Rereading is not revision

The trap

Rereading a chapter produces a warm sense of recognition. That sense is not retention — it is fluency, and it disappears the moment you are asked to produce the material without the page in front of you.

This is why a month of diligent rereading can leave you with a week of recall.

What works instead

Method	Why it works
Closed-book recall	Forces retrieval, which is the thing being trained
Spaced revisits	Interrupts forgetting at the point it starts
Explaining aloud	Exposes gaps immediately and unforgivingly

Why nobody does it

Because it feels worse. Retrieval practice is uncomfortable and produces a running tally of what you do not know, where rereading produces a pleasant sense of progress.

The discomfort is the mechanism. If revision feels easy, it is probably not revision.