Somewhere around 40 years ago, I created my best course. If you are a former teacher, you know that teachers are often required to get further professional education. Thus, they may have many graduate credits, most of which are in their specialty, primary ed or shop or whatever they teach. Teachers are interested in the whole world and my course was simply a review of what they had read over their lifetime.
The main assignment was to make a list of the books they had read - ever. That is a nutty assignment but a good exercise. First, I urged them to list books they could remember reading, especially books that they remembered helping them through new insights or deep pleasure. Of course, most adults today have read many books that they can't recall. Sometimes, a class member would look at another classmate's list and recognize a title they too had read.
As a teacher of testing and grading, I spent much time learning and teaching modern testing methods. The typical standardized test today is a multiple choice test.
Which was George Washington
President
Counterfeiter
Pilot
Printer
Normally, if you can't remember what George did, you may still recognize the best choice shown. That is the issue often referred to as "recognition v. recall". If you can recall something, the action is in your head. If you recognize something, it comes from your eyes or ears (or nose or fingertips). I wanted evidence that a book I recall has made a deeper more lasting impression on me than a book that I recognize out of a lineup as having read. Our ability to recognize includes more items than we can recall. I couldn't find evidence that recalling "The House of Intellect" tells me it is deeper in me than DeVries' "The Tents of Wickedness" but I am confident that recall indicates a stronger effect on me than mere recognition.
I did learn that when older people like me realize that someone they see has a name they can't recall, they are recognizing that person as someone whose name they used to know.
