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It is all well and good that teachers provide quizzes.  The premise for our taskmasters doing so is to determine where their students are on a particular learning curve.  Let’s assume that the learning curve particulars are focused on the vocabulary for Chrysalids, an assigned grade-eleven novel.

How is a student going to understand the novel when he does not know much of the context and little of the target vocabulary words.  What does he do?

It’s simple.  Begin reading the novel.  On every page or two you will find a sentence that is pertinent and a word or two that is unknown.  Write down the sentence on one page and words you don’t know on the second page.

If you persevere, in the above manner right through the novel, you will have an excellent outline and be one of the delightful students who actually has come close to understanding the theme of The Chrysalids.

Now is the time to come to grips with the premise behind a learning curve.  A learning curve is a narrowly confined approach to measuring learning progress with regard to a specific learning task especially a fairly complex one.

Do remember when you were learning to ride a bicycle?  One of the aspects of your adventure was the definite possibility that the bike was going to fall over.  Once you had conquered that negative idea your bike-riding competency went up a notch.  The learning curve for bike riding should be very short.

However, let’s say that your teacher gives you a Chrysalids vocabulary quiz.  You get 80 out of 100 questions write.  How does this look on your Chrysalids learning curve?

It doesn’t look too bad.  What is your next move?  You now need to realize that you should be able to remember eighty percent of the words that you got right on your latest quiz. What is eighty percent of eighty?  You are too fast for me.  You should remember at least 64 of the 80 words that you answered correctly.

Here’s the glitch.  As you move up in the academic sphere the amount of study time required is at a premium.  Do not waste a single moment on stuff that you have fairly mastered. If you take my advice and work solely on the twenty words that you got wrong you should end up ahead.

This is where the careless tend to fall by the wayside.  If you are going to have a learning curve, you need to realize that there are several components.

In this case, the first component should be the characters.  The second component should be the Chrysalids Java game to get you up to speed on your vocabulary. I will tell you more about that later.  The third component should be Chrysalids Crossword Puzzles.  The third part should be the Day of the Triffids Quiz.  The fourth part should be the Chrysalids Summary.

Now we come to the icing on the cake.  The Chrysalids novel is written in a genre known as the bildungsroman genre.  You need to delve into it.  Once you have some understanding of the genre, you will find the Chrysalids story that much easier to fathom.

There are two other links to the learning curve:  the Chrysalids link and the Chrysalids background.

The gist of the matter is to develop a learning plan that covers most of the bases.