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Teaching, Knowledge and Assessment

Are exams a good thing or bad thing? It depends on whom you speak to. As children grow up and enter the academic world of school, they enter periods of testing and exams and homework. Most people would agree that exams to a certain extent are good, because they give the students something to focus on and apply their knowledge. A lot of school involves the dissemination of knowledge and facts, particularly in the early year of Maths and Science, but the sole memorisation and replication of these facts does not necessarily guarantee a wise student – merely one who is good at parroting back information.

The problem with exams and test is that schools and other education providers can get too involved with literal facts and the accumulation of them. The students are judged by how much information they have soaked up and can reproduce. But that is not necessarily learning; it is learning for assessment. And teachers end up teaching to the test – in short, teaching about things that may eventually be used in an exam. It is a very narrow-minded method, of selectively teaching information that is going to be assessed, rather than giving a broad range of education.

Why do they do that? Well, when you are choosing a school for your child, what do you look at? You look at its Ofsted ranking and its GCSE results, or where possible, how the school ranks in terms of SATS tests achievements. Better results suggest that the school is better – although they may only be teaching towards the test. In many schools, there are exams, and then there are mock-exams to prepare for the exams, and then a further round of mock exams. The students sit a battery of tests and are expected to find out why they made mistakes, and then plug the missing information into their brains. Learning for examination, and learning by examination. Schools have to do this because of the political game of attracting enough students to qualify for funding.

Learning a skill puts this style of learning into perspective. If you are learning a musical instrument like the piano, you have to work out reading the notes, hand-coordination, and develop that sort of fluency by going slower and being comfortable to doing many things at once. And once you have managed that, then you think about doing piano music exams. If a piano player were to learn and sit for an exam the same way as the school system seems to be going, they would merely be playing the same songs over and over again, entering themselves for exams over and over again, and hoping to pass – rather ineffective.

We should consider removing too much assessment in the school method, giving teachers the freedom to teach knowledge for its sake, rather than teaching to the test! The knowledge gained is more relevant, has more meaning and is likely to stay with the student for a longer period of time..

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Taking care of vision

Could it be true that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be short-sighted?

The NHS website seems to think so. It cited a piece of research involving over 67,000 participants which surveyed their educational levels and correlated them to their vision.

The result was that individuals who had higher levels of education were found to be more short-sighted.

Does this mean that if we wanted our children to be educated to at least university level, we should be prepared that they will be Specsavers customers in the future?

Maybe we should start investing in company shares for Vision Direct?

Before we jump to conclusions, we should perhaps think rationally about these claims.

The reasons why eye sight deteriorates can be due to various factors: diet, lifestyle, too much close focus, among others.

When we read to our children, or encourage them to read, we must help them establish good reading habits.

These can include adequate lighting, ensuring no shadow on the book, or not too close focus.

Unfortunately, before bedtime, we tend to do bedtime stories in dim lighting, ostensibly to calm children down, and read in poor conditions.

When a shadow is cast on the book, the eyes have to work extra hard to pick out the words and come under strain.

The same is if we read in the lazy position of lying on our back while holding the book up towards the sky, arms outstretched.

If we lie on our stomachs, propped by elbows and read a book too closely, the focus of the eyes is narrowed and over time the eyes get lazy and this leads to myopia.

Many of the above positions for reading seem normal and it is hard to accept that they are bad, but we have become habituated to them that we just have to pause and consider what we are doing to ourselves and our children.

Being educated does not lead to myopia. But the development of bad habits, exacerbated through the pursuit of knowledge through education, does.

In other words, if you have poor reading habits, then reading more books to gain educational qualifications means you will develop myopia.

What we can do for our children is to encourage them to develop good reading habits. We can also encourage them not to spend too much time on close focus. For example, if they are taking up a musical instrument, such as learning the piano, then make sure the music is lit without shadow, not too glaring, and also that the children break off after some time and do not prolong their close focus. We can encourage them to play outdoors. It is a myth that the colour green is good for the eyes; it is just taking the time to focus of long-distance objects that resets the balance in our eyes.

We can also encourage our children to use less electronic devices and watch less TV, both because of the glare and prolonged close-focus.

