SCHOOL LEARNING.

In formal educational institutions there are certain processes (ways of doing things) which are the means by which the ends of teaching and learning are to be achieved. These processes are things like: classes, lectures, seminars, timetables, textbooks, course material, notes, tests. (The word ‘processes’ isn’t exactly right but I can’t think of any other.)

The following are my thoughts on some of these processes as I experienced them during my time attending educational institutions. Which I did from the ages of 5 to 22. (Although I don’t have any recollection of my experiences before the age of about 10, so what I have got to say here only applies for the period from then.)

The main recurring point in the following is that it seemed to me that we (I use that pronoun to refer to me and the educational institution collectively) weren’t really applying the processes that we said we were applying. Or we were applying them but in a very superficial and perfunctory way. It was as if we were trying to give the impression that we were using the processes but we weren’t really doing that. It all seemed rather fake.

If we were really using the processes then there would have been evidence of some kind of conscious assessment and statement to ourselves about the efficacy of these processes with respect to them delivering the desired outcome of learning. But there was no such conscious assessment.

The following examples will make clearer what I mean by all of this.

1. Notes.

Notes are words which we write down so that we do not forget the things that those words are telling us. Making notes is part of the process of committing the content of the notes to memory. This process includes going back and re-reading the notes over a period of some time until their content is safely in your memory.

For example suppose Mary is showing Jack how to operate some machine. He will jot down some notes about what levers do what. And after that he will consult the notes a few times. Eventually he will remember and he can get rid of the notes. That’s more or less how notes work.

But at school notes were what I wrote down just because I had been told to do so. I was given a notebook and told to take notes in it. Notes of what the teacher said during the class. When I was writing notes in the classroom I was never thinking: I am writing these things down in order to help me remember the content.

I did not ever do the subsequent going back and re-reading the notes. Because nobody told me to do that. Despite the fact that doing note-taking without the subsequent re-reading was pointless. The only time I did re-read was when it was absolutely essential because there was an examination or test coming up. For more on that see later.

I never even stopped to consider if I fully understood what I was writing down. I was literally just writing it down. Looking back I’m amazed at how crazy my behaviour was. Here’s an example (which I might also have given elsewhere). I ‘learnt’ that a lunar eclipse occurs when the moon, in its orbit around the Earth, gets in between the Sun and the Earth. If I was bothered about understanding this I would have thought about it a bit and come up with the question: "so why isn’t there an eclipse every month?". But I didn’t. So my question now (to my past self) would be: “why are you writing down stuff which you aren’t even properly reading?”

When someone designed the classroom process they made a rule: students should take notes. The people making this rule didn’t also say “and then the students should re-read their notes until they have learnt the content”. The people making the rule didn’t say this because they, rightly, assumed that students would have enough sense to do re-reading as a matter of course. (And that teachers would make sure students were doing re-reading.) Because why would somebody just write notes and then immediately put them away and not look at them for months. That would be silly!

If I had been note-taking properly then I would have been regularly re-reading my notes. (In some structured way for example after one month then three months then six months.) And so my learning would have been fully cumulative and at any point in the course I would have known everything I had learnt and written down so far. About anything in the notes it would have been true that I knew it all as well as I knew it at the moment I had first heard it in the class. And I would have achieved this cumulative learning by regularly refreshing my knowledge by re-reading the course material so far. Of course doing all of this would mean that the further I progressed into the course the more time I would need to spend on reading the previous material. This means that the ideal layout of a course would be that the rate of learning new material would reduce as the course progressed.

But I didn’t do any of this. Which meant that if in January you had asked me something about what I had learnt in October I would not have been able to answer.

And this reviewing of notes is essential to knowing and learning proper. For example after you read some book you say: “wow I have learned a lot reading that”. But have you learnt a lot? No, because you will forget a lot of it in the coming weeks. For example if I tell you some passcode is 486213 and then I ask you straight away what it is you will give me the right answer. But it wouldn’t be right to say that you now KNOW it. Because when I ask you in two weeks time you won’t be able to tell me.

Despite the above failure to use notes properly, the act of taking notes was of great significance at school. Making sure you brought your notebooks to class and took notes was very important. Taking notes is a means to the end of learning but my experience at school was that the means had replaced the ends. The stepping stone had become the destination.

OK so that’s my first point about notes, how we didn’t really implement the method of taking notes. But my next point is: is that such a great method anyway?

Surely a good learning process would do the opposite and reduce as much as possible the reliance on the process of note-taking. Because, the aim and end point of learning is to know the material in your head. Having the material in written down form is, in and of itself, of no value whatsoever. Thus, writing things down can be dangerous because it gives you the false impression that you have acquired some knowledge. But you haven’t because it’s not in your head yet. Maybe writing notes should not be allowed at all in schools. You would just keep attending the same classes over and over until the content was in your head. I sometimes think it would have been a good idea to be illiterate. To prevent you being tempted to make notes.

Obviously attending the same classes over and again would not be practical. The institution would need staff to be constantly repeating classes in the same term. Or the students would need to repeat the same term many times. But when your learning source is something you can re-experience easily then the idea of taking as few notes as possible sounds more plausible.

