¿ªÔÆÌåÓý

ctrl + shift + ? for shortcuts
© 2025 Groups.io
  1. AlwaysLearning
  2. Topics

#4 about Teaching and Learning

 

Question #4 of 7, for thinking about teaching and learning, from an old questionnaire I dragged out to amuse people.

What factors help you learn?

?

The full list of questions is here:??

?

Sandra
 

#4:? A comfortable seat, such as sofa, stuffed armchair or bed.? Definitely not a school desk
? ? ? ?Instrumental background music
? ? ? ?Snacks

On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 8:46 PM Sandra Dodd <Sandra@...> wrote:

Question #4 of 7, for thinking about teaching and learning, from an old questionnaire I dragged out to amuse people.

What factors help you learn?

?

The full list of questions is here:??

?

Sandra
 

Peace and quiet - no talking or music.

Feeling at peace in myself and not hungry or anxious or self conscious.

Space to spread out papers or ideas like a bed, floor or table if its academic writing type learning.

Time to assimilate on my own. Time to draw my own flowcarts, lists, diagrams. Time to try out phrasings, fingerings, steps, etc on my own.
I have almost never had an ¡®aha¡¯ moment in the company of a teacher - they might suggest, open doors etc and i will keep up mostly but until i am alone with the material it isn¡¯t integrated.

I also need things to be visual so if i have received information verbally or in a long unbroken paragraph i need to write it down or sketch it out straight away!

Looking at that list i can see why a peaceful home is a good place for learning for me, and a school would only be better if it were more spacious and peaceful than home. When i was at school/college i took notes in the lectures and lessons but all the real learning happened later, at home, and i wonder if we had had the Internet then and the lectures were recorded like they are now, how much i would have attended. Probably only the lectures my friends were at...
 

Mostly, I seem to do my best thinking late at night. That's when I read something and suddenly 'get it'. Or alternatively when talking to other people while walking or driving, is a good way to iron out bumps in my thinking and work out what I'm not understanding.

I prefer music or movement to quieten my mind, so I can concentrate. People watching TV in the background works?too, but sometimes they expect me to know what's happening on the TV and I have no idea.

And always a cup of tea at my elbow.


Bernadette.


On Mon, 29 Jun 2020 at 01:46, Sandra Dodd <Sandra@...> wrote:

Question #4 of 7, for thinking about teaching and learning, from an old questionnaire I dragged out to amuse people.

What factors help you learn?

?

The full list of questions is here:??

?

Sandra

_._,_._,_
 

Here's something I learned about teachers, watching them analytically since I was six years old, because I knew I wanted to be one:

?

They do things differently.

That's a "duh" sort of observation, but it helped me, then to try to see WHY.? We had a geography teacher who was very quiet.? He liked to look out the window at the mountains.? He thought before he spoke, and gave short, clear answers.? He never rambled.

When I was a teacher, my room was often busy and loud, with kids working in groups, with laughter, and competitions and cooperative projects.? Looking back, after that was all over, and as I've watched so many unschooling families also live with different degrees of mess, activity, noise, laughter, I think it was that I was assuming or hoping or trusting that SOME of the kids would learn the way I did.??

Every year, though, there would be a kid or two come to me earnestly and ask if I couldn't PLEASE get those other kids to be quieter.

So even outside of classroom situations, I learn better when there's a lot of input at once, maybe because I'm making connections right then in the air.??

Forget Covid-19 days, but cast your mind back to busy crowdedness.? I LIKE the Apple store.? I don't mind going in and waiting for my genius bar appointment, or to be in a queue for help or sales, or playing around with the iPads while I wait for someone.? I could stay all day.? (One time when I was transferring the memory from one computer to another, I stayed a few hours.)? I know where the bathroom is. :-)

Holly can hardly even walk through there.? If she gets as far as the middle of the store she needs OUT.

Museums:? I like the interactive noisy lit-up things.? Many people like the carpeted, softly-lit, read-the-placards and look-in-silence parts.? I want to buy the display guide and read it on the toilet at the Apple Store!!

My website, compared to Joyce's.? :-)

Hers was a certain uniform way and it got a little old, and now it's a new, softly colored, well-organized, only-so-many-pages marvel.

