Learning Can Be As Easy As 'Statement-Pie' She Says

About 12 years ago Laia Hanau was starting out on her second career. After working for a number of eyars as a writer and editorial assistant, she had gone back to school to ger a master's degree n education, which she completed in 1960. But her first two days of practice aching, in a ninth grade English class n Lexington, Ky., proved to be a near calamity. "All I could think of was, 'These kids have measles of the brain,' " she says. "There were all these kids and all these facts running around the room, and they weren't getting anywhere near each other." At the end of her second day she carne home crying her heart out for the kids who didn't know how to learn. Her physics professor husband, "a typical, unemotional .scientist," put h i s f o o t down. "You're over-involved already," he said. "If you can't stop crying, you'll just have to get out of teaching. I won't have it." With visions of her hard earned new career going down the drain, Mrs. Hanau reduced her crying to "snuffling" and went to bed. At 2 a.m., as she tells it, she awoke from a sound sleep, sat bolt upright in bed and shouted, 'Tve got it. I'll 'statement-pie' the children. "I won't repeat what my husband said then," Mrs. Hanau says. But it turned out to be the start of something big. The next day Mrs. Hanau walked into the class and said, "Listen kids, there's nothing mysterious about learning. It's all so simple. Everything you hear or read is made up of two things, statement and pie . . ." And everything just poured out in words all at once. Several years and several thousand students later, the study method Laia Hanau first elaborated spontaneously to those ninth grade English students has been copyrighted tinder the name of "Statement-Pie Study Techniques." Pie is an acronym for "proofs, information and examples." She now believes that what she has done is identify the sequence of processes that good students unconsciously use to learn material. "I was always considered a good student, in the non-sciences at least," Mrs. Hanau says. "Out of their need, I think I just made cönscious what I had alvrays done unconsciously." "Statement-pie is so simple and so obvious that it took a genius like Laia to figure it out," says Suzanne Stephanie, one of four study skills counselors at the University of Michigan trained in the Hanau Method. What happened after Mrs. Hanau introduced Statement-Pie to her high school English students was a "gradual explosión" of interest in the method. The high-schoolers did beautifully with it, and Mrs. Hanau began encouraging them to take the freshman composition cours e at the University of Kentucky during the summer so they'd have it out of the way when they started their first year of college. Lo and behold, most of them turned up with A's in the course. The unbelieving college instructors wanted to know why and traced the students back to Mrs. Hanau and Statement-Pie. Shortly thereafter she was approached by someone from the University of Kentucky medical school and asked to give instruction in her method to medical students. "The first couple of days no-one came," she recalls. "Then it just suddenly mushroomed." Before long she had joined the staff of the U - K department of behavioral sciences and was holding forth on Statement-Pie with individual students eight hours a day, six days a week, including Saturdays and Sundays. One year she worked with three-fourths of the freshman medical students and twothirds of the freshman dental students. Requests for her to come and teach the course were coming in from all over, and each one she accepted meant four months way from home and family. At last count she had received requests from 25 states, "unfortunately not including Hawaii," she says. Something had to give, and several things did. For one thing she got her method down on paper, or actually on plastic. She prepared six books of transparency overlays which the student could go through on his own. Then the students met with her only for practice sessions at applying the techniques to their own class material. In the summer of 1969, Mrs. Hanau spent a month at the University of Michigan training four persons how to teach the method. The program was funded by a grant from the Macy Foundation at the request of Dr. Robert E. Green, associate dean of student affairs at the U-M Medical School. The four have been employed by the U-M as study skills counselors since then. Madeleine Wright works through the School of Public Health. Suzanne Stephanie works with law students. Laia Hanau ("it wouldn't be me without a cigarette in my hand") and three of her teachers at the University of Michigan look through one of the transparency books they use to teach Statement-Pie Study Techniques. Fr om the left are Suzanne Stephanie, Marcella Trautmann, Mrs. Hanau and Madeleine Wright. So. far they've taught mostly professional and pre-professional students, but theyd like to catch kids in the elementary and secondary schools. (News photo by Cecil Lockard) la Trautmann and Daphne Grew, who is now on. leave, work with medical students. The program has been so successful among professional students that the Medical School and the Sloan Foundation have called on Mrs. Hanau to conduct a four-month training session here this summer for teachers from universities throughout the Midwest. Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Trautmann and Mrs. Stephanie, her first teachers, will now be trained to teach other teachers. "So that they can be separated from their husbands and families for months at a time, and I can go back to mine," says Mrs. Hanau slyly. Mrs. Hanau also trained teachers at the U-K, at Howard University and elsewhere; but as she was the only one training teachers, the demands on her time were tremendous. And she was getting into a corner in professional and pre-professional programs, when she'd really like to see the techniques introduced much earlier, at the secondary or even the elementary level. The transparceny books were so expensive that they were only produced on special order for institutions that had trained teachers. "By last year it was so unwieldy that it was either write a book or drop the whole thing," she sighs. So it's been wrltten, a paperback called "Statement-Pie Study Techniques: Book I," which will be available at two area bookstores early in June. It's the first of a series which will be published over the next six years and will gradually replace the transparency series. The books will permit people to learn the method on their own, at least at the lower levéis. It will also allow teachers to work with whole classes at one time instead of having to work with each student alone. Mrs. Wright hopes that these changes will make the method suitable for teaching at the elementary and secondary school level. She would like to see a pilot project of that type done locally. Statement-Pie is the lazy man's way to school survival, Mrs. Hanau says, and it takes up where the popular speedr e ad ing courses leave off. "Speedreading teaches you to comprehend what you read. We teach how to organize and learn large bodies of material." The most important thing about it, she says, is that "it takes the mystique out of being a good student." Some people seem to be bom with this skill. Everybody else becomes a victim of the academie establishment. "They're told to 'study harder, to concéntrate, to organize,' but nobody ever tells them how. "There's a big difference between académie intelligence and living intelligence," she says, and cites the example of a long-term study of two children who started out with an IQ of 112. After a number of years, the two were tested again. One scored 115, the other 150. "The only difference between these two people was that one knew how to lparn." she savs. Mrs. Hanau's learning method consists of four basic techniques. The student learns the theory of each one in about a half hour. TheiKhe spends a half hour a day for one week working with a teacher practicing the technique on his own class work. The next week he goes on to the next technique. The first step is Statement-Pie, where the student learns to break everything he reads or hears in a lecture into two elements: statement and pie (proof, information, example). Technique II is spotting "GoBetweens," which are defined as the relationship between statement and pie. The student then learns to subject all the material relating to one subject to "Overall Organization," or OAO. This helps the student identify the structural relationships in the material and also what he knows, what he doesn't know and what he's "fuzzy" on. Technique IV, the "Single Letter Sketch," or SLS, is used to prepare for an examination and to recall material during the exam. It involves making a visual pattern using the OAO's and labeling each part with a code letter. The method can be applied to any subject matter at any level, Mrs. Hanau says, except foreign languages which involve highly specialized methods of memorization. The sciences are the 1 est of all because there is less interference from language. "The definitions aren't always being changed on you." The method isn't for everyone, Mrs. Hanau admits. The Center for the Utilization of Learning Skills at the U-M, which provides study counseling for minority students, rejected the method, partly because of the time and expense of training teachers. On an individual basis, however, the greatest problem is for people who can't get over the idea that learning is a painful, "blood, sweat and tears" process, Mrs. Hanau says. "When they see how easy it is, the only way they ean justify all the pain and suffering they've gone through for years is to reject it out of hand." "And," adds Mrs. Wright, "there are I always students who come in thinking 'the teacher's going to lay some magie on me and I won't have to do any work.' Of course, there is no such thing." But the performance of the method is impressive. The experience both here and at the U-K has been that among students who came because they were failing in school and then participated fully in the instruction, 100 per cent passed all I their courses. The summer program needs students I for workshops to be held July 10 to Aug. I 22. Participants must be taking at least one course at the post-high school level. I They must commit themselves to use thel method on their course work and attend regularly. If you meet requirements and are interested in a free study skills course call 764-1510 between 1 and 5 p.m., Mon-I . days through Thursdays.