Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours

Outside and I am completely honored to bring to you today a cognitive psychologist, I think the

first ever cognitive psychologist we've ever had on this on the show. Dr. Daniel Willingham.

Welcome. Thank you so much, and you're really happy to be here. So you have written so many articles. If people go to your website and I'll put the link in the show notes, just article after article, very diverse topics, but all surrounding for the most part, the brain, how the brain works. And then I have three of your books. We're going to focus on two of them today, but three of your books raising kids who read,

why students don't like school, and also outsmart your brain. And we're going to focus on, outsmart your brain is, I couldn't, like, if I ever read more than two or three books, I'm like, I have too many notes and I can't keep up with them. But I just want to, I just want to really so people understand the table of contents for outsmart your brain, how to understand a lecture.

This is a great one if you've got kids. How to understand a lecture. How to take lecture notes. How to learn from labs, activities, and demonstrations. How to reorganize your notes. How to read difficult books. How to study for exams. How to judge whether you're ready for an exam, how to take tests,

how to learn from your past exams, how to defeat procrastination. This is a must read for parents.

I think it can be very helpful for parents. I mean, the whole point of the book is that, you know,

as you were reading through that list of topics, I'm sure parents were having

a little bit of flashback from their own school days and certainly get identified that these

are things their children are doing. And what I emphasize in this book is that these are things

that when children first start school, none of this is relevant, right? All, everything about learning is on the teacher.

It's up to the teacher to make sure that children learn.

As children progress through school, more and more of the responsibility of learning

falls on the student.

We have higher and higher expectations about what they can bring to the table when it comes to learning. So you're expected, you know, think about it. Like the first time a child takes a spelling quiz, for example, usually the first kind of quiz thing that they encounter, it's usually sort of mid-elementary. So you are asking the

child to commit things to memory. Do they know how to commit things to memory? Do they understand

enough about how their memory works that they can do that efficiently? The answer is in almost every

case, no. And none of these things tend to be taught in school.

So by the time children in 12th grade, we have very high expectations about their ability

to regulate their own memory, regulate their attention and so on, but no one's teaching them

how to do it.

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