The Geosafari Approach to Education
I did damn good in school. Like nine straight years of no B’s.
I had just the right skillset to excel at school, but there was one thing that took all those raw skills and turned them into a A-making machine: the Geosafari.
When I was growing up, the geosafari was like a big slate with a column of lights on either side.
On the slate, you would stick a sheet, the most common ones being maps, such as all the US state capitals with little numbers where the cities are. The names of the cities would be on the sides of the sheet. The machine would randomly select one of the names and you would have to key in the right number on the sheet.
I learned the names of the states, countries in Central America, Asia, some science terms, and many other things through the Geosafari. I probably had over 100 sheets of various things to learn. But the thing I learned the most was perfection.
When one of the lights blinked to ask for an answer, you had three chances to put in the right number. I think you got 3 points if you got it right on the first try, 2 for the second, and 1 for the third.
When learning a new card, I would do it over and over again until I got the perfect score a few times in a row. I didn’t feel like I was done with it until I had that huge rush of seeing the perfect score come up over and over. Then, sometimes I would time myself and figure out how quickly I could get it done.
The way I got better at each card was just brute force: try again and again until you beat the thing down and mastered it.
This became how I studied for tests. Take all the notes, look at the study guide and then pound it out over and over again until it was deep inside your brain. Greek/Spanish vocabulary words–pound them out. Dates–pound them out. Math problems–pound them out. Repeat, repeat, repeat until it was perfect.
The lessons I learned from Geosafari were invaluable to my approach to education system.
99% isn’t good enough. You can do it again, get better, don’t miss out. Be perfect.
Don’t cheat. To truly know you’ve mastered it, you have to let the machine do its work without interference, and you can have any cheat sheets around you. Don’t look up the answer.
Use memorization tricks. To memorize something well, it often requires coming up with stories or mnemonic devices to help you remember how certain things are related. This helps some, but in the end it just creates another layer of things to remember. Brute force memorization sticks the longest.
I tried to apply the Geosafari approach to other areas of life, such as shooting basketball free throws. However, I got frustrated because once I learned the state capitals, I would always get a perfect score on those. But with free throws, I could never reach perfection.
The same is true with writing, relationships, and basically every other concept. In fact, there are very few arenas of life where you can truly master a topic to where you get 100% every time you attempt it.
I would love to have a job where I could master a concept and just spit out the answers over and over again for the rest of my life. But I haven’t found such a thing yet.
While the Geosafari approach did amazing wonders for my academic career, I’m not sure how well it prepared me for the rest of my life.
It turns out that in most fields, 90% is good enough. Virtually none of my day is spent memorizing terms or ideas. If need to know something I can just look it up. If I continually forget something, I can make a cheat sheet and set it beside me and look at it anytime I want to. Finding relationships between things is still helpful, but memorizing just ain’t what it used to be when it comes to getting rewards.
So, thanks Mom and Dad, for the Geosafari. It was the perfect tool to learn how to beat down and master the education system. But now I’m stuck trying to figure out who changed all the rules and why I can’t just be perfect at things again.
