You, Margaret are the best kind of Medic/Nurse, who cares enough to do anything you can for those in your care. If you had ended up in, say, Oban, you would have learned Gaelic and a lot about The Clearances!
The only person who made the Laws of Thermodynamics interesting was such a Lecturer! Oh and when I was at Uni, my class went to our tutor and asked politely if we could have another Maths Lecturer. We explained, “We know he is a brilliant Mathematician. That is the problem. We are just idiot chemists doing ancillary maths, Please can we have a slightly less brilliant Mathematician, who may understand why we don’t catch on at once?” We got one!!!
@henddraig. I’ve been blessed with a Scottish husband for nearly 30 years. He was/is a fan of 7/84 and my Scottish history began with The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil. I remember staying at a hotel for a few days in Rogart and the bar feeling like the clearances had happened just yesterday. He’s also a fan of the Corries.
This might explain some of the reluctance I often feel to call myself English. Luckily we are usually offered British as an option.
Our children were born in Scotland and although Rachel has no accent calls herself a Scot even after living there for less than three years.
When you say people learn in different ways, are you referring to the whole visual/audio/tactile thing? Because that particularly hypothesis has pretty much no evidence backing it up. In general, people learn best by doing (edit: in particular, they learn best when doing something interesting). I think the thing in common between language teaching and maths teaching is probably that there’s a lot of rote learning where there probably shouldn’t be.
See for example, the rote learning of verb conjugations (or worse yet, the mutations) vs the rote learning of times tables. There is a big difference between remembering that 3 X 5 = 15 and understanding that 3 X 5 = 5 + 5 + 5 = 15. After a while spent practising, the kids will eventually just remember the equivalent of their “times tables” up to 12 regardless - but understanding what they’re actually doing will surely make this time shorter and less stressful for the kids involved.
Likewise for language - much of my memory of language lessons in school (around 15-20 years ago now, but I doubt much has changed) was of sitting down, being given a list of words to learn at home (I didn’t), being given a text in French to translate into English in class (often boring, and did nothing for my ability to actually use my French) and of the whole room sitting in silence. Oh, and the rote speech of “Bonjour ,” “Bonjour. Ca va?” “Ca va tres bien. Et vous?” “Ca va tres bien.” at the beginning of every single lesson. That was the only French spoken in class.
So when we got to verb conjugations? They looked just as arbitrary and confusing as times tables must look to kids who are introduced to them without any context. Sure, I learned both (though in the case of verb conjugation, I only remembered it long enough to get through my exams), and many people do the same. That doesn’t make these methods even remotely useful though.
No, I didn’t have any particular theory in mind. I’m not an educator; just an eternal student. :).
What I was getting at was that people are individuals, and their learning experiences are all individual - not the same as everyone else’s. I could observe this for myself in maths class, when others “got” things right off the bat, whereas I had to think about things, meanwhile, the class had moved on. ( I listened to a radio programme about maths teaching a few years ago, and an enlightened maths teacher was saying exactly this, and that the “slow” person’s way of learning is no less valid than the shooting star’s, and I was thinking "yes! yes! - why didn’t they understand this at my school?! - It still rankles, 50 odd years later.
I certainly agree with “learning by doing” though, although that’s harder to arrange when it comes to complex mathematics.I agree about rote learning as well, but again when it comes to a lot of maths, there seems to be a lot of rote learning that one simply has to get through.
I think maths is taught very differently these days, compared to even 15 or 20 years ago. I struggle understanding the methods that my daughter uses at school - it seems to be patterns and number bonds rather than times tables, although there is a bit of that as well. Also a lot more tricks for mental arithmatic. The way kids are taught these days is a bit alien to an old timer like me, but perhaps more in line with what you are suggesting.
I think also differentiating materials for pupils of different abilities is also a key part of teaching these days as well, so that everyone is stretched (another teaching buzz word) and hopefully no-one is neglected and allowed to sink.
There are bound to be good and bad teachers out there, just as in times gone by. The old days of chalk and talk are almost forbidden these days as well and there is a lot more emphasis on kids discovering things for themselves and learning from each other. Apparently they learn more from discussing things with each other and figuring things out together than they do from the teachers. I’m sure this has been the style of teaching for quite a while now.
