And she uses it to this day
I work in technology & I’m always bringing ideas home from work. Productivity ideas, organization ideas, thinking ideas, all kinds of ideas. Sometimes these ideas find a place at home and we use them, other times my husband and my kids give me a loud groan, like “Oh Mom, not another idea!”.
Once I co-opted the dining room and put giant post-it note stickies all over the walls so that I could teach my son conceptual modeling.
Another time I created an Agile roadmap for deep cleaning the garage and managed the whole process through sprints and releases.
Yeah, so I’m definitely not the typical mom.
When my daughter was in the 7th grade, she needed to memorize the reproduction process of plants for her biology class. (I bet we all remember pistels and stamens, right?) She usually does pretty well in school, but unfortunately this time, she hadn’t really studied it well enough and it was clear the material hadn’t sunk in yet.
After trying more traditional study techniques with her, I said “Let’s mindmap it!” She gave me an annoyed look.
“Mom, is that what you tried to teach Drew last week? No! I just need to memorize these biology facts and I don’t have time for any of your work ideas.”
Drew is her older brother, and I had indeed tried to teach him how to mindmap Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
“Oh, let’s just try it and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll try something else.” This time she gave me the rolling eye look.
It just so happens I had a giant newsprint pad at the ready. I mean who doesn’t have giant newsprint pads in their closet, right? I got out the pad, the markers, we got down on the floor and we started mindmapping.
I drew one big circle in the middle of the page and wrote inside the circle “Plant Reproduction”.
“Now that’s your central concept there, all the other circles we draw will all tie to this idea. What are the things we need to know and remember which are related to this key concept?”
Begrudgingly, she started rattling off different topics and I drew little circles for each topic and then she wrote a description of the idea inside each circle. Then I drew some fancy looking connecting lines (in different colors of course) from the smaller circles to the central idea in the middle of the page.
She wanted to just rattle off the topics to me, but I slowed her down and said, “Now underneath this stamen circle here, let’s draw a little picture of a stamen. She drew the picture of the stamen and then started to connect the stamen circles to other topic circles on the page. Slowly she was coming around to this new way of studying.
Pretty soon she was mindmapping like a pro.
I had only set out the framework for her and she picked it up and mapped the whole reproductive process of plants in about an hour. Drawing circles, lines, and little cartoony pictures for the important ideas. The longer she worked on it and fiddled with the pictures, and drew more arrows and lines, the more the visual stuck with her. The finished map was a beautiful work of art. I wish I still had it, but that was many years ago.
That visual of plant reproduction is still in my head to this day. There’s something about creating a visual map that sticks with you, even years later.
A few days later, after she had turned in her work and taken the test at school, I asked her about her grade. “Oh, on the mindmap thing? I got an A.” Still, it was no big deal and she refused to give me any credit for my work idea. Oh well, I didn’t need credit, I was just pleased that she made an A on the exam.
Many semesters later, one of her friends came over to study something more complex than plant reproduction. As I walked by her room, I heard her say to her friend, “Now this is something my mom taught me in 7th grade and it really works.” My daughter and her friend had the newsprint pad on the floor, drawing central topics, arrows and lines, and little cartoony pictures.
That was probably about the only “thanks Mom!” I was going to get. But that’s ok — the message had been absorbed and to this day she uses mindmapping for her college level classes.
Note, if you are anything like me, and you want to teach your kid mindmapping, check out the books by Tony Buzan. Here’s a link to a great one: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Map-Book-Thinking-Potential/dp/0452273226/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=buzan&qid=1588986170&sr=8-6
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