Category Archives: Good books

This category will be used to share with readers “good books” on matters related to education, especially to those which shed light on the contents and experience of using “Breakthrough to Learning” and “The Language of Ideas”.

Interactive Peer Group Learning

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I’m delighted to put up as this week’s blog a piece by Professor Bob Farmer. (Who is he? See at the end of the blog.)

Professor Eric Mazur is a distinguished Harvard physicist with a deep interest in teaching and learning. In the past, as a traditional university lecturer, he was successful in helping his classes achieve better than average grades and his clear lectures and demonstrations were highly rated by his students. More recently, however, Professor Mazur came to the staggering conclusion that his success as a teacher ‘was a complete illusion, a house of cards’.

Continue reading →

Jubilee!

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Better for the young people of this country – and the world – than the Queen’s Jubilee is the news that a secondary school in the North of England has taken up Breakthrough to Learning and is preparing to use it throughout the school from September!

My last blog recommended a lecture on the revolution in education by Professor Eric Mazur. It is exactly the same message as the ethos of this school. I quote from a pamphlet handed out to new teachers at the school:

We are about learning. We are unusual in that. So much time and energy in schools is spent on pursuing teaching standards, exam grades, league table positions etc. that, in reality, little time is left for learning. Continue reading →

Is education about teaching or learning?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Above is a site that anyone interested in education should view and rejoice in. It is a lecture by Eric Mazur, a Harvard Professor of Physics, entitled Confessions of a Converted Lecturer. He observes what many of us have noted – that, although printing has been around for four centuries, teaching is still based on the practice of a time when oral transmission from teacher to pupil was the only method of passing the knowledge and culture of a community from generation to generation. Continue reading →

Intellectual property and the internet

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I’ve been reading a very interesting article describing some experimental work in Australia by teachers improving the literacy of their pupils through the new technology of computers. *

No doubt, since 1998 many other teachers everywhere in the world have embraced the new technology, especially younger teachers who themselves grew up with computers. Because I recognise that the future must lie with these amazing new tools, I took advantage of the success of the book form of The Language of Ideas to rewrite it as an interactive computer course (www.languageofideas.co.uk)

My decision to make the Breakthrough to Learning courses available online has already borne fruit: this week a secondary school has contacted me for ways of implementing it throughout their school. Continue reading →

Experts can be wrong

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Another wonderful book:

Jonah Lehrer: Proust was a Neuroscientist.

The author considers the work of  five avant garde writers (Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf), an artist (Paul Cezanne), a composer (Igor Stravinsky) and a chef (Auguste Escoffier).

He relates the ground-breaking achievement of each of them to the scientific ideas of the time and shows how, by being true to their experience of life, they anticipated the scientific insights of modern neuroscience. This meant that they found themselves in conflict with the scientific pundits of the time. Continue reading →

Literacy and schooling

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Another mind-opening read:

Jenny Cook-Gumperz: Literacy and Schooling: an unchanging equation in ed.  Cook-Gumperz: The Social Construction of Literacy, 1986, CUP

The author questions the assumption in Western societies that there is a necessary connection between literacy and schooling. In other times and places the mass of the people have been literate without going to school. (The Vai people in Liberia were literate in Vai and Arabic before going to school to become literate in English, for example.) Continue reading →

The Wigan Language Project

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Last week I finished reading Urszula Clark’s book War Words: Language, History and the Discipline of English (Elsevier 2001). For this blog I shall skip chapters 4,5 and 6 and move at once to share my delight at finding her reference to the Wigan Language Project. In half a page she encapsulates the main features of Breakthrough to Learning, laying proper emphasis on the teaching of abstract language. Continue reading →

What was going on?

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With two friends I’ve been reading Chapter 3 of Urszula Clark’s book War Words: Language, History and the Discipline of English. All three of us have “English” degrees and we all earned our living teaching “English” in one form or another. (The first effect of Urszula’s book is to problematize as a school subject – hence the inverted commas.) We all had some training in modern Linguistics  and two of us taught English Literature as well. The institutions we taught in ranged from primary through secondary schools and Further Education to University, and the clientele from native speakers to foreigners and immigrants.

Our professional lives covered, between us, the period 1950-2000, the major part of the period covered by Clark’s second chapter. It was fascinating to see how our various experiences exemplified the ideological debates and practices of the second half of the twentieth century. I, at least, participated in those debates, both as an active member of the Labour Party and as a teacher in the system. When I recall what it felt like to be involved in those conflicts, I recall my utter confusion! What the heck was going on? Continue reading →

Language and thought

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My own work takes the point of view that thought does not exist independent of the semiotic system which encodes it – art, maths, music and, of greatest interest to me, language.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the argument that thought is conditioned by the structure of language, is an old one. Whorf had described the language of the Hopi Indians and showed that their language encoded obligatorily certain concepts which we do not have in the Indo-European languages. For example, nouns are inflected to include the difference between long straight things and round things. Concepts of time are encoded differently in the verbs.

A later article (1981) by A.H. Bloom compares Chinese and English at the level of the clause. There is, it seems, no specific grammatical structure available in Chinese for what applied linguists call the third or hypothetical conditional: If you had called me, I would have come at once. Bloom calls this “counterfactual”. I looked up my (elementary)Chinese grammar and it gives examples of only the first and second conditionals: If you really want to buy a car, then buy one. If I were you, I would marry him. It gives no example of the hypothetical conditional.

Apparently, the author’s Chinese students found the idea of a hypothetical condition not merely difficult: they found it offensive and “unChinese” to imagine the consequences of an imagined untrue situation. This meant that they could not understand an important academic concept.

A.H. Bloom (1981):The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study of the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West, LEA New Jersey