A curious correlation...

The first minutes of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket have always struck me as the most accurate fictional depiction of the boot camp experience, although some details—such as having recruits refer to themselves in the first person past the first scene—do depart from reality.

One aspect I've never seen dramatized—because, frankly, it has no dramatic value at all—was the two days spent taking all sorts of tests, on subjects ranging from what you learned in school, to as many uses as you could think of (within 60 seconds) for common items, to learning an (artificial) foreign language, to copying Morse code.

The Morse test was pretty simple, as I recall. Everyone in the room was taught the letter M ("dah-dah") and one other letter (it may have been K, "dah-di-dah"). The point of the test was to go down a column of lines on the answer sheet (each with two circles) and fill in the appropriate circle as the letters were played at an ever-accelerating rate. I used to wonder how anyone could tell that a person taking the test might have an aptitude for decoding Morse based on just two letters.

I may have run across the answer today.

While looking something up online, I ran across a discussion of something called the Koch method, which dates from the 1920s, if memory serves, and was designed to bypass the formation of a mental "look-up table" that occurs when one learns all of the letters and then tries to become proficient.

The natural, intuitive (and yet counterproductive) approach requires the student to learn all the individual letters and numbers before developing any proficiency in recognizing them, which has the debilitating side effect of causing the student to stop for a moment to mentally "translate" what is heard into a letter. To add insult to injury, the traditional approach seeks to improve proficiency incrementally, by initially having students understand code sent at 5 words-per-minute, then at 10 WPM, etc.

In the Koch method, the student starts with just two letters sent at the target speed of proficiency (e.g., 20-25 WPM, or somewhere around 2 letters per second) and "copies" them (a radio term that basically means "writes them down") until some high level of proficiency is attained, say 95%.

At that point a third letter is added to the mix, which causes proficiency to drop, but after sufficient practice, it comes back up to that high level again, at which point another letter is added, and the procedure repeats, etc.

I'm thinking this approach is probably useful for some mnemonics I've played around with over the years, too, because there are times I will stop rather suddenly and have to think my way through a mnemonic to get a desired answer.

Something to think about.

Cheers...