For example at University where the idea was that most of the learning process has written material as its source and starting point. So you would read an article or chapter of a book and make notes of what you had learnt from reading it. (These notes are a kind of summary of what you have read.) I followed this process but later I thought: how does that help? If anything it just makes the process of learning more complicated by adding another stage in between the source material and knowing that material in my mind which is what I want. The ideal way of studying would be to never write anything, never take any notes. If you need to re-read the source material then do so. Do that as many times as you need to for the knowing to be in your mind. Then throw away the source material and then you’re done. Until you’ve got to that stage you haven’t learnt anything.

(Like Max Cady in ‘Cape Fear’. He leaves prison and doesn’t take his books with him and they say “What about your books?” and he says “Already read ‘em.”)

And there was another thing. When you make notes based on source material this means that it is the content of the notes that you are going to learn, not the whole of the source material. Because once you’ve made your notes then you re-read your notes, not the source material. But if that’s how we’re going to do it, then why didn’t the author who wrote the source material just write something that was like the notes you make. Saving you the time and effort it takes to make the notes. And saving the author the time of writing more than they needed to.

I get the impression that the content of a book is more than you are expected to learn from it. That is why books are so long. So if the aim and purpose of a book is for you to learn 20 facts about something then the book will contain about 50. Of which you will learn the 20 most significant ones. But then you could have just had a book with just those 20 facts? By the way, when I say 'learn' I mean learn so that you know for a period longer than just for a while after you have finished the book.

The other odd thing is that we had textbooks at school. And then we had teachers giving classes covering the same material. Based on which we made notes. Why this duplication? It seemed inefficient. It was like I was taking two concurrent courses covering the same material. (See later for more on textbooks.) Why doesn’t the existence of textbooks just remove the need for schools and teachers immediately and completely? If you want to know about Chemistry just go and read the book.

2. Timetable.

A timetable is something you might use to organise your life in the best way to achieve your ends. You allocate time to different activities depending on how much time you need for each of those activities. And at a time that’s convenient for you. Maybe people should use timetables in everyday life. Make an hour by hour plan of what they are going to do. Making a timetable is budgeting time the way people already budget their money. (After all, time is money.) The fact that I never used timetables in my life outside school shows just how oblivious I was to their value.

So: having a timetable is a good time management technique. But that’s not what the things we called “timetables” at school were to me. They were just a set of instructions telling me where to go and when and that’s what I did.

In a school the timetable was “one size fits all”. Which defeats the purpose of a timetable. Which is to manage your time as an individual. As an individual you might need less time on one subject and more on another. Or you might be better at concentrating in the morning than the afternoon and so would put the activities requiring concentration in the morning periods. But at school you couldn’t rearrange things according to what is best for you.

Also there was no scope to change the timetable from week to week. Which meant there would be some subjects that were set in the period just before lunch and they would be there at that time every single week for forty weeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody did worse at those subjects.

3. Revision.

The standard meaning of the word ‘revision’ is to look again at something for the purpose of making changes to it (due to an update or correction or some similar reason). But at school it means to look again at something for the purpose of reminding yourself of it (and to then keep it in your memory for the least amount of time necessary) in order to pass an examination.

Note that this latter meaning of “revise” is peculiar to Britain. The correct meaning in most of the world is “to look at again with the intent to amend or improve” or just “to amend or improve”. But people in Britain insisted on using it to mean “to look at again with the intent to memorise (for an examination)” and so now this latter meaning has become an official one and is listed in dictionaries. Where it states that this is how the word is used in Britain. (See HERE.) But this doesn’t change the fact that the British use is an abuse of the word. It’s rather like the way that one of the now official meanings of the word “disinterested” is the same as “uninterested” as well as (the correct) meaning of “disinterested” which is “not influenced by considerations of personal advantage”.

Revision is something you do to give the impression of knowing things you don’t really know. Suppose Jack found out that Mary would ask him later that day about train times to Manchester. And so he memorised all the times before she asked. So that when she asked he just reeled off all the times correctly. This would give Mary the impression that he has an amazing and vast long term memory and that this is just the kind of thing he knows all the time.

Revision doesn’t produce knowledge. To know something means it is in your head in a more permanent and settled way than whatever state revision yields. Like the way you know what your name is.

If your learning was cumulative (see §1 above) then you wouldn’t need to do revision or any kind of special preparation before you sat an exam. You would just go and sit an exam and it wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary.

Suppose your car needs repairing and Jack says he knows all about repairing cars as he has passed an examination in how to repair cars. But if he only passed the exam by revising and making sure he knew what he needed to know just for the examination and then forgot it afterwards. Would you want him to repair you car?

Consider asking yourself the question of what knowledge you have got after having done some course. You study some course for a year and then after that you ask: how much have I learnt? If I wrote it down how many pages would it fill?

