Pete and Repeat were brothers...

"Pete and Repeat were brothers. Pete and Repeat went down the river in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was left?" - source unknown

    When I was about 10 yrs old, I took a personality test which identified me in the Littauer/Hippocrates tradition as sanguine (though a few years later I was split between sanguine and melancholy). Note that one of the possible weaknesses mentioned in the test is repetition. Generally speaking, if I like something, I like to repeat it, often to the point of annoying other people. I also can annoy certain adventure-oriented people by insisting on repeating familiar things which I like, rather than trying something new (which I may not like). So, I guess that's why it's considered a weakness. And yet, it has always been hard for me to think of it as a weakness, I simply thought of it as a quirk. One of my favorite Chesterton quotes shows how repetition and sanguinity are inter-related:

"It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead."
   
Though I now have a degree in physics, with a minor in statistics, I have not always been good at math. I started to get good when my parents enrolled me in Algebra 1/2 at our co-op, and I did Saxon math the way it was meant to be done: every problem in every lesson! That is alot of homework, doing about 1 lesson a day, with 30 or more problems per lesson. Much of the point of Saxon math is repetition, and building concepts just a piece at a time, every day, and then practicing that over, and over, and over. I know other students HATED this. I think even my parents, and some of my later math teachers (and certainly most college math teachers/students) saw some of this as unecessary. But for me, it was the key. Without the gentle but persistent method employed by Saxon, I don't think I ever would have built enough math confidence to major in physics. I remember another homeschooler complaining to me that he was so sick and tired of the repetition in Saxon lessons, and I tried to encourage him, saying something like: "I try not to think of the lessons as work. In music, there is lots of repetition, each verse in a song is a different variation, and the choruses are often repeated endlessly. We enjoy this repetition in music, and in Saxon lessons I see something similar going on. It all becomes so predictable after a while, and I actually find that very comforting. I love the sense I have of knowing what's coming next." In fact, I like to paraphrase something Saxon himself once said: "Math is not difficult, math is just different. Time is the elixir that turns things different into things familiar." Furthermore, I can't help but compare this to the end of Matthew 11, as phrased in The Message "Come to me...I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me - watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you." So, for me, repetition is the comfort of the familiar, and it is often ONLY in that comfort zone that I am able to confront and master new material, and expand my comfort zone. I know many educators think that rote memorization and drill is boring and unproductive, but I'm glad that I was in a situation where the Saxon method was allowed.

Also, the more repetition that is involved in learning something, the longer one tends to remember it. I think that studies of various reinforcement schedules in conditioning show this not just for me, but for almost everybody. I have often thought that if my college textbooks had mimicked the Saxon method, my college education would've been a much more valuable experience (as it is, I feel I've forgotten so much already). Anyway, I once read a book called Positive Addiction, which was mainly about the phenomena of runners high. Running is a very repetitive activity, almost mindless in fact. I started thinking about the "comfort" produced by physical repetition, and how that might be related to learning and creativity? Lots of people (including me) tend to pace when they think (although my doing this annoys some people). So, perhaps creativity can be related to so-called mindless repetition? If the brain is more-or-less a neural network, then each repetition will widen the brain pathway for a given "thought." They also say that if you study in a specific setting, you will do much better on a test taken in the same setting.

In fact, there exists a whole class of people who seem to be obsessed with routines, familiarity, and even physical repetitions (such as rocking, or other obsessive-compulsive behaviours): autistics. The reason why I find this interesting is because a small amount of them are savants. Though savants are not known for being creative per se, they have some exceptional skills! If the skills of savants are related to their obsession with repeating certain behaviours, even certain mental behaviours, then I think that would open up new frontiers in learning. I have never seriously tried this, but part of me thinks it would be fun to try acting autistic for some time, and then see if I might be able to gain any slightly savantish skills? Another reason why I thought this is because I read Tesla's autobiography . I gained three rather interesting observations about Tesla from that book:

1. Tesla has some bizarre, autistic like habits/obsessions (counting steps, calculating the volume of his meals, etc)
2. Tesla has some bizarre mental capabilities (being able to visualize exact blueprints for devices that when built would work without having the prototype go through testing processes)
3. Tesla believed his abilities could be taught to other engineers.

So, anyway, that's something to ponder; and in some degree, I think the old idea of having students write something on the blackboard 100 times was actually not a bad idea.

As an afterthought, there is one more place where I have noticed some interesting effects of repetition. As my family moved towards being Messianic, we began to celebrate the traditional Jewish feasts (now I celebrate some of them, and others I do not). In the Bible, important events often align with the celebration of these feasts, particularly in Jesus' life. This is true not only in a temporal sense, but in meaning as well. The most notable example would be Jesus dying as the sacrificial lamb at Passover time. Furthermore, if there is anything to Biblical Eschatology, I think it must involve the feast-times. Which brings me to the closest thing I can give as a summary for this blog: Time allows repetition (and recursion, which I will mention in a later blog, I hope). Every day is a form of repetition. Every year is a form of repetition. Perhaps it is possible in an individual sense to pay attention to your life, and develop a sense for what is coming next?