Chapter 9: Frameworks and the Museum Tour

It took a moment to get myself oriented, but I found my way back to the dorm. Larry was still snoring, face down on his bed, so I grabbed a towel and a change of clothes and went off to the showers. I brushed my teeth and changed into clean clothes and went back to the room. I put the old clothes in the hamper, lay back on my bed and closed my eyes.

“What do you think you’re doing coming in at this hour, young man!”

“Very funny, Larry. I’m tired.”

“So let’s hear it. What happened?”

“Uh-uh, I’m not a kiss and tell kind of guy.”

“So you did do it! I knew it! She looked hot. Lucky bastard.”

“Larry, go have breakfast, let me sleep.”

“Oh, you’re going to tell me, Carter, just you wait.”

But he did eventually put on some clothes and go off to find food. I slept for a couple of hours and woke feeling better. There were some dreams, I think, and boobs featured prominently, but the details were fuzzy.

I got up and went to the food factory for a sandwich. I brought the abnormal psychology book with me to read while I ate. Afterwards, I wondered if I should go to the library for more research, but in the end I thought I should make sure I was up to date on my class work.

From his bed, Larry, who was also reading a textbook, looked up at me periodically to appraise me.

And so the week repeated itself beginning on Monday. I was careful to keep up with the reading, and to review my class notes, in order to keep this material structured in my head. Each of these classes had a framework onto which the topics discussed in class were overlaid.

If we kept that organization intact, the exams would be easy. If we lost the framework or never built it in the first place, then the material became just a collection of random facts to be memorized. It was hard to do the exams without a matrix in which to understand the material. And it was only by virtue of being able to “see” into a teacher’s epicenter that I knew about these frameworks.

I wondered why no one had tried to diagram these and present them to students in class. It would have made retention and understanding of the material much easier. Then I thought, it might be that instructors don’t recognize that there is a framework, that it is constructed by the mind unwittingly as we try to collate the facts that comprise a subject and see the relationships among them. Hmmm, that might be worth following up on. I put it in the back of my mind.

In fact, I really couldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my “independent research projects”, because I was finding the course material was getting a bit more detailed and complex. So far I was keeping up okay, but I was seeing some panicked looks on other student faces. I had an advantage, of course, but these were seriously smart people to have been admitted here, and if they were starting to worry, it would behoove me to worry a bit, too.

So I focused on my classes, trying to get a jump on the reading and exercises, and going back periodically to review what I’d already learned. I’d have midterms creeping up on me before I knew it, so no slacking. On Wednesday I got back to my room and found a note taped to my door. Someone had taken a call from Gail, who left a message with the name and author of the art history survey she recommended. It was nice of her to remember. I’d take it out from the library.

Larry was doing his best, but his study discipline left something to be desired. I would help him with his math every so often, and he seemed to be able to pick it up, but didn’t much like it. I’d finally convinced him that he did not have a genetic abnormality that prevented him from doing math. It was a chore for him, but he was slogging through it. But I wasn’t sure how he was coping with the rest of his classes.

The following Monday when I stopped by the campus post office I found a letter in my box. From California. I felt my heart jump as I saw it. I wanted to rip it open right there and read it, but I was two minutes away from the start of English class and I forced myself to put it in my bag. I was distracted all through class knowing that it was there, calling out to me.

As soon as the bell rang, I was out of there like a shot. I went to the cafeteria and got coffee and found a table. I could almost feel her excitement as she told me about the campus, her classes, what she was reading, her roommates (she had two), what clubs she had joined, and so on. The overall theme I picked up was her intoxication by the exposure to ideas that she found everywhere on campus.

People there, students and teachers, were excited about new ideas, discussing them, thinking about them, inventing them, discarding them. She found it stimulating and was caught up in it. She talked very little about the social aspects of her campus life, and I wondered whether she hadn’t yet had time for it, or if she was avoiding talking about it. That was my paranoia poking its head out, sure that she would find some smarter, more handsome guy who would take my place. I had to fight it down.