4. Examination, test.

The meaning of the word ‘examination’ is the act of examining something where examining means “inspecting something thoroughly in order to say in detail something about it”. The result of an examination is what the person doing the examination says they have found out about the thing being examined. For example I can say I have done an examination of this box to see how big it is. And the result is “this box is 23 cm by 10 cm by 9 cm”. An examination is pretty much a measure (quantitative or qualitative).

The word ‘test’ means something similar. A test is an examination which has the purpose of establishing if some particular fact is true about the thing being tested. For example motor vehicles in the UK are subjected to an MOT (Ministry of Transport) test to establish whether or not they are road-worthy.

In the sense as explained it doesn’t make sense to say that you ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ an examination. Strictly speaking it is only a test, not an examination, that you can be said to have passed or failed. Suppose I examine Jack’s ability at adding up numbers to see how many he can do per minute. And the result is that he can do 10. But to get the job at the store he needs to be able to do at least 12. So the examination was done (his abilities were examined) to find out if he could do at least 12 per minute. So that examination was a test rather than an examination. If the test results are that he can only do less than 12 then Jack has failed the test.

At school an examination was a test treated as a challenge or task. Which means that, if you are being tested, then a positive outcome to the test is something that you need to make special efforts to produce. But this isn’t right. Because if you are making special efforts the result will be special and not general and so will not be accurate. The test needs to measure your general everyday ability. Because that is your real ability. If you are taking a test you shouldn’t aim to do your best but rather your average. Your best isn’t an accurate reflection of your general and usual ability.

So if you spend 20 hours a week learning and get a grade A. But everybody else who got a grade A did it by only spending 2 hours a week. Then you are not as clever (?) as the others. And your grade A will give people the wrong idea of your abilities.

If you think it’s OK to make special efforts to get the desired result then you are more likely to think that efforts other than improving your ability are also acceptable. So, if we say “Jack wants to pass the test”. This should mean that he wants to be able to do at least 12 sums per minute. But it could mean that he just wants to get the result which says that he can do 12 sums per minute regardless of whether or not he actually can. In which case he would think it OK to cheat, for example by sending someone else to take the test for him.

People are treating the measure as the goal to be achieved. Whereas the goal should be the thing that is being measured. Namely your ability to do the task.

“Revising” (see above) is a more common practice which isn’t considered cheating but which has the same effect of producing a less accurate measure in an examination. Because “revising” gives the result that you seem to know things you don’t really know.

If you’re having to strain your mind (the way you do in an examination) to recall or express some fact then you don’t really know that fact. If Jack was able, after much trying, to momentarily balance four things on his head. Then it wouldn’t be correct for him to say to people: "I can balance four things on my head".

Consider the example of a medical examination. This is a measure of your level of health. So suppose Mary’s diet contributes to her poor health. She wouldn’t deliberately improve her diet in the weeks before a medical examination in order to get a better result. Because that would defeat the purpose of the examination which is to be an accurate measure of her general usual level of health.

People get anxious about sitting an examination because they see it as a task the aim of which is to get a high score, a good result. By seeing it like this then it becomes something they might fail to do this and so they are anxious. But if you consider an examination to be a measure then there’s nothing to be anxious about. It can’t fail to be an accurate measure. And if it is inaccurate (and there are many many reasons to think examinations are very inaccurate measures) there is nothing you can do about that. Or should do even if you could. (But that is a separate matter see below.)

Another thing about about thinking of an examination in terms of just aiming to get the result is that this undervalues what is being measured. This latter then just becomes a means to an end and knowledge has no significance other than a means of getting a pass result in an examination. So, for example you would learn the fact that “soap is the end result of the reaction between an alkali and a fatty acid”. But to you that fact is just something you need to repeat to get a pass result in a Chemistry test. If someone asked you what soap was in any context other than the examination then you either wouldn’t know or you would be able to repeat the words of the fact but they would have no meaning to you.

Of course it is perfectly understandable that at school knowledge became nothing more than a means to an end. Because pretty much all of the knowledge we were taught at school was of no relevance or meaning to us as an end in itself. (Knowledge like how to solve quadratic equations and about sheep farming in Australia.) There was no other way we could treat it than as a means to the end of getting a test score in a test.

Students say that they are “studying for their exams”. Which means they are learning things just so that they can say on some particular date that they have learnt them. (So they don’t care if they will still know the things after that date.) Not so that they know them for whatever normal sensible real-life reasons there are for knowing those things.

4a. Accuracy of examinations.

To return to the point about the results of examinations not being accurate. The main cause of this is, as described above, revising which distorts the results. The other way in which the result of an examination is not accurate is the fact that not everything is examined.

You don’t have to get 100% to pass an exam, even to get a top grade. So having passed an exam doesn’t really say anything about what you know. It’s not an accurate measure of something. If you get a top grade with 80% then it’s as if 80% is the same as 100%. The pass rate for all examinations should be 100%.

Suppose Jack takes his car to Mary’s car repair shop to get fixed. Because Mary got the top grade in the car repairing exam. But this means there will be 20% about cars that she doesn’t know.

What if all this happened in a medical examination? That wouldn’t be right. If your doctor said you were OK without having checked 20% of your organs.

