Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 3 Synthesis

Chapter 3 of Meet Me in the Middle focused primarily on the brain of middle school students, something that all of us found extremely fascinating and a very interesting topic. Almost all of us talked about memorization, and how, while sometimes necessary, we need to avoid depending on it in our classrooms, and focus more on encouraging independent thinking in the classroom. Most of us said that, as teachers, we want to encourage our kids to think for themselves, and not rely on memorization, or simply just learning all the information and not think critically about the information. If students are thinking more critically, and being encouraged to come up with their own conclusions, they’ll be more likely to remember it naturally. Another way to get kids to remember things naturally, is applying different important key points to something outside of the classroom, that they can relate it to. One thing that almost all of us pointed out that we found interesting, and none of us had ever really heard of it before, was this concept of chunking. Chunking is a memorization strategy, that connects different items together, which allows easier and more natural memorization, if students can connect two things together, they might be more likely to remember it.