Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Help Your Kids Avoid The Summer Brain Drain

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Help Your Kids Avoid The Summer Brain Drain · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

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  Five past the hour. Good morning friends, ruminators, men, women,
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  ladies and gentlemen, Ruminators near and far. It's the third hour of the
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  Morning Show with Preston Scott Show five thousand, one hundred and eighty three.
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  But who's counting? That is Jared running the radio program in Studio one A,
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  and I am here in Studio one B. Great to be with you
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  after taking some time off over the last few days. Delighted to share time
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  once again. And as I told you, one of the things we like
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  to do here is, you know, twenty two plus years of doing the
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  program, we try to make this show a show that's a safe harbor for
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  parents with their kids. And now we have kids that are grown and in
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  college and they have kids and they listen to this show when they were young.
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  We try to make this a program that not only discusses the things that
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  are in the news, but things that can improve your life, the life
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  of your family, the life of your your children that would be helpful.
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  And this is a topic that when I saw it, I was very intrigued.
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  I shared last hour my interest in education. My wife, of course,
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  it's her profession, and I'm joined by college professor Michael Erman. He's
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  the founder of something called the Olive Book Professor. How are you. I'm
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  doing really well. How are you? I'm doing terrific. Tell us about
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  the all of book? What is that? The all of the book is
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  a digital SAT prep. So the SAT went digital in March, and it's
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  a digital SAT prep that is really for visual learners. So we have it's
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  not kind of Pixar level, but we have animations that pretty high quality animations
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  that help explain the answers to the questions. Well, we're pretty much so
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  good. God, I was just going to say, what what what gave
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  you the idea to do this? What was the gap the need that you
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  felt needed to be filled. I'm an architecture professor at Virginia Tech, and
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  so I kind of come to believe that everybody's a visual learner, and that
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  no one ever looked at a graph and said, can you put that back
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  into a table of numbers. So at first, you know, everyone would
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  everyone could say that. I think I would say, you know, architecture
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  visual learners. But the more I kind of looked around and read about it,
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  the more I realized that everybody is. And I have a math degree
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  and I've been tutoring maths for I don't know thirty years or so, so
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  between the two I started to combine those to those two interests. What what
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  kind of I'm curious before we get into the summer brain drain and kind of
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  some tips to help parents and high schoolers, maybe even some middle schoolers keep
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  a little bit of an edge intellectually as they head to the next school year.
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  I'm just fascinated. What was the reaction you got? What are you
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  seeing that is showing you that your method of helping people in this format is
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  working. It's a great question, and it's kind of a challenge, frankly
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  for anyone who's creating a synchronous online content. So it's you know, students
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  can kind of log in. It's not really me talking to them in any
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  kind of direct way. It's usually most of the feedback comes by email and
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  people will say, oh, this is really helpful. But there was nothing
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  specifically before I started that led it to it. I mean, I did
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  have a I did have a I have a history of kind of making other
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  types of courses in visual ways, and I've been pretty successful on YouTube.
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  I think I have maybe eight or nine million views now on my YouTube channel,
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  and just kind of explaining things in visual ways seems to be something that
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  people crave, but I don't know, I don't know of a way to
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  measure it too carefully. Do you generally get feedback from parents or from young
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  people that are actually engaged in the content? Probably about half and half,
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  although there's a surprising number of grandparents out there as well that I did not
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  count on when I started this. It's generally, it seems like the people
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  this is a this is a real challenge for anyone who's in this space is
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  a people. The people using the course of the students, right, and
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  the people buying the course and kind of selecting the course of the parents,
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  and so generally, so it's not enough. It's not enough just to kind
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  of attack attack one or the other. You kind of have to talk to
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  both groups at the same time. The students get it, I think they
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  would, you know, they're very comfortable learning online. The parents maybe are
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  used to some of the more old fashioned sources for test prep, some of
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  the names that they had when they were a kid. They feel might be
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  more comfortable. And I understand that too, as a parent of a student.
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  Who's taking the sets right now himself, Professor Michael Erman with us,
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  founder of the Olive Book in fact online you can find it at olive dashbook
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  dot com. Talk a little bit more about that. Also get into some
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  strategy GEZ for you as parents, for some of you young people. I
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  know I've got young people listening to the program. It's after eight a m.
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  Eastern. There's a few of you. Wake it up and are joining
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  us this morning morning. Come here on the Morning Show with Preston Scott.
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  Dizzy from the Spin, don't know what to believe? Clear the fog The
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  Morning Show with Preston Scott on News Radio one hundred point seven w FLA.
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  Levin passed the hour with Professor Michael Erman. The Olive Book, Olive Dashbook
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  dot com. It's sat prep test prep stuff. Professor. I'm curious.
