I admit: I'm a feedback junkie when it comes to training.

I also happily work as a consultant, but, when I teach, I love getting the immediate feedback in everyone's eyes. I can see who is actively learning, who is connecting the dots between new ideas, and who is quietly puzzling on "how would I use this feature in my site?"

Offering class breaks, then, can be a challenge for me.

Of course, we break so that people can get coffee and use the restroom and ask me questions. I usually time these to be about 7-8 minutes.

After the DC class, I received three different pieces of feedback that all suggested longer breaks.

Longer breaks? But everyone always says that they love learning this stuff, that they want to cover even more, that they wished they could come back for another day, etc.

Plus, in my heart-of-hearts, I know that I sometimes worry that people wanting a long break might mean that they're not engaged or as interested as others are. I expect I'm not the first trainer or teacher to think this.

In a twist of interesting timing, I've been spending most of this week in a hospital: my girlfriend had a bad bike accident, had a head injury, and has been recuperating, slowly, in a trauma unit. While she's expecting a full recovery, one of the possibilities is that she'll have a harder time for a few weeks making short-term memories; her brain may have to "re-learn" the process to do so.

So, I've been reading about memory, and how we make them. It turns out that our brains need several things to make good memories:

• connection: Understanding how this relates to other things. I usually try to address this when I teach by first showing people where they'd use a technology, and then introducing what it is.
  
• repetition: I often perform the same process several times, with variations, knowing that repetition is a key part of learning.
  
• quiet: We need frequent periods of rest so that our brain can decide what is useful, try to assimilate it, and move it into our longer-term memories.

The first two are things I'd already learned to do as a trainer; the third is the new one.

So, I need to adjust my thinking: rather than worrying, even semi-consciously, that a long break might mean that people don't want to learn more, or that they might find their GMail checking more interesting than my teaching, I'm resolving to give them frequent, thoughtful breaks to rest and assimiliate.

I teach my next long class at the end of this month, in San Francisco. I'm going to schedule breaks of 15 minutes--almost twice a long as usual.

We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, here's to making memory.