I have some pages that are 19 years old, and one has a link to the previous version when it was on a free server from the late 1990s.? Some are clunky and dusty now, but I leave them for the historical effect, sometimes, and occasionally update one out of sympathy for smartphone-only people (WHY DO YOU DO THAT!??), if I'm in there anyway.? I don't know how many pages I have but it's about 7,000.

Holly uses her laptop for art and photoshop, but otherwise hates it.? She said the other day if It were up to her she would gather up all our laptops and put them in recycling.? I don't even have e-mail on my phone.? I use it for... phone.? Messages.? Music and books.? I don't look at webpages with it unless someone sends me a link.??

For me to learn something, I need to be able to connect it to things I already know, in as many ways as possible.? I weave it into the existing fabric of my life.

?

Sandra
 

Belinda, your description of needing quiet solitude is fascinating to me for it being so exotic.? I mean it might be common to lots of people, but it's so unlike my own process that I read it twice with big eyes.??

-=-Time to assimilate on my own. Time to draw my own flowcarts, lists, diagrams. Time to try out phrasings, fingerings, steps,? etc on my own.
I have almost never had an ¡®aha¡¯ moment in the company of a teacher --=-

SO MANY of my aha moments are right then, right when someone said something or did something, or responded to me in a surprising or emotional way.??

I have a friend with a really good memory, and we've talked about how some people remember things.? It's SO DIFFERENT for different people. He and I travelled together to events in a club we were in (SCA/Society for Creative Anachronism; some other readers know that group).? Sometimes I would have vivid memories of a day, or of an incident, that he didn't remember at all, and we wanted to get to the bottom of that.? It irritated him if I remembered something he didn't.

So it turned out that his memories were mostly visual, like photographic memory, and partly from his being really good with names, and remembering faces and words.? He would meet someone a second time, and say "The first time I met you, I remember you said..." and quote the guy.? Sheeeesh!!??

But my own memories were set to record if there was emotion involved.? If someone was afraid, angry, jealous, embarrassed, giddy, surprised¡ªand if the person acted from that emotion, or others reacted to it emotionally, THEN my brain went on the alert and started analyzing the situation and recording it for posterity. :-)

If a day or a party or a car trip was calm and routine, my brain let it go.? Jeff could tell me who sat where and what they were wearing, but if there was no excitement or drama, I didn't care. :-)

Same with other kinds of learning, for me.? If there was a demonstration of physics that made people laugh, or that scared someone, or broke something and so the teacher was embarrassed, then I remembered.

I think I've just worked around to saying that I learn best when there's interpersonal drama, but it can be comedy, romance, mystery or adventure, too. :-)? Not so much documentaries, maybe.? (joking)

If the memory of a day is a kind of learning, then that can help me form or to retrieve memories.??


Sandra

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 7:08 AM belinda dutch <belinda.dutch@...> wrote:
Peace and quiet - no talking or music.

Feeling at peace in myself and not hungry or anxious or self conscious.

Space to spread out papers or ideas like a bed, floor or table if its academic writing type learning.

Time to assimilate on my own. Time to draw my own flowcarts, lists, diagrams. Time to try out phrasings, fingerings, steps,? etc on my own.
I have almost never had an ¡®aha¡¯ moment in the company of a teacher - they might suggest, open doors etc and i will keep up mostly but until i am alone with the material it isn¡¯t integrated.

I also need things to be visual so if i have received information verbally or in a long unbroken paragraph i need to write it down or sketch it out straight away!

Looking at that list i can see why a peaceful home is a good place for learning for me, and a school would only be better if it were more spacious and peaceful than home. When i was at school/college i took notes in the lectures and lessons but all the real learning happened later, at home, and i wonder if we had had the Internet then and the lectures were recorded like they are now, how much i would have attended. Probably only the lectures my friends were at...







--
(This doesn't look like Sandra Dodd's e-mail, but it is one.)
 

¿ªÔÆÌåÓý

"What factors help you learn?"

Interest in the subject at hand.
Quiet - although I've learnt to work with Kai in the background over 14 years!
Time to play around and make mistakes and fix them



Jo

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Sandra Dodd <Sandra@...>
Sent: 29 June 2020 10:46
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: [AlwaysLearning] #4 about Teaching and Learning
?

Question #4 of 7, for thinking about teaching and learning, from an old questionnaire I dragged out to amuse people.

What factors help you learn?

?

The full list of questions is here:??

?

Sandra

1 - 7 of 7