Tabula Rosa

The other day as I sat in my dorm room making flash cards for my networking class, I began to feel like a blank slate! It was a horrible feeling! I was making flash cards to memorize the terms I was unfamiliar with and that I would be quizzed on the following day. As I wrote the terms and their definitions, it occurred to me that I had no prior knowledge on the subject. I was making flash cards with words on one side that I had never heard of and the definitions on the reverse side had terms and concepts that I was also unfamiliar with! I spent the night memorizing my flash cards and although I knew them very well, all I had done was memorize the words; but there was no meaning behind the words. The following day, I took my quiz; the questions that involved matching the words to the definition were easy because I had memorized my cards. However, there were questions where the answers did not match the definitions I had memorized. After class, I went to speak with my professor. I explained to him how I felt lost because I had no prior knowledge of the subject. He told me that I did well on my quiz so I had nothing to worry about. I tried to explain to him that although I can recite my flash cards I could not have a conversation with someone about the material. I did not understand the material beyond the memorization of meaningless definitions. My teacher finally understood and spent the following hour and a half trying to help me. This whole ordeal made me great full that students come into school with background knowledge. I don't want my students to ever feel like a blank slate. I will invest much of my time trying to establish what kind of background knowledge my students have so that I can give them all the information they need to fill the gaps.