What I think about when I think about learning

Quite often I come across references in books I'm reading which seem to me to summarise certain ideas and attitudes to learning and teaching better than the text books do. I want to build up a bank of these paragraphs in case they are useful in a lesson/paper. One example is a section of the auto-biographical book 'What I talk about when I talk about running' by Haruki Murakami. He describes learning to improve his swimming (to improve his triathlon times).

"Lots of people know how to swim, but those who can efficiently teach how to swim are few and far between. That's the feeling I get. It's difficult to teach how to write novels (at least I know I couldn't), but teaching swimming is just as hard. And this isn't confined to swimming and novels. Of course, there are teachers who can teach a set subject in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren't many who can adjust thier teaching to the abilities and tendencies of thier pupils and explain things in thier own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all.

I wasted the first two years trying to find a good coach. Each new coach tinkered with my form, just enough to mess up my swimming, sometimes to the point where I could hardly swim at all. Naturally, my confidence went down the drain. At this rate, there was no way I could enter a triathlon...

My wife was the one who found me a good coach...

The first thing this coach did was check my overall swimming and ask what my goals were. "I want to participate in a triathalon" I told her. "So you want ot be able to do the crawl in the ocean and swim long distances" she asked... "I'm glad you have clear-cut goals. That makes it easier for me."...

What's special about this woman's teaching style is that she doesn't teach you the textbook form at the beginning... So in the beginning, she teaches you to swim like a flat board without any body rotation - in other words, completely the opposite of what the textbook says... As I practiced persistently, I could swim the way she told me to, in this awkward way, but I wasn't convinved it was doing any good.

And then, ever so slowly, my coach started to add some rotation. Not emphasising that we were practising rotation, but just teaching a seperate way of moving. The pupil has no idea what the real point of this practice is. He merely does as he is told...You end up end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realsie what it was all for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture, and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light and the colours and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage, 2009). pp. 161-162

Livescribe

I'm trying out a Livescribe Pulse pen (which I bought for myself as a pressie). Essentially, it is a pen that captures anything you write on special paper, and also records audio at the same time if you ask it to. The audio and writing are synched such that you can click on your paper and hear the audio, or you can create a pencast that plays back the writing and audio together.

I have some projects coming up where I think it will prove useful. I'm hoping that it will help with interviews with staff for case studies. Since buying it, I've discovered the good people in the Technology Enhanced Learning group upstairs are also trying them out. In their case, they are using them with students with learning difficulties. It will be great to see how they get on with it, and I'm sure it will prove to be useful to those students. I wish I'd had one when studying at University.

The best use for me so far has been in lesson planning. I write a plan on paper (which feels the most natural way to sketch this out). I can then write an extra not and orally rehearse the kind of thing I'll say at each section. I can later listen back to those bits by clicking the paper. One nice thing about this is getting away from the screen and also from PowerPoint whilst planning. I'm becoming overly reliant on the latter. It also puts the emphaisis for me back onto what I am going to say whilst planning, rather than the bullets and pictures for the slide. It's not that I think PowerPoint is not useful, but I think I prefer this text and aural planning first, and then work out how to add slides to complement the session.