I was astonished by the fact that at the end of the course I got a grade A and yet, looking at the syllabus (the list of the course contents) there was so much on there that I hadn’t learnt or been taught. And even what I did learn, for a lot of that my understanding felt rather shaky. I thought: at the start you said you would teach me all this, but you haven’t. And even worse, you have said (by giving me a grade A) that you have done that. Despite the fact that you haven’t. And nobody was saying anything about this.

Exam results are often taken to be an accurate measure of intelligence. But they are not this either. If Jack gets a top grade in his Maths exam we think he is really clever. But what if he spent two years studying and everyone else got the same grade after studying for six months?

Sometimes a teacher might say about a learner that they “lack confidence in their abilities”. And I think: if the only measure a learner has of their abilities is the one that ‘examinations’ provide then it is not surprising that they lack confidence. They are not able to say anything about their actual abilities.

5. Exercises.

To exercise means to do something quite frequently over a short period of time for the purposes of improving your ability at doing that thing. But at school it meant some kind of ordeal and chore. So I hated exercises and I didn’t do them. So I didn’t learn anything properly.

Exercises are a good thing. And if I had ever understood what they were, without the negative connotations given to the word at school, I would have done more of them I think.

Part of the negative connotations associated with exercises is because, in the past, they have been over-used. There was something called “rote-learning” which was memorising of bare simple facts without any kind attention being paid to the content of what was being learned. So doing rote-learning fell out of favour. But sometimes memorising bare simple facts is all you want. If you want to know what the sequence of a particular set of chemicals is then the best way to do that is just to sit down and say them over and over again.

One other thing about exercises. When I was studying maths at school the lesson format was we were told some mathematical facts. And then given a batch of exercises to do that required knowledge of those facts. But these exercises were more a sort of self-test than exercises as I have described above. And what I noticed was that later in the batch the exercises were more difficult. And they required something more than just knowing the facts we had been told in the lesson. This “something more” was often skills at general problem solving. But it seemed unreasonable for them to give me something to do which required knowledge they had not yet supplied me with.

A surprising amount of learning is done by doing the same thing over and over again. Practice. But the school format isn’t really designed to accommodate this. There are classrooms for maths, but not practice rooms.

6. Science Experiment.

An experiment is the doing of something that hasn’t been done before (either by you or by anyone) to see what happens as a result. (For example what if I stuffed a dead chicken with snow and left it, would that increase the time it takes to spoil?)

But at school (in a (so-called) science lesson) an “experiment” was just following through some instructions about what to do where there wasn’t any thinking about what was going to happen. Either because we just didn’t care what was going to happen or because we already knew because we had already been told it in the class. But we still “did the experiment” like we were pretending to do a real experiment.

In most of my science lessons at school the teacher told us what was going to happen, told us about whatever scientific fact was involved. At the very most our “experiment” was a confirmation. But confirmation experiments are not as exciting as discovery experiments. I always wanted to really do proper discovery experiments. Where we got the materials and were just left to really experiment, to really just throw things together and see what happens.

7. Textbooks.

A ‘textbook’ is a book with text in it where the point of that text is to tell you something. But how is that different from just books in general? All books are ‘textbooks’ surely!

Sometimes a book will say that it is “for students and general readers”. But why would they need to make this distinction? What’s the difference between a book written for students and one written for the general reader? What’s the difference between a student and a general reader? They both want to know whatever the book has got to say, don’t they? And the book tells them what they want to know.

But there was a difference between textbooks and other books, especially when it came to textbooks in science. And the difference was that these latter were written in a really terse, formal and difficult to understand way. Whenever I found a science book that was “for general readers” it was always a lot better.

And textbooks often had questions at the end of each chapter to see if you, the reader, have acquired the knowledge the text is aiming to provide you with. But books in general also aim to provide you with knowledge and yet they don’t have questions at the end of each chapter.

8. Essay.

An essay is something you write to try to get to an understanding of whatever it is that you are writing about. (The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer” meaning: to try.)

But at school an essay was an ordeal and an onerous task. Giving a student the task of writing an essay was often a punishment.

What was the purpose of writing essays in school? I never understood. Was it so that students would become better at writing. But there was never enough feedback on essays or enough teaching of “how to write” for that to be the case.

Or it might be that a teacher tells a student to write an essay about X as a test so that the teacher can see how much the student knows about X. But then they ought to have got us to write essays on all the course content. But it was only ever two or three bits of it.

9. Report.

Once or twice or year the school would send to my parents something called a “report”. That word means to give “an account of” or “some quite detailed information about”.

But I never associated the document we were given with the word “report” because what we were given didn’t report anything. It was completely devoid of any useful information. It was the usual line or two using stock phrases such as “must try harder”. Yes of course, we must all try harder! You could say that about anybody.

We should have given back to the teachers a report about their report that said: “must try harder”!