We only have one set of eyes to last a lifetime. Those of our little ones have to last a lifetime while being bombarded by things that demand their attention. We can help by guiding them through the growing years and making important decisions that they are unable to conceptualise for their good.

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Managing phone reliance

Media mogul Simon Cowell has reportedly ditched his phone for over ten months, and has been quoted to say the withdrawal from technology has been good for his mental health.

Cowell expressed how irritated he was with the quality of interaction he had with those around him, and how – ever since he ditched it – he was more aware and paid more attention to the world and people around him.

Researchers have gathered data to show that the addiction Cowell had with his phone is not limited to him only. In fact, it is so widespread, that more than half of phone users check it within 15 minutes of waking up. Four in ten people believe that our partners use the phone too much, so much so that it becomes a point of contention.

Cowell has a young son and it might have been that he realised how he was breaking off playing to check his phone everytime it beeped.

It is also not good for children to see the adults around them swarmed by technology. But it is not easy for us to ditch the phone altogether.

Employers demand their employees time and attention outside of the office by sending documents with the expectation that they will have been read by the next meeting, and then expecting things have been dealt with, or demanding their response with a text message.

Many of us, unlike Cowell, do not have executive assistants to deal with such matters on our behalf, or to filter out emails and text messages. We do not have buffers. So while we don’t want it intruding, but we can’t exactly do without it completely, we need to navigate the disconnect that proves difficult, or else our children will adopt our bad habits as the norm.

What can we do? We can try to limit the time we handle emails and text messages to specific moments in the day. Having twenty minutes twice or thrice a day to deal with all these matters does not mean a reduction in overall time, but does mean that the time away from these periods is not tainted by work-related matters and the feeling of being on-call all the time, especially when we are with our children.

When we are with our children, give them new areas of pursuit. This can be listening to music, such as Baroque music. Classical music is said to be good for the mind, while Romantic music stirs emotions. If children are not into that kind of music, other forms of music might also provide a welcome distraction, both for us and them.

Just make sure it is playing from a normal radio or similar device – not a phone!

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Teaching our children new skills to cope

According to Seth Stephenson-Davidowitz, a data scientist who uses data to draw insights into human behaviour, people are less inclined to tell the truth face to face or in a survey, because of perceived reaction and perception. This means that they are afraid of what people might think of them and hence try to soften or cushion their words. The problem with this though is that information around us is hence not necessarily the best source. The data scientist believes that because there is a higher perception of anonymity afforded computer users – people believe they are anonymous when they are not, but that is a post for another day – many go on Google to search for answers to thoughts and hence the data trends are more accurate.

One of Stephenson-Davidowitz’s research on data trends has focused on depression. According to data searches, August 11 and Christmas Day are the happiest days of the year – there are less searches for the word depression, while depression is highest in April, the month called the “cruelest month” by poet T S Eliot. Google data also suggests that climate matters a great deal. But also highlights that money is the perhaps a strong underlying cause – searches for depression are less in areas which a large percentage of people are college-educated, which – for those of us in the UK – means they have degrees, and are not to be confused with sixth-form college.

While we all know that money underpins a lot of our concerns – those who have financial freedom, and power, a BBC report revealed the extent to which it can affect us. A young man who took up a job as a delivery driver found himself in debt because of traffic violations, and that, coupled with the low-paying job he was on, meant he earned next to nothing and this mental stress caused him unfortunately to end his own life prematurely.

We all have worries about job security and for many adults that live from paycheck to paycheck with huge financial commitments, we must be careful that this stress does not impact on our children. Children that live in such households where there is latent stress grow up to be more negative and resentful, and fearful of life, instead of embracing it.

What can we do in such situations? After all, the modern world for most people creates tensions for us, and increasing demands of work, family, commitments and family and personal needs all never fit into of what a friend of mine calls the Tetris of Life.

We can find outlets of expression for us and for our children. Music is often seen to be a good outlet because it only costs a device (a phone which most of us already have) and some bandwidth. But listening to music is passive, involves mental processing and receiving input, and when they listen to more music, they are already cramming more into their minds and suppressing more mental triggers which want to manifest themselves in activity.