We’ve discussed that before. It’s not very well-supported from an academic point of view, and there’s a suspicion that it may be an attempt at justifying some rather extreme politics. I would be wary.
Teaching - fashions seem to go in circles. I was asked by friends in about, oh, 1975, (very roughly) to help their daughter with her maths. When I saw her homework, I found she was doing set theory and using sets to solve quadratic equations. This had been introduced at Uni when I was a student and Ancillary Maths was something with which I had real problems! I could solve the equations using algebra, but I asked for the text book to try to explain to the lass. These were kept at school. Oh dear! We did not get far!
Between then and now we seem to have been through at least two fashion cycles. I learned tables, it was a quick way of adding up, say 6 twelves! They went out of fashion and I think have come back, gone and returned!!
The young person for whom I felt most sympathy was the son of a man who was a Coastguard. His job moved him around. the poor boy had been taught to read by: Look and Say, Initial Teaching Alphabet, Phonetics and a sort of mix. He could not read. My ‘Auntie’ set out to help him. I wrote a story which appealed him and she found books about his favourite subjects, because he’d decided reading was useless - having had the equivalent of Janet and John about five times! He learned. But ‘educational theories’ had a lot to answer for!
No, Leanne didn’t learn via SSiW (to the best of my knowledge) but she did do Bootcamp (which she flew through). She’s done absolutely brilliantly, especially when you consider the pressures on her from lots of different directions in the political sphere.
[Edited to add: thank you all very much indeed for making this thread clear and friendly and largely unemotional, which is so important on a topic which inspires such passion. ]
Haha, don’t worry I didn’t feel forced to. I felt best because I’m not willing to spend time checking how valid it is, so I probably shouldn’t share if I’m not willing to do that. Could be too misleading.
Agreed, I’m not sure it is without debate how valid that traditional view is. There was a rebellion against Roman rule in the 280s that was successful for a good 10 years with little recorded (doesn’t negate) resistance to the new form of rule. Suggestive that possibly Roman rule was slipping in Britain (I’ll use Britain here as an easy reference point for the island off the west coast of Europe, not as the modern political entity) some 130 years prior to their eventual declared departure (410). Also, it’s unclear how much Roman power differed regionally in Britain. Germanic people may well have been setting up trading posts across the East coast for some time (akin to the Irish in Cumbria and west Wales, or the later Vikings on the western isles and Dublin).
Sorry, Rob, I have totally rewritten the post I sent because @AnthonyCusack said he was withdrawing his and mine no longer made sense!
So, I had mentioned the first Angles and Saxons to, I thought, be bribed by the Romans to keep their friends and relations away from Britain. I can see that it is something I have read and believed, but I cannot cite the sources, so I should not be dogmatic about it!
My recollection was that they were and that the Romans gave them preferential trade terms if they discouraged others from coming! This would have limited the spread of Germanic language to the edge of East Anglia and Kent.
I think the traditional view is certainly worth questioning, but there are lots of bits that tie together. I think a lot of the thinking of an Anglo Saxon invasion of sorts came from sources like Gildas in his “De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae”, where he mentions the time they came and were defeated only to come back a century later. This sort of stuff implies they weren’t here before in any significant way and also in the things that Bede didn’t write about, which imply the same sort of thing.
I would ponder on the extent of Anglo Saxon influence on England. Clearly significant and very important, but I don’t consider the people of England as an Anglo Saxon race of people if you like - that is a weakness in some ways of thinking I believe. When Germany was created it was all about the teutonic peoples and Anglo Saxon england is a similar sort of way of looking at things, but a lot of these things are not really racial, which gets you into sticky territory, but more cultural and linguistic things - nation building tools really.
Thankfully there are differences between people across Europe, but not the simplistic divides that Julius Caesar used, when he divided Europe up into Northern barbarians, Germanic tribes East of the Rhine and Celtic peoples to the West. These were probably simplistic descriptions of social strutures, trading relationships, cultures and languages than of more basic natural differences, but people are tribal by instinct and still want to be part of particular gangs.
Although Gildas was inherently political too, pagan vs Christian, Briton vs invader. A sense of external imposition is more powerful than newer arrivals of a pre-existing enclave.
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