Sequential Problem Solving by Fredric B. Lozo (free children's ebooks online txt) 📖

if we were blind, we could identify the object by touch. Large objects in the memory seem to engage muscular memory areas as well as sight memory areas in the brain and expand the memory web. For instance, remembering the points of a speech about a military battle might involving walking from one room to another in a familiar house. In the first room a ship's anchor is propped up in a corner, in the next room is a cannon, in the third room is a large telescope, and the in the fourth room is a horse. This sequence of anchor, cannon, telescope, horse might remind the speaker that the speech is about a ship being bombarded from the shore by a cannon; and that the cannon was captured when a scouting party saw the cannon through a telescope and sent for the cavalry.

Imagining numbers as objects in three-dimensional space is a very powerful way of remembering a series of numbers. This also seems to engage muscular memory. For instance, we might imagine block numbers for Pi, 3.1416. These numbered blocks should be about four inches high and one inch thick and should be imagined rotating in space about two feet to the front and about six inches above eye level. We can imagine them rotating slowly in a circle through an entire revolution. As they turn, we can mentally reach out and feel them with our fingers on every side. Such exercises, involving three-dimensional objects in space and muscles, allow the associated memory cells to form many, many more links than just a single glance at written numbers will form. Additional associations not only form more axon-dendrite connections, but also cause an increase in the surrounding glial sheath of the brain cell.

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Research Skills.

1. Mindil, Phyllis. Power Reading. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993.
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2. Robinson, Francis P. . Effective Studying. 4th ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
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3. Spitzer, Herbert F. "Studies in Retention". Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. XXX (Dec. 1930) No. 9.
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4. Minninger, Joan. Total Recall—How to Boost Your Memory Power. Emmaus, Pa: Rodale Press, 1984.
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5. Neural mechanisms of learning and memory. Mark R. Rosenzweig and Edward L. Bennett, eds. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, c1976.
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6. Spense, Jonathan D. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Penquin Books, 1984.
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PRACTICAL PROBLEM SOLVING

Sequential Problem Solving is a labor of love for all students who seek success and for the parents and teachers who guide them. Sequential Problem Solving also provides the lifelong-learner with the satisfaction of being able to measure his performance.

The goal of Sequential Problem Solving is to provide learners with a road map for successfully making decisions. Students can began their adult lives with a framework that will help them pick noble goals, know themselves, and be prepared for dealing with life's villains. They can thus achieve peace and joy, and can be prepared for making life's hard decisions as well.

Young people often dream of a loving spouse and joyful children. Older people dream of success in business. Still others dream of securing a suitable retirement. Whatever the age or the dream, the problems, of making dreams come true, share some similarities.

People solving problems share certain common steps in resolving those problems and face certain common difficulties. How do we develop solutions? Where do we get information to work with? Who should we trust for advise? At what point should we make a decision? What are the alternatives?

Study leads to success, and organization builds bridges to the future. Organized systematic thinking requires effort, and the effort is justified by predictable success. This is contrasted to happenstance decision making based on impulsiveness and wishful thinking. Sequential Problem Solving is about organized thinking, and justifying decisions based on solid facts, rather than on impulsiveness or emotional indulgence. Growing to maturity is about planning rather than acting on impulses or instant gratification. Instant gratification often has costly consequences that forethought might have averted. Sequential Problem Solving is about making dreams come true while minimizing the hidden costs.

I remember well the magic of that first romantic glance across a crowded ballroom, the guileless smile and downcast eyes that instantaneously made my heart skip a beat. I remember the soul stirring melody of Band of Gold and the lingering smell of peaches and the gentle winds against my ears on a pleasant summer night. Sequential Problem Solving is about memories and dreams, making them come true, and keeping them alive.

Sequential Problem Solving is about becoming both a success and a lifelong-learner. Problem solving has two aspects: physical problems in a scientific environment and personal problems in a spiritual inner world. This book uses well known classical literary selections as models for personal decision making and character development. These works were chosen primarily due to their ready availability.

Part of the fun of sequential problem solving is mentally rewriting stories to have more favorable outcomes. We imagine favorable outcomes naturally, but successful people do so in a more systematic fashion, that makes logical outcomes more certain. Using realistic logic rather than wishful emotion requires that we know ourselves, know our values and where they came from, and know clearly what our basic goals are in life. Sequential Problem Solving systematically outlines those aspects of our spiritual inner selves that play a part in our decision making and, largely, determine our success.

Sequential Problem Solving explores the nature of personal internal conflict and how literary characters change in the course of stories to overcome personal weaknesses. Successful learners learn to recognize their own internal conflicts and learn that courage is a skill anyone can learn to re-direct their own destiny.

