What You Can Do With Flash Cards

I spend one entire chapter of my Math book on the topic of flash cards. When I started into that material, I wondered if I had enough to fill the six or seven pages that I hoped the chapter would span. I knew that it was an important topic but wasn't sure how best to get that belief across in printed form, and feared that I'd come up mostly empty.

As I got into it, though, it began to almost write itself. The more I thought about all of the things that I'd been able to accomplish with flash cards over the past 9 months of tutoring, in terms of getting many of the foundational Math concepts imprinted and then reinforced in young minds, the faster the words flowed out of me. Around that same time, Vicki found a set of my homemade flash cards (previously, business cards of mine from the bank). They'd been stowed away in a box upstairs after being used by Tammy while she was in high school. Although I'd forgotten doing it, I apparently had gone to town and put all kinds of interesting questions on them for Tammy to study from. Looking at what I'd come up with years before I ever began formally tutoring, I started to see new, potential applications for flash cards even beyond anything that I'd come with to date.

Before I was done, that chapter exploded into one of the longest in the book and, I happen to think, one of the best. If the book was out today and someone told me that they only had time to read one chapter in it, Getting Smarter, In A Flash! would be the one that I'd point him or her to. It's probably the signature chapter of the book. I can barely wait until people get a chance to read it... along with the 14 other great chapters, of course!