10. Games.

The word ‘games’ means something fun. Who doesn’t like playing games? At school we had periods called ‘Games’ which covered physical activity and sports. But the ‘Games’ at my school seemed to be largely about giving people who were good at that sort of thing an opportunity to enjoy doing that. And making people who weren’t any good at that sort of thing feel thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Which didn’t exactly encourage them to improve. (In fact that description could apply to all subjects at school!)

As I’ve said before the lesson format was teacher saying "here do this" and doing the activity. And then we tried to do that ourselves. As expected there was a bell curve of people who were really good at it through to people who were awful at it. And that’s about it. There wasn’t really much change. If you were bad at it at the start of a lesson you were bad at it at the end of the lesson.

Maybe this is the most important point of what I have got to say here. Which is that physical activity, like just running around, and playing physical games, like catch chasing or play-fighting. These are things that children (and older people) like naturally. Even geeky bookish nerdy types like this. And yet somehow school made people (like me) hate it. This is an astonishing fact! It made me hate fun.

It has taken me a long time to even partially recover my natural enthusiasm. For example as a child we were sent on cross-country runs and hated it. It has taken me decades to get back to doing this. And now, while I am out running, I find myself thinking: I used to hate this, I used to think this was a punishment.

11. Teaching.

The act of teaching is something you do which results in a specific outcome. Which is someone else getting to the desired level of ability or understanding or knowledge of something. So we might say Jack taught Mary how to bake bread. Which means that there was an outcome which was that Mary knows how to bake bread. Or Mary taught Jack how to solve quadratic equations. Which means that there was an outcome which was that Jack could solve quadratic equations.

But in a school it seemed teaching was just standing in front of a class and saying things. Regardless of what the outcome of that saying was. The outcome could be understanding. But mostly it was not understanding or it was boredom or annoyance or a headache. I didn’t notice any ‘teaching’ that took the nature of the outcome into account. (Actually that’s not entirely true, the school was certainly interested in students getting the grades but that was about it.) If you asked them if that was something they thought about they would probably be surprised. They would say: I’ve done my job which is to stand at the front and deliver the lesson. That’s what teachers do!

It might well have been the case that if the teacher went and spoke direct to students they could, in a few minutes, fix the problem with the way the students were receiving the lesson being delivered. So that then the teacher could go back to the front, safe in the knowledge that the lesson was being received and understood. But they didn't do this. They just carried on delivering the lesson unconcerned about whether it was being effective.

My overall impression of school was that it was less a place where learning how to do things was effected but more just a place where you went and got given these things to do, and either you could do them or you couldn’t. (And you got told things which you could either understand or you couldn’t understand.) If you could then fine. If you couldn’t then you got, at the very least, frowned at. Maybe also pointed and laughed at or shouted at. Many times I was given things to do which I was awful at and I could see that I should be able to do those things and I felt how great it would be if I could. For example I was bad at writing. We were told to write an account of what we did during the summer. And then (like now!) I couldn’t put the words together. When I came to think what to write my mind was blank. (Maybe that was because I spent summers doing nothing, I don’t know.) But there was nothing being done by any teacher so that I would be good at writing. And, when I look back at it now, I see that this is a basic skill, like arithmetic. Being able to articulate your inner mental life into words.

At school I would think about the logistics of the process of teaching. A good process (any kind of process) covers all eventualities but this one of teaching at school seemed to deal inadequately with the possibility of a student failing to understand what they were told.

If you didn’t understand something you got told then, in principle, you could ask. But this ability to ask was not the central part of the format of the process of teaching. If it was then provision would have been made for students to ask questions. The central part was always a teacher at the front of the class. Asking questions was an afterthought, something which got in the way of the central part.

Allowing questions to be asked in a class format isn’t that great anyway. I want my questions answered I don’t want to sit and listen to other people get their questions answered. That’s just a waste of my time, not very efficient at all.

When they said: “if you don’t understand then ask” I would think: what if they tried to explain again I still didn’t understand and I said so. And this kept on happening regardless of how they tried to explain. What would they do then? It didn’t seem to me that they had any plan for this eventuality!

Maybe it makes sense to limit the ability to ask questions. After all the lesson has been spoken and so should have been understood. If you have questions that means you haven’t understood straight away. But why would that be so? The material was presented in a form that someone of your understanding ability could reasonably be expected to understand. If you don’t then maybe the thing to do should be to work out why rather than teachers making an extra effort (by answering your questions) to get you to understand.

In my experience if you did ask about something you didn’t understand you would just get the teacher simply repeating word for word the explanation you had already had (the one you didn’t understand). Like that was the only resource they had to get students to a state of understanding.

The analogy might be something like: suppose there was a widget making plant. And one of the main processes was R, where the purpose of this process was to fit component K to component L. If process R was failing 20% of the time. Then the engineers would modify and correct it to get to the 100% rate. Or, if they were not able to do that (maybe because process R was too complex and expensive to tinker with) then, at the very least they would introduce a subprocess to pick up the 20% failed from process R and to fit K and L together via that. But if they were working the way school worked they would just throw away the 20% of widgets!

