Coffee Shop

Alyssa and I hung out today. Surprise, surprise. If you don't know who Alyssa is, then educate yourself.

If you choose to be ignorant, then just know that she is one of my best friends and moreover, like a sister to me. So anyway, we went to Starbucks like we so often do. Thinking back on all the times we have gone there and all the money we must have spent there makes me sad. Maybe tomorrow I should invest in the Starbucks Coffee Company just so I can get some of that money back.

Regardless, we went to Starbucks to have coffee, enjoy each other's company, and of course, be a little productive. Alyssa has her GREs soon and I was helping her study her vocabulary. I was actually surprised by how many of the words on the little cheat-sheet I already knew. Granted it makes sense that I would know them. When I was little, my mother would constantly use words that were way too sophisticated for a 7-year-old to understand, but I picked them up and I would almost guarantee that's why my critical reading skills are so high and my vocabulary is so vast.

Anyway, back to Alyssa. So for the words that she didn't know we used pneumatic devices and made little word games out of each word. It was kind of fun too. I wish I could remember some of them. Sad face. It got me thinking about memory though. And if you've read any of my posts before, you know what it's like when I start thinking. If not, EDUCATE YOURSELF!

Repetition is the key to learning. Repetition is the key to learning (couldn't help myself :P). But I feel like there are a lot of locks. Therefore, I believe you need a lot of keys. I think the human mind is about as simple as the contents of the picture frame above. I do think that saying things over and over again will help people remember certain phrases, but I don't necessarily know if I believe that it will help them understand it. Isn't learning the grasping of certain ideas and the analyzing and processing of some truth?

Take the quote: "Journalism is society's way of communicating with itself." Read it a couple times and you'll easily have it memorized. But just because you can recite it back to me verbatim doesn't mean you grasp just how important or how much of an impact that quote has not only on society, but the journalism world. With it, it carries expectations, roles, and responsibilities. Not only is it the journalist's job to make sure that society knows what's going on, but journalist's need to report on what society wants to know. But not just that, journalist's need to make a statement about the current affairs of things. They need to express the facts, but also tell society what it is those facts mean and how they impact our lives.

So what does it all mean? I don't really know. But I do know that memorization is not knowledge. Until you internalize what you've memorized and translate the meaning into significant terms, I don't believe you can fully understand what it is you think you know.

Quote:
"Information is not knowledge."