato for a SHORTER period of time with full attention.  I think it was about 1/3rd the time – so with my example it was 10 seconds.  After that time, the student again did the vibrato for him as long as he could keep the attention – and it was a LOT longer… about a minute.  [sorry I don’t remember the exact numbers]

Also in regards to music practice (for a beginner) … he said something like 2 minutes 10 times a day with joy is better than a 30 minutes.   [again, I don’t remember the exact numbers….]  [note that those numbers were definitely for a beginner, as he advocated a lot of practice a day overall!)

In a different area, I know that Sidney Ledso (“Teach your child to read in 10 minutes a day” advocates always stopping a lesson before the child wants to… so that they WANT to do the next lesson.  If you wait until their interest is lost, they don’t look forward to the next one.

I don’t have any studies… but just wanted to say that the same concept is out there by other educators.  I’m sure there are others!

Well, I can give you personal case studies.  When I moved my oldest son from a more classical approach, where we often worked on a single topic for up to an hour, to a CM approach implementing better quality books, short lessons and narration, my son’s retention improved dramatically.  He was 7 at the time.  I am not sure how much of a percentage belongs to  which difference, but the difference was profound.

Also, because I had a “book gulping” habit, but yet a tendency to forget about the books I read, I did an “experiment” on myself.  I chose two similar books, “gulped” one, and read one spread out slowly, allowing myself only twenty minutes a day to read it.  I remembered much, much more of the second book.  I was,  however, nowhere near childhood when I did this.  But I was sold. 

I don’t have a study on hand but read in various articles/books that the average attention span of an adult is about 15-20 minutes, with younger children only 1 minute per age. Guess that would make a great case for short lessons;).

I did a quick search and found this article about it concerning the length of college lectures http://www.ntlf.com/html/pi/9601/article1.htm