Watching my toddler grandsons, I observe them learning. They can both concentrate when they are not interrupted (by parent or brother). The nearly two year old at a “Messy Play” event once a month, is given pens to colour in, but does no more than the obligatory draw of the pen that he sees the grown up wants. No one has yet shown him how to hold the pen and I think he’d ignore them if they did. But he is fascinated by the way pen lids come off and go on. He can happily spend half an hour pulling and pushing lids, gesticulating to be given another pen in order to try that lid too. He has also spent half an hour on a paste stick, poking pens into it, pushing the paste up and down.
Susan Isaacs believed in nursery education. Issacs emphasised the value of play in nursery school, with bricks, sand, clay, art and craft, which is what Messy Play afternoons are about.   They also provide opportunities to play with other children, or at least to observe them, observe how they play, observe how the adults interact too.
Sometimes, as a tutor of adults, I’ve had the chance to observe my university students actively learning. Once, I knew a student was close to working something out, whilst her neighbour who already understood was dying to explain it to her, but waited when I gesticulated. And the student got it! That is what is so satisfying about being a tutor – seeing students achieve understanding through their own efforts.
I can’t see that achievement with online tutorials.

Recently, I was asked the question, “After the pandemic, what message would you give a politician?” Here’s what I’d like to see changed about our schools in the UK.

• Increase the space for each child in school,
• Provide three times the existing sets of books in secondary schools.
• Use desks, not lockers for children in years 7-8 (ages 11 – 13)
• Give most lessons in the home class room until students are 14 or older.
• Segregate years 7-8 from upper years

In lockdown under Covid, people have reported the spread of Covid among school children. If you see how crammed together they are in their classrooms, you’d understand why. Take a worse case, a class room built in the 1950s for teenage boys, who apparently were smaller than today’s teenage boys. Add a teacher. Add a learning assistant or two. Add all the bags and music cases that the students must now carry around with them. And you’ll be unable to move unless you have similar agility to them and can climb over them and their stuff, and no-one complains about you touching them to keep your balance as you pass.

Children in secondary schools move between class rooms for different lessons, and the relevant text books are kept in those rooms. During lockdown, children had to stay in their rooms and the teachers had to hoik the books around the school. Now, if you loaned each child the book for the year, then it would already be in the class room.  If each student had a desk in their home class room, a desk in which they could keep their books, a classroom that other students didn’t use, then the teachers wouldn’t have to carry books around and students would have a more secure home base.

Children get bullied. Bullying happens between classrooms, in the corridors. Less movement around schools will reduce congestion on the corridors, some of which are barely two metres wide anyhow. Under lockdown, some head teachers kept the younger years away from the older, and discovered that bullying dropped a lot. Segregating those younger years  helped them settle in more securely, and so would having their own classroom.

Such changes would reduce congestion, opportunities for bullying and weight lifting for teachers. The children should also feel more comfortable and safe, which will make it easier for them to learn – the aim of our schools.

This links to architects who design educational buildings: https://www.tgescapes.co.uk/blog/education-how-big-should-send-classroom-be

How big should a SEND classroom be?

I expect lemons have been in your life nearly all year, dear reader. Who has not been affected by Covid 19? Looking back at the year, I realise that Covid 19 by constraining us, forced us to take new opportunities. One of those has been online choirs. Choirs are considered to spread the disease easily because members sing so close to each other that they share air droplets and infect each other, so choirs have been banned. Some existing choirs went on line for Zoom rehearsals. I know one good choir, and one pants at the Zoom thing. It depends on how the director sets it up, looks at the camera, manages the sound technology. And some choirs started up for the first time. One good new choir was The Self Isolation Choir, started with the intention to teach and sing The Messiah, and then everything would go back to normal again. Everything has not yet gone back to normal, and the Self Isolation Choir is still here. It has grown from a few hundred members to several thousands, from the Bristol region it started at, to international. I had never sung The Messiah before, have learned to sing it, including the long bouncy bits and the high Gs. Then the SIC offered a summer school of a variety of choral music, most of which I didn’t know. I’d not heard of Rutter! Then they offered more courses in the autumn, requiems, Elijah, and then Christmas songs. If you want, you can record yourself singing your part, upload it, and their wonderful technicians wave some magic wand that hides the page turning rustles and high note screeching, producing a blended harmonious tune from all the sopranos, altos, tenors and basses together.

This evening we have a performance from 17:00 UTC-19:00 UTC, of Christmas at Home with nine carols,  publishing our recording on YouTube live at https://youtu.be/P53dr0Jo40s.  Tune in and enjoy it.

Sometimes life throws you lemons.

I consolidated what I’d learned from that Cisco course by taking the Cisco CCNA2 course too. – a glutton for punishment, but then that’s the point – lifelong learning The learning  last year is paying off as I analyse and mark my OU TM129 students’ problems and assignments on networks.

However, life gets in the way sometimes for students and this time for this tutor too. I enrolled on the CCNA security course on 28 January. I shouldn’t have done. I’m never going to use the content, no one is going to employ in that capacity and I probably wouldn’t want to be a security exert. I’m not interested.Add to that, I got ill and all the subsequent treatment in February and March threw me off studying. I’ve not been motivated.  The CCNA security exam is opening now and I am not going to succeed in it, especially as I shan’t even take it!

However, FutureLearn is running a usefully interesting short course on programming pedagogy and that’s helping me tutor Python better to my TM112 students.

When life throws you lemons, you need to grab the G& T.