The first step in the adventure of becoming courageous is to write down a philosophy of life: what we want to achieve and how we plan to treat other people. A few words will do: I want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, have a loving companion, help others, etc.

Everyone should develop, write down, and periodically review their philosophy of life. If we are going to be successful, we need to have a systematic way of going about it. What do we know today about effective ways of becoming educated and successful?

At this point in time, my own philosophy for education has 11 parts.

First, learning has three basic components: specialized knowledge, basic thinking skills, and mature thinking skills. [1] In the study of Dickens' Great Expectations, "specialized knowledge" includes Pip's turbulent relationship to his sister and to her husband Joe. "Basic thinking skills" include the student's memorization of the various characters and the sequence of the plot in the story. "Mature thinking skills" include the student's analysis of Pip's internal conflict and how Pip overcomes his internal weaknesses. Mature skills might also include the creation of an alternative ending of how the story could have achieved an even more satisfactory ending. This story is unique in that there are two published endings: one, the author's original ending, and the second written at the insistence of the author's newspaper editor. These alternative endings illustrate how we can create an alternative environment and make our dreams come true. Sequential Problem Solving is about finding alternative solutions to problems and executing well researched plans.

Second, students learn to trust their own ability through success, and the teacher can help to insure that success. Success can be assured by tailoring the curriculum to the student. The student with severe prior knowledge deficits can usually be rapidly remediated by learning basic thinking skills first: for instance, the basic memorization techniques, note taking, outlining, and free association recall techniques. (These are discussed in detail elsewhere.)

Students should be aware of what they learn and feel pride of accomplishment. They should recognize for themselves when they achieve success in learning. They should learn to constantly monitor their own performance and the success of their strategies.

Learning occurs in well ordered ways:[2] first, the student gains understanding of what is read or the teacher explains, then memorizes the facts of the subject in order to analysis the information later through comparing and contrasting. Next the student may use the information to create something new, and finally he should use the memorized information to evaluate his own performance. This sequence is known to teachers as Bloom's taxonomy. [3]

Students need guidelines for making decisions. Those decisions may involve physical, scientific problems, or they may involve interpersonal problems, social values and moral decisions. Students should learn a systematic workable framework for making decisions. All students should develop the ability to evaluate their thought processes as a learned skill. The mature learner should be able to recall the steps of scientific problem solving, recognize specific personal values and character traits, and remember the tests for sequential steps in moral decision making. Students should then be able to use apply those mature thinking skills to first literary scenarios and then to real life problems. Studies of literature enable the student to extend the analysis to television drama and ultimately to real life and to subsequently imagine a variety of suitable alternative outcomes.

Students should learn to recognize and control certain biological feelings. A student should know how the human brain is organized and recognize those times when animal-like impulses jeopardize more mature, rational thought. A student should also be able to recall and use basic information about basic nutrition, rest, and exercise, in order to minimize the danger of thoughtless impulsiveness.

Students should develop a sense of belonging to a caring, helpful humanity, and develop their own short and long term goals in achieving peace and joy through helping others in a responsible manner.

Students should learn the dynamics of basic childcare and the importance of continuous parental attachment in the first two years of a baby's life. Students should be aware of how "unattached" children are set up for failure and antisocial behavior disorders, by poor bonding with the parent in the first few months and years of life.

Students should be prepared to deal with manipulative people. Students should learn how to recognize people without a conscience. Students should have strategies for managing interpersonal relationships, both good and bad.

Students should have a knowledge of the religions of the world and develop a toleration for other people.

Finally, students should become citizens of the world, dedicated to helping others while making their own dreams come true.

Developing and maintaining a systematic philosophy of life entails becoming a lifelong learner.

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LEARNING.

Learning has three basic components: specialized knowledge, basic thinking skills, and mature thinking skills.

Specialized knowledge is that part of a study that must be memorized. This "disciplinary based knowledge" contains unique terms and definitions. Language studies have their unique terms: nominative, comma, plot; mathematics has its: tangent, sum, parabola, etc. These are terms that must be memorized in order to understand and use the subject matter.

Basic thinking skills include memorization techniques, the stream of consciousness technique, outlining, note taking, rapid reading, scanning for main ideas and keywords, questioning, and reorganizing.

Mature thinking skills include procedures that require specialized knowledge and basic thinking skills, like applying the sequential steps of problem solving and following the sequential tests for moral decision making.

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STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Both creative writers, artists and scientific problem solvers use the stream of consciousness or free-association skill. This skill is also known as gestation, mulling things over, and getting a handle on things. The process begins by letting our thoughts flow freely and then sorting out the ones useful to our problem from the many that came to mind. Often many of the random thoughts that come to mind have no apparent connection to the problem; they are merely connected like circular links in a spider's web to threads that interconnect with others and run toward the center