In a classroom a teacher is supposed to check that everyone understands the material. But they often bypassed this step. Sometimes I wonder if the way they put students into groups was a way of doing this. So they would set the class a task. And then put students into groups and get each group to do some task to demonstrate understanding of the material. In this way each group could demonstrate understanding, or rather: the brightest students in each group could. And the teacher could take this as that everyone in the group had understanding. It was a kind of way of ignoring the experience of the less able students. Or even: a way of delegating this task of ignoring to the more able students! Who could be relied on to speak up when the others did not.

There was no process by which you might criticise teaching. Sometimes I thought about teachers that they have the same sort of arbitrary power that they (as members of a good liberal profession) rail against in other areas.

Often "good teaching" was taken to mean teaching that made the pupils interested. But how can you "make something interesting"? That makes no sense: either the student wants is interested in something and so wants to understand it. Or they aren’t and they don’t. I think at school "making it interesting" was things like, in history lessons, recounting exciting dramatic events. Or in science it might be to wow the pupils with amazing demonstrations of exploding chemicals or the effects of electricity. But wowing science is no good. The student’s aim should be to understand not to be wowed. If a student is interested i wow science then they are interested in wow not in science. I guess the idea is that the wow increases the desire to understand science but I’m not sure that it ever does.

A similar point applies to “making learning fun”. If you want to learn then learning is already fun. You only need to make it fun for students who don’t want to learn. 

In short teaching is about communication. But at school it was just 'going through the motions' of communication. A teacher saying things. It looks like communication but it isn't. In fact I would say that in all my years of schooling I never, not once not even for five minutes, felt that any of my (so-called) teachers really cared about how well they had communicated to me the material at hand, how well I had learnt something. (And I would include my years at University in this.) This was largely due to sheer numbers. One teacher and 30 learners. I would look forward to going to school on those days when lots of kids were off because of some religious festival. This was one of the few times when you would actually get to talk to a teacher. Have a proper conversation with them.

It seemed to me that teachers thought teaching was a process rather like pouring water into a jug. That's why they just stood at the front of the class saying things as if those things would just go into our minds like water going into a jug. This is also why often teaching is referred to using the word 'instruction'. As if teaching was 'giving instructions'. But teaching is more complex than that. They might rename schools 'instructories', like factories of instruction! 

I think the main point of this section is that my experience of teaching is that it wasn’t tailored to individuals. It didn’t address the different sorts of not-understanding that individuals had. It was like I had something in front of me on my desk that I had problem with. And I told the teacher who was stood at the front of the classroom. And they shouted over some things I could try to resolve the problem. And I was thinking: no, you need to come over here and directly look at exactly what is going on with the thing on my desk. This example is literal and metaphorical too.

The teaching I experienced was usually ‘mass’ action. By which I mean a teacher at the front of the class saying things to a whole class of learners. (Like ‘mass production’.) But then this could be done in a different way. Like the class going away and reading a book. I thought: an actual teacher in real life should do only things which can’t be done otherwise. By which I mean one-to-one interaction with learners individually.

My experience of teaching was often: teacher explains something to the class and expects them to understand straight away. When the class doesn’t then the teacher gets impatient and annoyed.

Something else about teachers which I am sure I have mentioned elsewhere. Teachers are people who, as students themselves excelled and were good at understanding the subject. But then they won’t make good teachers. Because they don’t understand what it’s like to not understand.

12. More things.

When I think about it, the point I have been making (labouring) in the foregoing also applies to just about everything. For example one of the things taught at school was long multiplication. This was all about how to work out things like that “27 x 43 = 1,161”. Looking back at it now I can see that the procedure I was taught to follow was based on the idea that you can separate the 43 into 40 and 3. And then you apply the other number, the 27 to both those parts separately. And add up the results. So then you do the two actions “27 x 3” and “27 x 40” separately. And then add the two together. So you could have done it the other way around. You could have split the 27 into 20 and 7 and applied each part to the 43. But at school I had no idea that that’s what I was doing. That that’s what was going on. Nobody told me and it never occurred to me to think about it like that. I just followed the procedure. That’s what I did with everything. I did things I was told to without understanding their significance. Like a machine.

Here’s another example. Suppose Jack gives Mary these instructions: Come over here and stand in front of this shelf. Now, put your right hand up near that bottle of olive oil. Now open the fingers of your right hand as wide as you can with the palm facing the bottle and with the fingers pointing to about the 2 o’clock position. Then move your hand slowly forward until the palm just touches the bottle. Then close the fingers of your hand so they go round the bottle and meet round the back. At which point Mary says: “Wait stop! why don’t you just tell me to get you the bottle off the shelf. That’s what you want isn’t it?”.

I have experienced something similar where someone is explaining how to do something but all they are telling me is what sequence to press some buttons. For example doing something on a computer application like a spreadsheet. But really they should be telling me for each button, the reason why I pressing that button, ie what the pressing is doing.

In general I went to school in the morning and couldn’t wait to finish. To come back home and watch cartoons and eat crisps. In the meantime I did what I was told and if (for example) I was told to write words in some things called ‘notebooks’ then I would do so. I didn’t ever reflect on the significance or efficacy of what I was doing.

