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As a teacher and a student, I find myself consistently relating the concepts the author speaks of in this article. The author takes five questions and answers them systematically throughout the article. I found myself concentrating and relating to the first three more compared to the last two questions. I enjoy how Schulman uses common words such as amnesia, fantasia, and inertia and applies a teaching and learning denotation to these words.

The first term, amnesia, describes the phenomenon of forgetting facts and concepts just learned. Being a high school elective teacher, I see this on almost a daily basis. “What do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about, we just covered this material at the beginning of class?” I find myself saying this often to some students. However, this is not always the case. Other students are so in tuned with the concepts we discuss in my classes, that they will come back years later and still remember a concept and just need some clarification with its meaning or procedures. Reflecting upon a passage that discusses whether or not students remember concepts from classes by looking at his or her transcripts, I find myself recalling certain courses from high school and my undergraduate degree and finding myself in a similar situation. I do not remember everything from these classes. I do however; understand that if I could remember everything from all of the courses I took over the past 10 years including being able to identify key concepts and facts, I probably would not be writing this paper at this moment. Chances are I would be in the running for the Noble Prize.
Looking at the quote above makes me think of the next term Schulman uses, fantasia. He describes fantasia as the illusion of understanding. Students may just pretend they understand a concept and give the thumbs-up to move to the next concept. However, they are not completely comfortable or competent enough to transfer knowledge from the beginning procedure to the next step or dive deeper into a concept. I observe this on a consistent basis at school. For example, I will teach the steps in the design process which begins with sketches and evolves to designing on the computer. Some students will start designing on the computer without even touching a pencil to the paper. Sometimes this happens just minutes after we have a class discussion and demonstrations on how to draw a thumbnail sketch. This tells me the students thought they already know how to design without taking the proper steps we cover in class.

A great example of inertia is the students who are just good Jeopardy players and not complex thinkers. They can remember and recite facts for a short period of time but cannot justify or rationalize because that material was not covered. These students are great memorizers and will get good grades as long as they are not asked to think critically and tie concepts together.
Overall, I enjoyed this article and the way it made me reflect upon my teaching methods as well as my experiences as a student. It also leaves me with a thought, “will all students evolve past the point of just memorizing facts and begin to become complex and critical thinkers?