i noticed that after the holidays my math plummeted and teachers told me its because of the break i took… why does this happen and how can i regain those skills acquired prior to the break
In: 356
Probably because you subconsciously don’t like it that much so your brain does the best to forget it branding those memories as unpleasant. I’m a programmer and that happens to me all the time. You cant make yourself like something you don’t but there are workarounds. I spend a lot of time working on my set up, getting the right notebooks and pens and keyboard and mouse and mousepad and a comfortable chair. All of these things makes me want to be in many desk and when I’m there I know it’s time for work.
Maybe you cant make yourself love math but i suggest you work on your setup make it as comfortable as possible, that’ll tell your brain that maybe is not that unpleasant, maybe those skills and memories are worth saving.
Brain forgot details of tasks that you no longer practice after few times.
It is also quicker to forgot:
1 things that does not get you emotions (love, hate,fear, laugh)
2 things you used few times
3 things you learned from only 1/2 months
I took a degree in engineering and I always forgot the theorems demonstration few weeks after the exam.
Your brain likes to be efficient with its space. It doesn’t like to hoard stuff.
If it thinks you don’t need to remember something, be it a skill, or a memory, it will forget about it. Just saving space for new, more important memories.
This is why cramming is a bad thing in schooling. People only remember the stuff they study, until they can finish the exam. After that, they forget everything because their brain doesn’t think they’ll need it. “If I only needed to learn for this one day, why remember”.
To regain said skills, the only real way is to practice again. But, they will come back quicker.
For example, I’m a brass instrument player. I actually benifited from a 4 month hiatus of playing. It let me break bad habits, and build back up with what I knew was better.
Edit to Clarify: It is more complicated than “hoarding” and “forgetting”, and “efficiency”, and it’s not my intent to anthropomorphise the brain. This is “Explain It Like I’m 5”, and I’m not getting too caught up on specifics.
Your brain makes connections and networks for things it learns. They’re strengthened and more efficient when used and get weaker if not used.
Think of it like a river. More rain = bigger and bigger river, water flows easy.
Rain stops, river dries up. If it starts again, water now has to carve a path all over again before it can efficiently flow.
I don’t think you do forget skills. I can still roll a cigarette just as well now as when I quit 16 years ago. I could still ride a bike after a 10yr gap and I could still roller skate just as well after an 18 month COVID lockdown.
TLDR:
Why we forget? Lack of practice.
How to regain (or not forget)? Practice.
We forget some things over time without practice. If I ask you to memorise a string of 10 digits in a few minutes you’ll probably be able to do it. If I don’t tell you that I’ll want to you to repeat that string to me in three months’ time, you’ll likely forget it after the first or second day and fail the three-month test. You would have to practice over those months to retain that knowledge. You’ll find that, over time, the 10 digits become increasingly easy to recall and you could even add 10 or 20 more digits to the string.
Many learning apps and websites use a method called “[spaced repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition)” to help keep knowledge (like a second language you want to learn or other subject-specific terminology) in your accessible memory. They work by reminding you/testing you over increasingly longer periods of time. If you forget a piece of information, they will increase the frequency of testing you on that particular piece until you recall it easily, and then reduce that frequency over time unless you fail to recall it again.
As adults, we forget the things we learned in youth (including entire languages) if we don’t practice them. This can be part of the reason we have difficulty in tests like “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” – the student may have relatively recently learned knowledge in their working memory while adults might not have had it in working memory for years or decades.
Think of a fair or something similar where you have multiple stands on a field. If you wait some time paths will form between the stands. If two stands are often visited after each other the path between them will get bigger. For example there is probably a big path from the stand selling drinks to the toilets. If you close a stand the paths to this stand will overgrow.
Your brain works similarl. The stand are your brain cells called neurons and the paths are the connections between the cells called synapses. Thinking is basically different signals traveling in between neurons. You can imagine a person walking in between stands on the fair. If you are learning something the person takes always the same path between the same stands. Your brain will adjust to this to by making the synapses between neurons often used together stronger or creating new synapses along the path. When you use the skill you just learned it’s easy because you can use a network of big well maintained paths. But if you stop using the skill your brain will stop maintaining the synapses and the paths will overgrow. Then it’s a lot harder for you to use the skill until your brain clears the path again.
Use it or lose it, pretty much. Pretty sobering and discouraging especially for my area of interest (language learning). Once I start a new language the old ones slowly start fading away, even if I was already at a fairly advanced level in them. There are ways to maintain but it requires plenty of practice (meaning: time investment). The good news is I never completely forget but it does take a bit of time to get back up to speed.
My first time living abroad, I came back home *stuttering* in my native language. It was a horrible feeling–like how can you fail in your native language!?!? But apparently you can start forgetting it after being away long enough. I got rid of the stutter eventually but it took a couple of months.
Thata why learning how to learn and problem solving is what you mostly get out of school imo.
The thing other comments are missing is WHEN to practice or refresh on something. The answer is: right before you are about to forget it.
Refreshing later than that means you have to spend time relearning, as well. Refreshing sooner than that is a bit wasted, since it’s still “fresh.”
This concept is also called “spaced repetition.” It’s key to learning and retaining ANYTHING. Especially useful for people who have to memorize a lot of stuff, like vocabulary when learning a foreign language. And it’s up to you to recognize the timing for when to refresh on stuff.
For me, with a set of ~20 new vocabulary words, I’d learn 5 at a time, and some I’d refresh after 30 seconds, then 2 minutes, then 2 more minutes, then 10, then 1 hour, 6 hours, a day, etc. The units get longer pretty quickly. But you do have to go back to earlier stuff now and then (like, a month or longer) or you’ll lose it, like you saw with math over the summer.
The good news is that it might just be one hour of time commitment over all of summer break to keep you sharp for the next semester!
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