Instead, encourage them to try doing some activity instead. Take up a skill like learning to draw or playing an instrument like the piano which will give them outlets of expression. And these are activities they can do indoors in colder season (climate is another trigger for searches of “depression” in Google).

Like many other composers in the past, children can learn music to channel their inner emotions and give them an outlet from the stresses of their life and those that we may inadvertently transfer onto them.

Learning a musical instrument is not just a good idea for children, but for you as well, for the same reasons. Learning the piano activates different parts of the brain which relieves the pressure on the cortex and the word-processing part of the brain and gives you some form of mental escape – instead of being lost in the maze of Google searches without a way out. And speak with someone too, and try to dissipate the stress of the environment around you.

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Protecting hearing

According to the World Health Organisation guidelines, listening to sounds above one hundred decibels for more than fifteen minutes a day will cause significant hearing impairment and eventually lead to hearing loss. They also suggest that listening to anything at more than eighty decibels should be limited to under eight hours a day.

We often read about how certain things produce different levels of volume, such as a train producing over one hundred decibels as it whooshes by. This knowledge to be managed with reference to proximity as well, of course. If we know a pneumatic drill produces one hundred and twenty decibels of sound, and stand next to it, we will experience the full aural impact. From a distance away, the impact is less.

What it does mean, for educators, is that we have to manage our children’s environment to avoid them suffering passive harm to their ears.

Play areas in schools can get very noisy over lunch times. If you happen to standing next to a group of kids playing a noisy but exciting game, just passive observance of the game will render you subject to the impact of the noise.

In schools, the sound of the loud school bells signifying the end of have to be rung at short bursts, rather than for continuous durations.

Older children may like to listen to loud music on their way to and from school. We see them plugged into their headphones, listening to loud music, such as punk music, pop chart music or metal.

On their way home they pass by noisy vehicles that blare out Dance Music as if it were cool to do so.

Then they have go on their computer games or phones and other sorts of devices and listen to what we might “technology music“, music that has been produced by for that purpose.

That is a lot of sound they are being exposed to.

We often talk about limiting screen time for children and are more conscious about that, getting them to rest their eyes and avoiding prolonged focussing and exposure. But what we have to realise that the ears are exposed to sounds and noises too.

Loud noise can have a debilitating impact. Just ask RB Lepzig football player Timo Werner, who experienced dizziness while playing against noisy Besiktas, and had to be substituted midway through the first half.

We have to protect society’s children from increasing levels of sound in society, so that they can live quality lives when they are older.

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Teaching Children the art of balancing

Among the useful life skills we can teach or children is the skill of learning to balance. Because life is about balancing. And when I speak about balancing, I don’t mean the physical skill if riding a bike or going about on a scooter. I refer to the skill of leaning on one set of rules on one occasion, and on another set at a different time.

Why is balancing important? It is because as adults we give children many layers of instruction. Depending on perhaps how liberal a parent it, the instructions can come more positively-wrapped, or a series of admonishments. “Stay close.” “Don’t do that.” “Don’t go there.” When we give children a seires of instructions that we expect them to follow through, in their minds they will be working out the reasons for these. Why does Mummy not want me to go near the tree? Because she is afraid I may fall. Why does Daddy want me to stop at the end of the road. In fact, why is he hollering “Stop!” at me when I know to stop? Because it is dangerous.

The unfortunate thing about negative parenting – or what appears to be negative anyway – is that compounded over time it can just bury the child under a series of Not To Dos. And repeated over time, it does foster a spirit of not trying, because everything is dangerous. If we repeatedly rein in our children, and curb their spirit, affter a while they do it to themselves.

Growing up, I knew of a friend that had often been told by his parents not to do this and that. Perhaps it was because he was the youngest of three children, and their instructions to him to keep safe (“Don’t do that) were more a way of keeping him reined him while they tried to manage the other two children. Slowly this friend grew to adopt the spirit that had been trained on him. But when he was in his teens and seemed to his parents to be developing into some sort of anti-social spirit (he is fine by the way), they were trying to encourage him to go out and make more friends. “Go out and socialise! Go meet more friends! Leave your room and meet new people!” Unfortunately the advice he was receiving was in direct contradiction to what he had been previously taught.