And neither was such reflection encouraged in any way. In fact it was discouraged. At school there was a profound and deep culture of hatred and despising of learning. At best learning was looked on as a chore and a necessary evil. (An attitude in which the teachers were complicit.) End of term was celebrated with rejoicing. I remember end of year children burnt their books in the street. (Yes, really!)

In educational institutions no provision is made for learners to reflect on and to talk about about what they’re doing. About the processes of teaching and learning that purport to get them what they want. But, in general, that is something that is necessary. Whenever you do something you always do some thinking about the efficacy of what you are doing for the getting to the end that you are aiming for. So why not do it at a school? I found the absence of such reflection quite frustrating.

A lot of what I have said in this section is echoed by John Holt in his book 'How Children Fail'. His point there is that schooling focuses on getting answers. It makes children afraid of getting things wrong and so they put all their efforts into just producing the answer by any means rather than through correct thinking. They are 'producers' not 'thinkers'. So schools fail to develop children's natural thinking skills.

Holt gives an example of a student studying for a Chemistry test. "He was trying to memorise which of a list of salts were soluble in water. Going through the list, he said that calcium carbonate was soluble. I asked him to name some common materials made of calcium carbonate. He named limestone, granite, and marble. I asked, 'do you often see these things dissolving in the rain?'. He had never thought of that. Between what he was studying for chemistry and the real world, the world of his senses and common sense, there was no connection." Connecting facts with the real world is something that 'thinkers' do.

But what he is saying is obvious. School is full of tests and exams and the aim is to get the grades. As to whether or not thinking skills have been used to get the grades, nobody cares about that. When I was at school I never had any teachers try to find out whether or not I was properly understanding things.

(Holt gives an example which resonated with me particularly, of children giving just any answer to a question even though it is certainly wrong. This is because the anxiety of whether or not you are going to get the correct answer is worse than the pain of actually being wrong. They give any old answer just to stop feeling anxious.)

So, says Holt, we need to stop children fearing being wrong. And he is correct about this. I used to think: why do teachers express disappointment (or even anger) at students being wrong. Being wrong is just a normal part of learning.

From my own experience another example of the students being producers instead of thinkers was in English Literature. I had lessons in this for a couple of years. In effect I was taught to say things about certain works which suggested I was articulating a literary critical opinion of those works. But really I was doing no such thing. I was just producing the answers I needed to produce to get the grades. There was no development of my own abilities to articulate my opinions of the works. Now that I think of it, this is a fundamental skill people need. Maths and English have always been the two core subjects. And the point of English is surely to teach you how to use the English language to articulate your thoughts. To put them into words. But, as you will have gathered if you have read much of the stuff I have written in this blog, that skill is one that I was never taught!

Even now when I sometimes search on the internet for certain works of literature Google tells me about similar things hat other people have searched for and these are often students searching for answers to essay questions. (For example I have just searched for Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’ and one of the “people also ask” is “How is the tragedy of war brought out in "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen?”) These students want to find something they can copy and paste and produce for their teachers. And then the teachers give them points. And everybody is happy.

(By the way, I think that was one of the two or three most horrible things about school. Having to write essays about, for example Shakespeare, in which I said things which expressed a kind of 'critical appreciation' whereas this was all false. In reality I thought Shakespeare was rubbish. The whole thing was so fake.)

One way in which I often found myself considering the efficacy of the way I was learning was: how fast? Sometimes it seemed as if things were going too fast. As if I was trying to learn things at too fast a rate. I remember once in a corridor seeing lots of students trying to stream through a doorway. There were too many and the result was that there was a jam and the rate of them getting through the door was zero. And I thought to myself: that’s what happens when you try to learn things at too fast a rate. You end up learning nothing. If you just slowed down the rate you’d actually learn more. Of course you want to go at as fast a rate as you can. You don’t want to go too slow. (So, at that moment, there in the corridor, with this profound insight just having dawned on me, I shouted to my fellow students: STOP, you’re trying to get through the doors too fast: just slow down. And they fell silent and gazed at me in wonder and spread themselves out so that they were less dense and the flow through the doorway was restored. And as they filed past me they patted me on the back remarking: "fine work, man!". -- Actually this last bit (the bit described so far in these parentheses) did NOT happen. The sort of school I went to, I’m quite certain that if I had made such a dramatic intervention in the corridor flow rate then those hordes of scruffy youths would have tackled me to the floor and beaten me to bloody pulp without a moment’s hesitation. Cleaning staff would still be wiping my remains off the walls to this very day.)

There were some students who wanted (for whatever reason) to do well at what the aim of school was, ie learning. Those students were disparagingly called, by other students, “swots” and mocked. Which was very off-putting. Imagine you lived in a house with someone who constantly mocked you for keeping the house clean and tidy.

In the above I have somewhat exaggerated the extent of my obliviousness during my years of schooling. Later on I began to think about what was going on and to try to change the way I was learning. But by then it was too late.