G & T

You know how I swore I’d never take another exam ever again? Well, this b* Cisco course of course it has an exam. Several components count towards the final grade. You have to:

1. Complete at least 75% of the chapter assessments (no other assessment) Done! 🙂
2. Submit the course feedback Done! 🙂 
3. Pass the Final Examination at 70% or higher on first attempt. 80% or higher on the second attempt.
4. Complete and submit the Skills Based Assessment as per instructions by the set deadline. Done! 🙂

so you see, I have just to take this final examination. Now, I did the practice last week and found you’re allowed three hours. Three hours! You expect me to get three hours to myself at home without someone knocking at the door, or the phone ringing, or husband stressing that he can’t find something or can’t make the phone or the computer work? Ha! Fortunately, I finished the practice in well under three hours and with a suitable mark. I seem to have learned how to do sub-netting and indeed, as usual, working out processes is easier than memorising material. So remembering which port is for what application or for which protocol, or what level of the OSI model matches some other model, is harder than calculating.

I think I’ll not sign up for more exams though.

If you look carefully at the OU Cisco FB page you’ll find a photo of me, and someone in the Philippines has shared it, commenting something like, “There is no age to stop learning.” Cheek! and never too old to teach either.

One of the OU modules, TM129 Technologies in practice, includes a block on networks, but unlike other modules I tutor, I’ve not done anything professionally with networks. I know a little about them and a little more because I’ve had to tutor them, so I know about addresses and sub net calculations and not much more. However, the OU is rewriting this block on networks and has encouraged its tutors to enroll on a free Cisco module about networks, which leads to a minor Cisco qualification. It will take about four hours a week over six months with a Facebook tutorial once a week, so is a Massive Open Online course or MOOC.
I’ve enrolled and started, discovered I have a skim knowledge of much of the material and am totally ignorant of it in depth. I doubt I’m going to turn out more competent at the later weeks so I’m working hard at it. It’s fun because it includes a practical skills based element that requires running packet tracer software. This makes up for not having a physical laboratory with real routers, switches, PCs and cables to choose. I do have such equipment, but not the variety that a large organisation or a teaching  laboratory would provide me with.
The course includes weekly quizzes, which I do several times until I get a high score. Then I dare take the weekly assessment paper that goes towards the final grade. It’s all rather odd doing these assessments alone, on line, with no human input apart from the friendly face in the FB tutorials once a week. One human helping in a discussion forum answered my plea for how to access the material on my iPad, and closed the discussion for further comments. But the problem isn’t solved, so I’m not happy.
It seems to be taking more than four hours a week, but this might be because my eyes have been difficult recently. Retinal tears and subsequent treatment have slowed me down. The OU has students who can’t see well, worse than my current problem (the OU has about 20,000 students with a disability), so the other thing I’m learning on this MOOC is how to cope with a disability.  Let’s hope I get more competent at learning over the next months.

“I never want to take an exam again!” Several of my OU AL colleagues, talking about possible further study, recently said they too were never going to take another exam, but would take courses without exams.

“And you’ve got a PhD!” exclaimed by tae kwon do friend. She could not understand how I could fail a recent tae kwon do Dan theory paper. But I also failed my 11+ (“not fail, just selected for another school” assured my mother), English ‘A’ level (got an ‘O’ level pass) and three or four other courses.

A tae kwon do theory paper and a PhD require different knowledge assessments, and different skills to pass. A PhD is a marathon that requires persistence, tenacity, determination. You need those attributes to manage your supervisors (thinking herding Siamese cats), agree research questions, acquire data, read very very widely. You need to learn skills to analyse data, and to report your results and conclusions. You need writing skills to produce a cohesive argument in a thesis of 70-100,000 words – the length of a novel. A PhD requires a three-year determined effort on top of previous years of work at a lower level (actually the same as you need to get to black belt practical standard in a martial art). And you need to start with knowledge in your own area, well beyond ‘O’ level, so you can assess other people’s work in that area before arguing for your own research.

Those skills are totally different from a 24 hour memorisation of a Korean general’s interpretation from a Buddhist or Confucian perspective of patterns, with no logic, just what the general said they were, and a rote learning of some Korean terms for which you don’t even know how to form the plural. If you don’t memorise, then it’s easy to fail. But is it learning? When a black belt tells you, “You can’t expect me to remember that. It’s three years since I took the theory paper!” he proves it is not learning.

Do you learn anywhere? Learning doesn’t have to be in an academic or formal environment. You can learn in other environments than an institution. You learn when with others.  Take learning a skill. You’ve got to be physically present to learn a physical skill. Learning a martial art in a local class is very physical. Your instructor arranges a variety of exercises and games to train you in new skills, often working with others; after all, how can you learn a martial art without a practice opponent?

Singing is also physical and singing in a choir requires learning to work with others – team work. Years ago, I vaguely remember a BBC radio programme for schools on Singing Together. The teacher would put it for her class to learn the songs together.

Which makes me think about how we learn with others, and how important your peers are for learning. Lots of people have written about learning with others. One of the most influential books is Lave & Wenger’s Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. They give example situations  for learning with each other, like midwives, or tailors (that surprises me because you’d think they’d be more isolated than midwives) and even alcoholics. By that advice, would-be university lecturers, still post grads could be learning from skilled teachers and researchers, working alongside them. If you’re learning qualitative research, then qualitative research,  shadow experienced interviewers, learning how to interview.

Learning anywhere together.