Having looked at and researched so much recently, I always find it very difficult to pick a subject to write about. My posts so far have been mostly just me passing on the things I’ve read during my research into various subjects and so today I thought I’d break the pattern a little and just talk about some of my own thoughts.
In the past, learning for me has been an uphill struggle. I’m not mentally impaired exactly; but my brain doesn’t make it easy for me or, as I have come to realise in more recent years, conventional teaching methods don’t make it easy for my brain.
In school I was “bright but lazy”, “a daydreamer”, or at worst “disruptive in class”. It wasn’t until I was about 20 years old that a college tutor sent me to see an educational psychiatrist because she was under the impression that I had ADHD. As it turned out, I suffer from an advanced form of “What the s**t did you think sitting me down in a completely sterile environment and talking at me for an hour was going to do?” As you might imagine, the psychiatrist put it slightly differently (those smooth talking shrinks). To be honest, I hadn’t really been told anything I didn’t already know, but it did confirm my suspicions: the modern education system is a joke. So what was I supposed to do? Cry about it? Ask for a free laptop (the standard government compensation/bribe for an inadequate education system)? Or should I just keep doing what I’ve been doing? The only reason I was sent to see an educational psychologist in the first place was that someone had noted my distaste for sitting still and hoping for inspiration to strike from out of the blue. I’m talking about a woman who had her entire fine art class erect plain white cubicles around their desks and completely cut them off from the world that is largely recognised to be the inspiration for about… I’d say every freakin’ piece of art on the planet.
So what did this psychologist tell me? He told me that it was very impressive that I’d managed to get through to doing a foundation degree without losing the plot (I’m not saying he suggested I was mentally unstable by the way). He noted that most people for whom the current education system is unsuited are spotted early as people who appear “bright but lazy”, “a daydreamer”, or sometimes “disruptive in class”. These people are treated as ‘special’ and given a disability allowance by the government (the compensation/bribe I mentioned earlier). He also pointed out that I appeared to have found my own methods for dealing with these inadequacies. It was that comment that got me really thinking. I hadn’t realised it but all those things that were seen as my quirkiness, sense of humour, and creativity, were actually just how I understood the world. For example: Sitting in a lecture one day after hearing the lecturer use the word “pastiche” I turned to my friend and said “Heh, he can’t even say ‘pasties’ properly”. Aside from being a hilarious joke, if I do say so myself, I later came to think of this as an example of how I simply learn things, by twisting them into something funny and memorable.
What I was actually told was that my brain operates in such a way that it needs to have some form of physical reference from which to understand a word. A chair is something solid of which I have personal experience being in physical contact with. Concepts such as love and hate can be referenced to my experiences of them. I know what love feels like because I’ve played Red Dead Redemption, and I know what hate feels like because Jordan has a reality show on ITV. In truth, everyone does this at some level or another and, in fact, it is an extremely effective way of learning; but one that is all but completely missing from the current education system. From that moment on, I decided to make it my ongoing aim to understand everything I could about how my (and everyone else’s) brain works.
I’ve thought for a long time that motivation is the key to learning. A person, properly motivated, can learn anything. Put a gun to a person’s head and I’m sure they’d be pretty obliging, but better than threats, are incentives. If I asked my girlfriend to try and play Halo with me, she might give it a shot, but it wouldn’t be long before she gave up. If I took away here Columbo DVDs and told her we could watch one episode for every deathmatch she won, she would be fraggin’ my ass to hell within 30mins. Having said this, however, it’s my belief that emotions are the real key to motivation. It’s not an original idea by any stretch but an interesting and useful one.
If you think back to your school days, what do you remember most? Can you remember any of your lessons? If so, what part of the lesson do you remember? Do you remember the work you were doing, or something else that was happening? Could it be that the something else was a particularly emotional event, either because it was funny, or annoying, or upsetting? I’ll tell you something I remember; I remember that the particles in a solid object are tightly aligned and rigid. When heated, these particles start to move, initially vibrating and then eventually becoming disconnected from one another. This turns the solid into a liquid. Further heating causes the particles to move more and more, eventually separating completely and evaporating. This is the liquid becoming a gas. I know this is basic stuff, but the reason I remembered it is because of the way it was taught to me. My physics teacher called up half a dozen or so people from the class to come and stand at the front of the room. He lined the “volunteers” up and explained that they represented particles in a solid object. He then set fire to a roll of paper towels and waved it a few feet from the group of assistants, causing them to shuffle uneasily away from him. He explained, as the line began to break down, that they were now becoming a liquid. The teacher then thrust the burning paper into the face of the nearest helper causing him and everyone else in the cluster to completely disperse, demonstrating how a liquid becomes a gas.
I remember certain things from school because they were funny, or exciting or entertaining, not because we were forced to write them down repeatedly. I can’t remember a word of any of my text books, but I could probably quote the entire Back to the Future trilogy. Guess which one I found more entertaining. “Learning isn’t supposed to be entertaining!” No it’s not, it’s supposed to be informative, but can you still call learning informative when people aren’t retaining the information that is being spoon-fed to them?
Ok, so this post is a little disjointed, but it sets us up nicely for future posts, in which I will cover some of the handy little things I’ve discovered about learning, and perphaps more interesting, about teaching.
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