Why didn’t we learn subjects sequentially? So if student was studying eight subjects over six terms which is 78 weeks. Then we could have just spent nine weeks doing each subject. In each nine week period you would study that subject and nothing else. I’m not saying that doing it like this would be good. But it’s something to think about.

I really hated having to study literature. I thought it was stupid but what I thought didn’t matter. There seems to be an odd sort of tyranny in place. There is a power relation between teacher and student. About what is taught and how it is taught.

Often it was like having to do ‘double-think’. So, a lesson in English Literature explains how Jane Austen portrays psychologically complex characters and comments on the social mores of her time. And I think: I don’t think she does either I just think it’s a silly story. But no! I’m not allowed to think that. I have to pass the exam so I have to write something I don’t think. I have to say that I think Jane Austen does portray complex characters and make comments on society. Even though I think that’s nonsense.

Sometimes it seemed as if school learning was actually a systematic and deliberate attempt to prevent learning of any sort. By occupying my time with nonsense. Or by persuading me that this nonsense was proper learning. Thus dissuading me from pursuing real "proper learning". Whatever that is.

A lot of learning, at school and after too, was of the sort where you get told that to do X just press these buttons. And I would ask: yes but I want to know how the buttons do X.

For two years when I was about age 11 I was at a school that had swimming lessons. This was about half an hour a week I think. But the whole of those so-called lessons consisted of me and a few others huddled at one end of the pool trying and failing to make any successful swimming strokes. Neither was anyone bothered about us. The swimming teacher was at the other end of the pool with the kids who were swimming well. (This is how I remember it. The craziness of it makes me think I am misremembering it but I’m certain that’s what happened.)

During my time being schooled (from age 5 to 21) the ONLY time I felt like I was properly learning was when, aged 13, I learnt how to do computer programming in the BASIC language on the ZX Spectrum home computer (both of these things are now so archaic) simply by sitting down and reading the manual. That was the only time ever.

Neither since then have there been many occasions when I felt I was properly learning something. One was when I learnt how to ride a bicycle as an adult.

Talking about learning to ride a bicycle, one thing I really wanted when I was doing this was a safe way to fall off repeatedly. If I could have had a padded suit (like the Michelin man) that would have been good. I wanted to fall off because falling off is "getting it wrong" and by doing that I would become aware of the boundary between doing it right and doing it wrong. Which is an important part of being able to do something right. - What I mean is that I needed to learn what things (call these X) I would have to do for me to become so unstable as to fall off. Then once I had learnt what X is then I would avoid X. But I can’t learn what X is unless I actually do it and so fall off. So then I don’t do that. But then this means I will always be overcautious. I will avoid doing things because, for all I know they might cause me to fall off! The solution to this is to have some way of falling off safely. Then I can repeatedly do X and fall off and from this I will come away having learnt what X is. Then I will know that I can do everything just up to X but not X. Without this I will avoid doing things which are just up to X even though I would be perfectly safe doing them! - Another example of this sort of thing is once when I had a job processing client claims using the business's proprietary software. I attended a training course on how to use this software but I never felt I really understood it. Then one day we got access to a dummy (non-live) version of the same software. I spent a few hours just inputting things incorrectly in lots of different ways. Repeatedly making the (dummy) system throw up error messages or even just crashing it altogether. And through doing this I got a better understanding of how that software worked than I got from the training course. This is all about learning by failing. (All this trying out behaviour you could describe as ‘playing’.)

From schooling the bottom line as I see it is: at the beginning I have a list of things that I will know. At the end of the course I want to know them. That’s all. But that never happens!

Here’s something which maybe I should have mentioned right at the start. When I was aged about 25 after I had finished full-time education years earlier, I realised that I didn’t know what causes seasons. I thought to myself: “wait a minute how can that be right? I have a top grade in physics at school (high school, age 18) and am a graduate after that too!” And this wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know.

In general my experience of school is that it was a conspiracy the aim of which wasn’t for me to learn things but the opposite of that. The aim was to prevent me from learning by putting me in some place where I would be constantly distracted from learning by anxiety induced by the formality of the place and by the rowdy attentions of other children. Furthermore, and maybe even more importantly, I wasn’t aware of the fact that I wasn’t learning anything. It’s as if I was thinking: I’m at school and nobody is saying I’m not doing well therefore I must be learning. This misperception was dangerous. If I had seen things correctly, ie that I wasn’t learning then I would have done something about it.

And outside school also I was under stimulated too. I remember just tagging along with my mother visiting other people’s houses and me so bored I was sitting watching the clock hands move slowly. This was when I was about 8. And I am thinking now, all that time I could have been doing something. With some attention I could have been being developed. I don’t remember those adults interacting with me. I don’t know how or how much all this has affected who I am became.

One thing I hated in classroom learning was where the teacher would pause giving their “talk from the front” and then they would ask a question. And kids would put their hands up and one would get selected and give an answer. I am happy with the idea that this kind of questioning and answering is an important part of teaching. But I was hardly ever selected to answer. And I thought to myself: “I didn’t come here to watch other people being taught! What good is that to me?”.

[19 February 2018 etc]