One word? When seven would do…

Way back when I first started to think about Home Education I spent lots of money amassing the various ‘tools’ I thought I’d require in order to do it properly. These included some things which have indeed proved useful – a laminator, a subscription to enchanted learning, a blog ;), membership to all the various yahoo groups and so on. Also included were the rather more expensive things, many of which have simply never been used. We do indeed have posters of the times table on our playroom wall, we have several jigsaw puzzles depicting maps of the UK and the world. We have a whole bookcase shelf crammed with workbooks. I’m not saying these will never get used, I’m not saying they were a complete waste of money, but I certainly was foolish if I thought that without them I would be unable to Home Educate.

One of the things I very quickly realised about Davies is that he simply doesn’t learn stuff the same as I do, or the same way as Scarlett. And none of us learn like Ady does! Ady is currently studying and revising and learning as much as he can about Health and Safety for a qualification he is working towards next year. It appears to be a quite academic type of exam with lots of essay style questions and whilst you do need to have an understanding of what you are talking about a great expanse of it is simply remembering facts and quoting the correct wording of great lumps of text. I imagine it is rather similar to a law qualfication in that there are aspects which are open to interpretation but you need to be 100% clear on what is written before you can start interpreting it.

Watching Ady try and cram as much of this information into his head as possible has reminded me of my own time spent revising for GCSEs and A levels back at school. I have a pretty good memory, specifically for things with numbers in – I can recall lots of phone numbers, birthdays, the five lines we used to do in the National Lottery when it first started. I also remember song lyrics and poems very easily. I have never got the hang of that memory trick where you associate things with something else to remember them though. But you know so much of the stuff I have filled my mind with on a temporary basis has been with the sole purpose of proving I can really. I have a GCSE in French, but the other day I couldn’t remember what the French word of ‘eye’ was. I have a GCSE in History but although the period we covered for the last two years was the Tudors and the Stuarts I couldn’t possibly tell you anything more about Henry VIII than I have recently learnt with the children from the Horrible Histories song. I have GCSEs in Science for which I learnt the chemical symbols from the periodic table – I could probably rustle up a few on demand but not the whole lot. For my A level in Government and Political Studies I could rattle off every post war election, who won and who was the leader of the opposition – I couldn’t tell you that information now.

I could however probably still recite chunks of the poem from James and the Giant Peach that we covered when I was 11, I could sit and rewrite all but from memory the essay that passed me my A Level Sociology (Marx claimed that ‘religion was the opiate of the masses’, discuss.). I could still recite the poem I wrote about every single one of my junior school teachers when I left the school aged 11.

What stuck, what was meaningful, were the things that inspired me, that I created myself, or that I have used in everyday life since. Reading, writing and arithmatic are things I use every single day in some capacity. I dropped Home Economics, cookery, music, textiles and PE in favour of Electronics when I reached 14. I do still know how to wire a plug, change a fuse and what a two gang, one way switch is but I don’t recall the last time I ever used those skills. Cooking, singing, dancing and even sewing are things I quite often do on some sort of daily basis nowadays though.

If I had to define the most useful lesson I ever learnt at school it was how to deal with people. And that was a very hard lesson – it took me the entire 11 years I was there and actually it was only in coming away from it and analysing it and then going to sixth form and trying a different approach that I cracked it anyway. Frankly I’ve come a hell of a long way from being 16 and leaving school in every single area and a lot of the ‘good work’ I’ve done was merely undoing what I’d learnt at school in many areas.

Anyway, learning styles :).

I think it is pretty much accepted that people learn things in different ways, we’ve all done enough of those blogthings and quizilla quizzes about whether our brains are left or right handed etc to know that we are all quite different. We all have different things that come easily to us, things that drive us etc. I won’t sit and list all the various skills and ‘things’ that all of my readers have but suffice to say I could choose something about every one of you that would be way beyond me and similarly I imagine I can do at least one thing that every one of you couldn’t too. Part of that is education, part of it is effort, part of it is natural skill and talent but I suspect a larger part is just our hardwiring – what makes us who we are. And I think how we learn is a big part of that too.

In that very unscientific post about how you’d process that maths question just in our little group we had several different answers. For people who don’t ‘get’ maths learning things like times tables is a tremendous help – you can learn by rote that 8 x 8 is 64 without visualising the numbers at all and if you are blessed with a photographic memory then maths is not beyond your reach even if you never really get the concept of ‘playing with numbers’. In that post I talked about being able to work out 80% of something as that would be the price less staff discount for most of the retail outlets I worked in over the years. I didn’t actually work it out by calculating 80%, I worked out 10%, doubled it and subtracted it from the total. Similarly if I had to work out 5% of something I would do it by working out 10% and halving it. I remember some maths concepts just made perfect sense to me at school – percentages, ratios, fractions, algebra were all pretty straightforward because I saw them as problem solving sort of questions. Things like long division and long multiplication were trickier because it was all about the numbers and not about a concept – does that make sense? There seemed to be a logic puzzle aspect to something like fractions and those questions like ‘Johnny has twice as many apples as Mary, Mary has half the amount that Fred does and Fred has one more than Susan. If all the apples together add up to 22 how many does each person have?’ (by the way that is not a real question, I have no idea if it would work out to whole apples each and might come back and try later and edit it :lol:) made far more sense to me and were also something I would enjoy trying to work out.

