The Difference Between Knowing and Remembering

Have you ever forgotten the name of an acquaintance? You're sure you knew it just last week, and suddenly it's just gone.

Well, it's not exactly gone, actually. What you're experiencing there is the difference between knowing information (having it encoded somewhere in your memory) and remembering it (being able to retrieve this information). It's frustrating when it happens, and it happens to people of all ages.

It helps to keep this phenomenon in mind when you see inconsistent recall in your children. Maybe your young learner could count perfectly to 30 last week, and this week many numbers are out of order. I've heard parents express concerns over a child who was almost ready suddenly loose their ability to decode three-letter words. It's certainly frustrating, but also very common.

The way memory works, getting information in and getting information out are two different processes. So when children forget what sounds correspond to certain letters, it's more likely that they're experiencing a loss in the ability to retrieve the information than a loss of the information altogether.

It's also worth noting that young children have not fully developed their language skills. Verbal memory, like remembering the names of numbers, letters, and letter sounds, can therefore be less stable than visual memory (like remembering a book cover), or procedural memory (like riding a bike or building with blocks).

Having said all that, it can still feel unsettling when your child could read a few short words a month ago, and suddenly it appears like that skill is "lost." It's typical for parents to have a vested interest in their child's education and to tie a child's academic progress to their own self-confidence.

Because the process of learning is so full of ups and downs, however, adherence to linear progress not a good measure of your abilities as an educator. It's kind of like watching the stock market bounce around; if you get shaken by every downturn, you will likely not feel confident as an investor. It's the overall trend that counts.

So how do we avoid getting bogged down in such day-to-day volatility? First, pay attention to your own feelings of disappointment. Those feelings are yours and are likely about your own memories of what it felt like to make mistakes. Just because you feel them, doesn't mean you have to act on them. Take some deep breaths. Take the time to calm yourself. Second, it helps to have a neutral tone that acknowledges what the child is thinking, as well as what you're thinking. It's more like: "Hey, we're trying to figure this out together" than "You did this wrong and I'm here to correct you." Try describing what you see your child doing and then describe what you see. For example:

Parent: "I see the letters . I wonder how we could pronounce those?"

Child: "/sh uh n/"

Parent: "Oh, the <s> reminded you of an , which writes the /sh/ sound. And you noticed the <u> writes /uh/ and the writes the /n/ sound. I think the <s> by itself would write the /s/ sound here; so that would give us /s uh n/. That word sounds familiar... what could /s uh n/ be all together?"</s></u></s>

Child: /shun/

Parent: "Oh, I don't know that word, but I think it's close to a word I know..../s u n/...../sun/! I think it's the word sun, like the sun in the sky. Does that sound right to you?"

The child would very likely agree at this point. Even if there is still disagreement, the larger point is in the striving for discussion and seeing the child as a partner in the discovery.

These types of conversations will be most successful when we are able to drop our agenda of progress, which is, yes, oh so hard. This gives us a particular division of labor: the child as a partner in discovery and the parent as a more experienced guide who is also in the process of letting go of past insecurities over making mistakes.

Cover Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash