Oliver Sacks: Hallucinations

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Before Christmas I had the pleasure of reading Oliver Sacks’s new book Hallucinations.

Like his other books, this is extremely readable with vivid accounts of his patients’ symptoms leading to a tentative neurological explanation of their often bizarre experiences. In this case I was pleased to find that I had myself experienced a common form of visual hallucination. A few years ago I fell (in trying to catch a frisbee sailing away from my hand) and banged the back of my head. Shortly afterwards half my visual field was filled with wobbly black and white hexagons. I realized I could not drive home with these patterns blocking out half the motorway. By the next day they had gone but in the weeks following I occasionally had the illusion of a large red hexagon taking over my visual field. Continue reading →

Neuroscience and education

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Neuroscience: implications for education and lifelong learning

I read recently this second of four modules in the Royal Society Brainwaves series on neuroscience and society.

It makes a strong case for people in education to be aware of the promise of a scientific approach to education when neuroscience can tell us more about the workings of the brain. It is, however, disappointing in that there are as yet no “biological” tests for such well-known conditions as dyslexia. Practitioners still have to rely on psychological / behavioural tests for diagnosing such disabling condition. Continue reading →

U3A

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Some friends have attended a meeting in a Birmingham suburb full of retired teachers called with the purpose of setting up a University of the Third Age in the area. It was packed with interested people and a further meeting has been called for this week.

I was talking to one of them about the Observer article that I wrote about in this blog last week – about first class courses free online – and we agreed that some of the U3A group might like to access these courses and study them together.

I look forward to hearing whether anyone has taken this up.

Learning for free

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The thing that got Breakthrough to Learning into MMHS in the first place was making the course available free to anyone on the internet. This seemed to me to be a good use of the digital revolution – and it has certainly paid off.

About twenty years ago I attended a conference organized by the Society of Authors. At this event it became clear that, with the international availability of information through the internet, there was no way that copyright could be defended. This is hard luck for authors but wonderful for readers. My life has been transformed by Wikipedia, another free service set up by people who want to share knowledge without profiting from it (though they seem to be hard up at the moment). Continue reading →

Language for learning in early childhood

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This is the title of a paper by Claire Painter, published in Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy, ed. Christie and Martin, 2007, Continuum.

The author tape-recorded interactions between herself and her two children, one up to the age of thirty months, the other from thirty months to five years. These recordings were transcribed and studied to throw light on how very young children learn language. The work is modeled on Halliday’s recording and analyzing of his own son’s language development*.

Painter is less concerned than Halliday to fit the child-parent utterances into his three-fold model of language (ideational, interpersonal, textual). Her work is more exploratory but she elicits some persuasive categories of the child-parent interactions: Continue reading →

Unpacking English Literature

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I was lucky enough to spend most of my teaching career sharing the enjoyment of classical literature with pupils and students. Going to a grammar school in the forties had opened “the canon” to me and I felt privileged to continue the tradition by introducing the great works of English literature to the next generation. My last experience of literature teaching was sitting in deckchairs in the garden of a Cambridge college sharing the experience of English poetry with teachers from the Soviet Union, who were brought up in the same “Cultural heritage” tradition. It was so enjoyable that it felt superfluous to be paid for it.

However, I had long felt uncomfortable with the lack of theoretical structure underpinning the teaching of “English”, not least the total separation of English language from English literature. When I discovered Stylistics in the seventies, I seized eagerly on this link between the two. (Stylistics is the linguistic examination of literary texts.) Continue reading →

Of apes and men

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I’ve been lucky enough to be put in touch with someone embarking on an M.A in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has told me about some of the recent books on her reading list and I look forward to getting up to date with what is happening in some of the research areas of the subject.

I was particularly interested in the work of Michael Tomasello, Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. I hope to get one of his books but meanwhile I have enjoyed a lecture on:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8933367116959974563 Continue reading →

Testing

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In order to test the efficacy of a piece of teaching/learning, the standard practice in Applied Linguistics is to give a pre-test and post-test of the same kind and level of difficulty, trying to isolate the effectiveness of the teaching by keeping everything else the same.

In the Wigan Language Project we hypothesized that the course would show an improvement in the reading and writing of academic/formal English. So we set pre- and post-tests at the beginning and end of Book 2 (Year 8) and Book 3 (Year 9).

Book 2 taught the language of abstract ideas and Book 3 basic discourse structures, but, since no teacher likely to buy the books would have heard of this, we called Book 2 Reading for Learning, and based the exercises on the processing of academic texts (reading). Book 3 we called Writing for Learning and the exercises were based on the composition of academic texts (writing). Continue reading →

First reactions to BtL

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Last week I had the huge pleasure of meeting the Research Assistants who are administering and monitoring the implementation of Breakthrough to Learning at Matthew Moss High School.

They have set up a blog and made a number of video clips (including two of me made on their visit!). They can be accessed on:

www.btlmmhs.blogspot.co.uk

These are some of the comments by Year Seven learners on their first experience of Book 1: Continue reading →