We give instructions to children because that is the quickest way of getting them to do something that is safe. Some of it is positive, some is negative. Sometimes there are two different sets of rules for social situations. We sometimes, for example, encourage children to give their best and try their hardest. Yet, at a birthday party for a friend, sometimes we have to teach them the skill of letting the birthday boy or girl win at a game of say, pass the parcel. We have to teach the children which rule to adhere to, and the skill of balance – knowing which one to choose.

We encourage children to be compliant, but sometimes we have to encourage them to be creative and go against the grain too. The Classical composer Richard Wagner was trained – as most musicians were – in the past generational ideas of harmony, and while his earliest work displayed a strong influence of the past, he realised that it was artistically sterile to merely repeat what had been done already, and if he did so, his own self would merely be subsumed in a long ancestral line of artistry. He needed to break free, and this is why as his musical work progressed, it broke free of the past structures of harmony. But Wagner could not merely write chromatic and dissonant music in a complete break with the past. Otherwise his music would be completely at odds with the status quo and he would have been an outsider inhabiting a different world to his surroundings. It was in the balance of new ideas with old existing ones which produced his best masterpieces, one where new ideas of harmony blend with traditional ones. Wagner found his balance. You can read more about this from the piano teacher crouch end blog.

Balancing is the switching between two sets of rules as the situation dictates. In life we are often given set rules but none of them are fixed; only situational. The skill of balancing is an important one to pass on to our children.

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Quotes on Parenting

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

The best gift, and investment, you can give your child is your time.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while. Your children need your presence more than your presents.

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

Your children will become what you are; so be what you want them to be.

If I had my child to raise all over again:
I’d finger paint more, and point the finger less.
I’d do less correcting, and more connecting.
I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.
I would care to know less, and know to care more.
I’d take more hikes and fly more kites.
I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play.
I’d run through more fields, and gaze at more stars.
I’d do more hugging, and less tugging.
I would be firm less often, and affirm much more.
I’d build self esteem first, and the house later.
I’d teach less about the love of power, and more about the power of love.

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Daring children to fail

It seems that we are such a goal-oriented society and measure our progress by the attainment of success, that we have forgotten that in failure there is much to learn to.

Think of a child making a Lego set. He or she follows the instructions, and then perhaps after a nunber of steps encountes a point where the pieces do not fit as the diagrams intended.

What do you do? Should you just break up the whole thing into the constituent blocks and then start all over again?

Strangely enough, this is how some people approach their learning.

Some piano players that I have encountered, for example, are so intent on getting it right, that when they make a mistake, they merely keep returning to the first bar, and try playing again from the beginning hoping to get a complete error-free version.

The problem with doing this is that you get familiar with the opening stages of the process. You don’t really learn as much as dealing with the difficult stage. What you are doing is repeating the process and banking on, or gambling on, that the next time you do it right something will magically sort itself out.  You have not really learnt to deal with the obstacle, as you have attempted to do the thing again and hope it will be right.

Imagine if you were that child playing with Lego. You hit a snag and somewhere something must have gone wrong.

What should you do?

You should retrace your steps, until you get to the point where you can identify what you have built does not match with the instructions. There you learn where you went wrong, how you misintepreted the instructions, and how to watch out for that step again if you ever decide to build your model from scratch.

If you do ever make a mistake and then decide to start from scratch, you may think your perserverance is a positive factor, but actually it is not. You are merely masking a lack of initiative to solve problems by hoping hard graft can make up for a lack of perserverance and the will to develop intelligent problem-solving skills.

Daring to fail is not a bad point. It gives us the opportunity to gain maturity and intelligence by overcoming the problem ahead of us.

In life, everyone frequently hits a snag. This presents an opportunity for growth. This is what we should teach our children. Dare to fail, dare to make mistakes, so that in overcoming them we grow. You don’t need to produce perfection. If you don’t try for the fear of making an error, you have lost out on the opporunity for growth.

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Before facts, teach purpose, relevance and meaning

How do we assess if children have learnt a fact or not? Usually it is their ability to recall a matching answer to a question we post them.