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  I mean, there's a part of me that says, Okay, a kid
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  that's gonna gonna go online and gonna go this route. They're they're already they're
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  thinking ahead, they're probably gonna be a better student. But there's still this
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  part of me that that no, based on what the colleges and the state
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  colleges, community colleges are telling us they're spending more and more time doing remedial
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  teaching before they can advance these kids into real college coursework. I'm curious,
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  have you had to take that into account with your with your olive book,
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  that more kids might need a little boosting on the stuff they should have learned
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  early in high school, maybe even middle school. Yeah, I mean,
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  there's there's probably three sides to this. So one is you touched on something
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  that oftentimes is something they did learning really quite well in middle school. Maybe
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  they're an advanced kid and they learned medians and they were in eighth grade,
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  but now they're in eleventh grade and they need to know mediums for the SAT
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  and it's been three years, and if they had an even number of you
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  know, even number of numbers, and they're trying to figure out, well,
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  what's the media and if it's you know, one, two, three,
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  four, what's the medium of one, two, three and four?
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  And so part of it is just kind of natural forgetting and that's actually probably
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  more of a problem for the advanced kids, just because they covered some of
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  the material they need a little bit earlier. So that's one side of it.
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  One side of it is. I think probably the r sweet spot is
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  a kid who maybe is an eleven hundred and something scorer and wants to get
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  in the thirteen hundreds. That's probably you know, the kid who's a thirteen
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  fifty scorer and wants to get in the fifteen hundreds. She's probably somebody who
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  once she sees the answer right away, she's like, right, that's what
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  I did wrong, and doesn't really maybe need as much of the animations.
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  But also, you know, I want to push back a little bit on
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  the idea, at least my experience. Based on my experience, I've been
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  teaching architecture of students at Virginia Tech, where I'm a professor, for twenty
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  three years, and I really haven't seen the kind of remedial problem. In
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  fact, if anything, the students seem to get smarter each year. A
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  lot of the kind of conventional wisdom that you know, I argue with my
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  friends about. They say, oh, you know, it's kind of see
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  that old man thing when they say, oh, you know, kids today,
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  and I'm like, man, aren't they amazing? And they're like,
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  no, they you know, they're they're they're they're you know, I'm having
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  to teach them everything that they should have known, and I think a lot
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  of us forgot how little we knew when we first started whatever it was we
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  were starting. So I yeah, so I'm a little bit more probably of
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  a defender of this generation of students. Maybe it's partly because of the types
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  of students I work with. Maybe I'm just lucky. Yeah, I would.
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  I would probably guess that, you know, someone that's going into architectures
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  probably sort of like someone that's going in engineering in general. You know,
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  it's just it's a different kind of kid, and they're just wired a little
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  bit differently. But that said, talking to masses right now, you know,
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  we hear about summer brain drain. I'm a fan of schools considering year
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  round school where they take three week breaks and there's not this long gap.
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  I think there are a lot of reasons to think about it. But we're
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  we're we're where we are. So what are some tips that you would give
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  parents and young people to kind of keep their brain sharp over the summertime months.
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  Yeah, I mean, generally, and this is across all races,
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  classes, genders, and so forth, we lose about a month during the
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  summer of progress. You know in everything, and so insofar as you kind
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  of have time now or some of some of your listeners have kids who have
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  time, and there are probably four things I would focus on. The first
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  is curiosity. There's nothing that I've seen in my teaching that's more closely correlated
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  to success in college than just someone who's curious. I'll take the curious kid
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  over any other quality every time. And it's just so easy now to look
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  something up compared to what it had been. So kind of living a curious
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  life. If you know, see something on a you know, some historical
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  reference on social media, you want to look up that seventeenth century figure of
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  being quoted, and you want to do it right away because you won't remember
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  to look it up later or you won't care. But importantly, curiosity kind
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  of compounds over time, so you get more and more content. The more
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  content you have, the more content you know. And I'm sure you deal
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  with this in your line of work. You probably just probably all kinds of
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  things you learn just kind of interviewing people. But if you treat not knowing
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  something like an itch that has to be stretched, the whole thing starts to
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  snowball in the good direction. Where each new concept is a bit easier and
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  a bit stickier with all the kind of you know, the knowledge of the
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  other concepts that start subscribing. So the first is curiosity, I think is
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  a good thing to have, frankly for anything. The second is maybe create
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  something right, so you know, read a blog post, design of you
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  know, if you're kind of a coder, start coding. If you want
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  to learn how to change your car headlamp. Change your car headlamps are things
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  you can also maybe do with a parent, right, so you can you
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  can plan a vacation with a parent, you can do an exercise regiment with
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  a parent. And that brings me to number three. Hang on a second,
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  professor, we got to take a quick break. We're going to pick
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  up on point three and four. Connect some dots together because that's what we
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  do around here. Seventeen minutes past the hour with me, Professor Michael Erman
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  with Virginia Tech University. And it's the Olive Book. It's online, Olive
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  Dashbook, dot com, WSLA, on your phone with the iHeartRadio app and
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  on hundreds of devices like Alexa, Google Home, Xbox, and Sonos and
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  Iheart's radio station. It's an online at tech platform. That's pretty innovative.