Autonomy allows children to play with numbers, maths is an area which I never fret about for the children. They can see at a glance if one of them has more sweets than the other, can divide a plate of sandwiches between six of them equally and will quite often sit pondering before saying to me ‘5 and 5 and 5 and 5 is 20’. In workbook world it would probably be more important that Scarlett could recognise numbers up to 10 written down and maybe even write them herself than counting any higher that that. Actually I don’t think she’d recognise the number 8 written down but she can all but count to 20.

So if we agree that we process information in different ways, we recall it in different ways then it stands to reason that we learn it in the first place in different ways. Some people have a knack for training, for identifying what it is that will make an idea or a concept or some information click for someone, how to make them ‘get it’. I’ve done a lot of training sessions (as both trainer and trainee) and some people respond really quickly to the whiteboard, teacher at the front, calling out ideas, being prompted and maybe having a summary or a handout given at the end about ‘what we’ve learnt’. Some people loathe that style of training and would rather learn on the job, out on the floor, doing the job as they learn. For others sessions like role play, watching films to demonstrate the training, examples and anecdotes and case studies are more powerful training tools. Some people require a personal aspect, something to empathise or identify with, something that resonates with them personally. I ‘good’ trainer will develop the knack of finding out which method works best for each individual and work on targetting their training accordingly.

I think there are two ways of getting a qualification in something. One is the total recall method, cramming as much information into your brain as possible and regurgitating it on demand. The other is actually understanding the subject. And understanding it to such a degree that any question posed about it would be one you could answer. And then I think in life generally we rely on a combination. Reading is a bit like that. You could learn whole words, rely on being able to recognise them without spelling them out – which is how we read once we are fluent at it, but we combine that with some knowledge of phonics or letter sounds so that when we come across a new word we are able to decode it – but added to that it needs to be a word we have in our vocabulary anyway. One of the words on that reading age list that several people had their children do recently was ‘poignant’ I believe (someone told me, I never looked at it 😉 ). Now if you didn’t know the word then you would be unlikely to work out what it said, whereas if it was a word you already knew then you’d be in a much better position to have a stab at guessing it. I had come across the name Hermione in books years ago (Jilly Cooper actually!) but never knew how it was pronounced until the Harry Potter films came out and I heard people saying the name and suddenly realised ‘oh that must be how you are supposed to say that Herm y one name’.

So with Maths you could do it by simply reciting times tables or you could truly ‘get’ what the numbers mean, you could visualise them as balls or cakes or whatever and have a mental image of what those numbers might ‘look like’.

There has been a thread on a yahoo group recently about the periodic table – I used to know quite a bit of that by memory but never actually understood it – that would have been a far better way of learning it I reckon, to have actually understood it.

Little kids constantly ask ‘why’ – I think that is because they start off with the learning style of making sense of something first, really trying to understand it. We seem keen to stamp that out of them though and by age 7 you rarely hear a child ask ‘why’, their lose their skill for lateral thinking, their wonder at how things happen and worse than that they lose that delightful ability of cross referencing everything back to everything else. They are pushed into only thinking about one thing at a time, categorising everything into curriculum headings, exercising only one area of their development at a time. Today I told the children that if they were really well behaved at the post office and didn’t touch ‘anything’ (it is crammed with all sorts of aladdins cave type goodies all very precariously balanced on the shelves and we have frequently brought piles cascading down by poking at interesting looking things!) I would buy them some sweets. Tarly wanted to know how that could happen when her feet would be touching the floor. Now she is not four yet, she was not being cheeky or clever, she simply hasn’t done the early years stuff about the senses and been shown the picture to demonstrate touch as being something we do with our fingers and hands. She has learnt some stuff about gravity and being pulled to touch the Earth at some contact point and that’s how she relates it. Scarlett can still listen with her eyes, taste with her nose and hear with her fingertips – hope she always can. 🙂

So maybe there aren’t learning styles, maybe we’re all hardwired to learn through experience but somewhere along the way we lose the right to learn what we want when we want and have it all prescribed to us in hour sized chunks under seperate headings and drip fed to us over 11 years. But think back to how you revised for the last exam you took? Did you sit listening to heavy rock music in your pit of a bedroom while reading and rereading? Did you hang upside down in complete silence with your eyes shut perfecting total recall? Did you develop some clever mnemonic for it, set it to a song, equate every bit of information with a step along a familiar journey? Did you write and rewrite it with different coloured pens as part of a timetabled study guide? Or did you just really, really love what you were learning about, still hold that knowledge today and just understood it because it meant something to you?