“What is 10 x 10?”  “One hundred.” (Learnt! Tick!)

“If ten friends give you ten sweets each, how many sweets do you have?”

“Er .. er… er … ”

“Come on, if you have ten rows of ten objects, how many objects have you got?”

“Er … ”

 

While the above may seem to be a discussion of an adult with two separate children, the two children were actually one and the same. The same child could moments earlier churn out the answer for ten mutiplied by ten, yet when presented with a word problem to an answer she already knew, could not connect the two together.

Unfortunately this are the limitations faced by the education system. Assessing learning and understanding is difficult, and time-consuming, and perhaps too individual a task to be managed within the confines of a classroom ratio of 30:1. So instead of understanding if students have learnt, teachers have to demonstrate that students are capable of reproducing facts that they have more often than not memorised and kept within short term memory, then reproduced in an exam question paper that is largely fact based and recollection-biased.

As educators, we have to communicate understanding and learning alongside the acquisition of facts and knowledge. We also have to communicate a love for learning, a desire to find things out, and a desire to be creative and experiment. In many of these cases we should withhold our inner desires for the right or wrong answer, but encourage the development of ideas first, then the facts.

Here is an example. Instead of teaching by rote questions such as 10 x 10 x 20 and other mental maths facts, another technique often used is the Problem-Solving Method. This can manifest itself in methods such as these:

Give a group of eight students twelve items each, and ask them to divide up these items equally into six boxes.

Some students will realise that one way to do this is for the first student to place his item in the boxes, then the second student to continue where he left off, and for each successive student to do that in turn. This is the linear way, where the items are “added” equally into each box.

Some may decide to count how many items they have first, and then see if they can divide them into four piles. This is the multiply and then divide method.

After a ten-minute timeframe, students may report back on their answers and be encouraged to look for other methods and examine their effectiveness.

This is a time-consuming process to teach 12 x 8 = 96, and 96 divided by 4 = 24. And in many classrooms, there isn’t really that much time to do all the mental sums in this way. But in the next lesson, you could assign one group to do another similar problem, while giving another group a multiplication chart to obtain the answer from.

In this way, you have demonstrated to them that there is purpose and meaning in what they are doing, and that there is reason to learn the mental maths – so that it is a quicker way to get the answer.

Purpose, Meaning and Relevance. These should form the basis of learning upon which facts are built. This ensures that another information memorised or learnt by the textbook delivery at least has some sort of personal relevance.

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Achieving Greatness

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

We often wish for our children to achieve good things in life. Perhaps they have a skill that could be nurtured. Perhaps it could be art, music or drama. Maybe a child shows an engineering bias or a love for machinery, or craftwork. We want them to be the best they can be, to do the best they can achieve. But often we could end up visualising the final product, conveying it to them, that we neglect to convey to them the little steps we take to get there.

Too often we forget that to achieve big things we have to do things in little stages. To get from A to Z, you can’t just fix your eyes on Z and hope that by the sheer force of willpower you will be able to drag yourself all the way. It is possible, of course, depending on the size of the task, but willpower can be discouraged if you pull for too long with no end in sight, and affect the effort as well. Imagine you are pulling a heavy car tyre from one place to another, using a rope. (Why you would do that is beyond the scope of this discussion, but this is only a hypothetical example.) If you pull the heavy weight and have to move it one foot at a time, if you keep your eyes and thoughts transfixed on the end goal, then you are really going to be discouraged by how the gulf seems to be still there even though you are shifting with all your energy with each tug. And after you have done that for a while, you will feel discouraged and that will manifest itself in your effort. You will pull with less energy – why invest all the energy for little return – and when you end up in that state, it will turn out to be a negative cycle. You pull less, you move less, and finally you stop.

It is much easier mentally to break the big task into little stages and work towards the completion of each stage. Have you ever heard of people who have accomplished big projects, then told others of how, had they realised it was going to be so big at the time, they would have never started?

The achievement of a great task starts with little steps.

So perhaps a good life skill to teach our children, before we teach them to work hard and never to give up, is to be able to break tasks up into little things, to strategise. Then direct full effort into fulfiling each stage. Otherwise brute effort without direction is a waste of effort.