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  It's the Olive Book and you can find it for yourself, for your children,
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  your kids, your youngsters Olive Dashbook dot com. It's designed for SAT
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  prep test prep and so for the older kids primarily. And with us is
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  a college professor from Virginia Tech, Michael Erman. Professor. You mentioned you
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  said the word memory in that it kind of stirred something in me. In
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  this day and age of people with their phones and they've got an entire phone
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  book as well as an entire library and their phone, and then some it
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  occurs to me that we're challenged these days with memory. We don't remember phone
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  numbers because we got them in our phone. How much is that play a
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  role in how you set up even the Olive Book and what you observe in
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  your students. The memory is a huge part of test prap. It's kind
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  of maybe not talked about as much as maybe it could be. And generally
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  the research on memory is shockingly new. I mean they only started really looking
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  at how we learned maybe one hundred years ago, and really in earnest started
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  looking at it maybe in the eighties, and what they found is well it's
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  a bunch of things, and all of them will kind of surprise you,
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  but none of them will at the same time. So one is that it
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  turns out our brains are capable of capable of kind of processing just about everything.
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  It's in terms of exposure, but it's the recall that turns out to
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  be the weak link. But the good news is that recall is a bit
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  like a muscle. So the more you work on practicing remembering things, the
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  more you're likely to remember something. And so generally what we want to do
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  is we want to remember try to remember something just before we would have forgotten
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  it anyway. So if you're learning, for instance, to play something on
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  the piano, if you kind of memorize it today and then tomorrow just about
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  the time you would have forgotten it, you should do it again, and
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  then again in about a week, and again in about a month, and
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  again in about a year, you'll have it forever. So that is one
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  of the kind of embracing the doubt that comes from really trying to figure something
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  out and really kind of working hard. That's why that's why flashcards work so
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  much better than highlighting in a book in terms of in terms of how the
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  course itself tackles that we generally we generally try to repeat things that need to
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  be repeated, but in a different way. Right, So it's called spiral
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  learning. So you kind of cover a topic and then maybe you go a
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  little bit and then you cover a topic again. Because very practice makes for
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  better learning and for better memory. So if, for instance, they found
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  that if they give kids when they're kids division, if they give them multiplication
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  and division in their worksheets, not just division, they'll do better than if
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  they just give them divisions. Because we we kind of approach things from different
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  sides. Yeah, you mentioned two things that would be useful to help a
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  kid keep their their brainal edge for the summer. For lack of a better
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  way of putting it, give us the final two. Yeah, the first
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  one was curiosity. The second one was to create. The final two is
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  you know exercise. I heard at the video show where the interviewer kept saying,
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  so, what's best for you know, for helping us with uh,
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  with learning and with memory, and the experts at exercise and the interviewers,
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  yeah, but like sudoku or puzzles, exercise, and they were talking past
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  each other and there's really no better way to sharpen your brain than physical exercise.
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  It's better than puzzles, it's better than way better than listening to classic
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  music. And nothing really comes close to physical exercise. And finally, just
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  reading. And I was not a reader until I was an adult. My
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  wife TV in the bedroom, and so I started reading. And just the
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  act of reading is also a bit like a muscle, where the more you
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  read, the easier it gets, the better, the better you comprehend something.
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  And there's really nothing better for reading comprehension than than actually reading. And
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  if you are an STPH or a CP, because you guys are down to
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  tellhassee uh test taker, Uh, the best thing you could probably do right
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  now is to just start reading every night a bit. Tell me where people
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  can find you on YouTube? Uh, they can go they can search YouTube
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  for all of the book test prep. Okay, so it's it's under all
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  the book as well. I'll try to remember that for the yeah, I'm
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  sorry for the for the for the big yeah. So that's where they can
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  find me for uh, for test prep, for for architecture, which is
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  where most of my most of my viewers come from. They can find me
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  at amber Book, Amber Book, good stuff. Professor, thanks for the
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  time. I appreciate your knowledge and UH appreciate your time this morning. It
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  was great to thank you. Thanks so very much. Professor Michael Hrman.
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  He's uh a professor of architecture at Virginia Tech University, but he's also a
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  learning development guy. And it's called the Olive Book. And you can learn
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  more online Olive dash Book or to be technical hyphen Olive hyphenbook dot com and
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  learn a bit more. Might get some tips to help the kids stay a
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  little bit more mentally engaged this summer so when they get back to school in
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  a month and a half, they will be better prepared.