She asked some questions about my classes, and I started composing my letter to her in my head. I hated how long it took for letters to get back and forth, and I really wanted to hear her voice, but cross-country phone calls then were still really expensive, and there was no guarantee that she would be near the phone when I called. Assuming I was able to afford to call. I forced myself to put the letter away and to get my head back in study mode, as psychology class was due to start soon.

I answered her letter that evening, and mailed it the next morning. In it, at the end, I lamented how long it took to get her reply and how much it frustrated me.

We were couple of weeks into the term, and the instructors in English and European History had already assigned research papers that would be due in a couple of weeks, so that was added on to my existing work. We’d already had some quizzes on the most recent lectures, but no large tests yet. Those would come soon enough. I’d done pretty well on the quizzes.

After dinner, I spent some time reading the art history book Gail had recommended, which I’d gotten from the library the previous weekend. I liked the paintings well enough and could see why they were memorable, but was struggling to try to classify the artists, to put them in some sort of hierarchy where I could see how each was influenced, and where styles started to diverge.

This was exactly where I’d noticed that students had trouble learning because they could not see the overall structure or framework that linked the concepts. I’d be able to understand this better if I took a class on it and could peek into the instructor’s epicenter and assimilate the framework of art knowledge they had built for themselves through years of study. Without that, I would have to struggle.

Maybe it would help to get a tutor. I thought about that for a couple of minutes, then went out to the pay phone in the hall and called Gail. She was surprised to hear from me. I told her I’d been swamped with schoolwork, but I had taken her advice and gotten the art history book she told me to and was reading it.

Now I thought it might be helpful to get a guided tour so I could ask questions. She sounded genuinely pleased that I was learning about this. I told her I had Fridays off and wondered whether she might have time to be my guide through the local art museum for a couple of hours.

“I could do that. I always like going to the museum anyway. I’ve got class in the morning but maybe sometime after two o’clock might work. You want to meet me there?”

“Sure. I’ll wait out front.”

“Right. And Carter? There will be a quiz at the end of the tour, so pay attention.”

I promised that I would.

Nothing much else happened for the rest of the week, classes, club meetings, meals and sleep. Except for the Thursday meeting of the psych club. Today’s speaker was a guy called Thornton from a university in a nearby city. His interest was memory: How it works, how we store them, how we recall them, why we forget them, and so on.

Part of his research was in the normal psychological study approach, trying to classify the different types of memories and how they’re processed, but he was also interested in the chemical or biological facets of memory, perhaps with the idea of enhancing memory retention and retrieval, but also to understand the chemical basis of memory storage in the brain.

I found myself surprisingly interested. He began with a discussion about memory techniques, like the memory palace, sometimes called the Method of Loci, dating back to Cicero and further, to ancient Greece.

He talked about short- and long-term memory, of explicit and implicit memory, declarative and procedural memory. Then he discussed the types of memory encoding, acoustic, semantic, visual, and so on.

Finally, he talked about what happens on the molecular and chemical level and what was understood at present about how memories are saved at a molecular level.

I hadn’t realized it until later because I was so wrapped up in his discussion, but I had been taking notes while he talked. When he finished, there were a number of questions from the group, and I asked a couple, too. This was fascinating stuff. It might be worth looking into further. I made a note of his name and university affiliation.

It was late enough when we got through that I went straight to the chuck wagon (Larry’s name for it had rubbed off on me) and got dinner. While I ate I thought about memory. I went back to the dorm and read art history until I went to sleep.

I was able to sleep later because I had no Friday classes, so after breakfast I did some assigned reading and a problem set for Real Analysis, and sketched out some ideas for the two research papers. Around one I got a sandwich and a slice of cake at the mess tent, then headed over to the art museum. I was a few minutes early, but it was a nice day and I people-watched till I saw her coming up the steps.

Yup. Still gorgeous. She smiled when she saw me and gave a little wave.

“Right on time. That’ll look good on your class record, Carter.”

“Well, I’m trying to get on the teacher’s good side. So, do you have a plan for my education?”