thoughts – Page 4 – Exciting Curiosity

Brand Wisdom

I was listening to Russell Brand on Desert Island Discs last week (click here to listen), and something he said stuck with me. He was asked by Kirsty Young if he would like to have children, he answered emphatically yes, and went on to say:

I like people that don’t have social constructs that I have to carve my way through to get to the truth of what they actually are and what they actually mean and what they are actually afraid of and what they actually care about, and children haven’t been taught to encode yet, so the only language they know is truth and love.

This brought home just what an honour it is to teach, to have those young minds in our care that we can help shape and form, inspire and excite curiosity in. What an opportunity!… Read more...

Chomsky Style

Passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with searching and enquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us. Noam Chomsky

I was struck by the above quote by Noam Chomsky which I read in a tweet by Brian Bailey (@EdTechEmpowers). Inspired to investigate further, I found the video ‘The Purpose of Education’ in which Chomsky talks about various topics around education including the purposes of an educational system, the impact of technology and thoughts on assessment. (The video was presented at the Learning without Frontiers conference in January 2012.)

The Daily Riff has a good breakdown of various aspects of the talk and you can watch it there too (click this link to watch on YouTube), but the parts that stuck out for me were:

That “passing tests doesn’t being to compare with searching and inquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us. That’s far more significant than passing tests. If that’s the kind of educational career that you are given the opportunity to pursue you will remember what you have discovered.”
That “teaching ought to inspire students to discover on their own, to challenge if they don’t agree, to look for alternatives

Being Human

I was looking for a podcast to listen to on a run last night. Being a fan of the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 I searched and found a series of podcasts by Jeremy Vine called Being Human. With contributions from leading thinkers and writers these podcasts explore just what makes us human. I listened to the episode featuring Lord David Puttnam, a British film producer and educator.

Being human is remaining curious about the world, and remaining ambitious for what your contribution can be. (Lord Puttnam)

He spoke of the 2012 Olympics and how people collectively worked to make a success of the Games – the Games brought out the best in us, but it was always there! If you smile at someone, they generally smile back. We are all capable of doing the very best we can. We should never lose sight of this. Lord Puttnam and Jeremy Vine end the episode discussing the importance of focussing on doing the right thing and building each other up. This reminded me of a quote I once read:

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. (Dalai Lama)

This episode was a great encouragement and reminder that … Read more...

Creativity – do schools kill it?

I’m reading Sir Ken Robinson’s book ‘The Element‘ just now. He was in the process of writing it when he did his first TED Talk – ‘Do schools kill creativity?‘ In this talk he speaks of the two things the hierarchy of our education system is based around: 1) most useful subjects for work and 2) academic ability.

The consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatised.

Sadly, this has been the experience for far too many people. When I was thinking about what to do after high school I was told by my careers advisor not to bother studying music. I was told to choose options like science or engineering because they were accepting a lot of girls into these subjects at that time. I left that interview not knowing what to do, and so my first application to university included courses ranging from statistics to travel and tourism. Thank goodness I realised soon enough that my passion lay in music – I filled in another application form and got a late place to study music.… Read more...

The most important thing is a person

Steve Jobs once said:

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.

I woke up this morning, checked Twitter and found an article posted today in the Guardian by Dylan William (@dylanwilliam) called ‘Love the one you’re with: improving professional development in schools.’ Passionate about professional development, my curiosity was piqued and I read on. The third paragraph hit the mark on something we as teachers know to be true…

Although the differences between schools are small, the differences in teachers are not. Teachers vary greatly in their ability to teach students what they need to learn. If you are taught by the best teacher in a group of 50, you will learn in six months what students taught by the average teacher will take a year to learn. If you are taught be the least effective teacher in that group, that same learning will take you two years.

In high school I was taught by an amazing, inspiring music teacher whose classroom, concert hall, theatre, wherever we were, was a fun place to be. I learned a lot … Read more...