Monday, March 19, 2007

on concentration

I was reading John Holt´s ¨How children fail¨ a week or so ago. In this book one of the problems he talks about is that children find school so boring that they cannot keep their minds on the work, and so do not learn it. (He was writing in 1960s America.) This seemed to be for two reasons. Firstly, the style of teaching was often for the teacher to leacture on the topic, asking the class questions from time to time to check understanding (or that they were paying attention). Secondly, the children could not connect the topic being covered with their own real life, and the teachers didn´t see this as a priority. So the topic covered was much less memorable; there was nothing to hook the child´s interest, so they were bored by it and didn´t learn.

I think John Holt is onto something here, and so must many teachers, as I´m sure my kids school makes the effort to relate what they are learning to how it can be used in real life. Another way of looking at this is that they use the children´s real life as a starting point for the topics they want the children to learn.

John Holt makes the point that children he observed did not know when their minds were wandering. Even with the best will in the world, if the material was stultifying then the kids would miss big chunks of the explanation and not be able to reproduce it. He suggested that the difference between a good and a poor student may be that the good student knows when their attention has wandered and can make some effort to go back to that point. He also comments that he finds this effect in himself (of his mind wandering when listening to a boring speaker), even when he is trying to fight it.

This is the point I am at this morning. This week I am reading a book called ¨An introducation to the philosophy of education¨ by SJ Curtis. It´s lovely and peaceful to study here, sitting partly in the sun and the kids at school. But I keep finding my mind has wandered off somewhere else, and I have to go back a few sentences to find out what I have been reading! Sometimes I can catch what my mind is working on instead of understanding about what I am supposed to be reading. Sometimes it´s even related to what I´m reading. But it´s quite annoying because it´s making the book go very slowly.

One thing I was being distracted about was how I might blog the thoughts I was having – so I´m doing that to get it over and done!!

I have a really helpful lecturer who talks about how to read a book. He suggests that you don´t have to understand a book on the first read through; in fact you shouldn´t try too hard. Just let it sink into your brain. Then go back and read the book through a second time, this time trying to engage with the ideas a bit. I´m holding out hope that this method will let me ´get´ the content of this book in time. Because it´s not that it is uninteresting or I can´t relate it to my life and work (which I can) – my mind is just doing other things as the same time!

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