Learner motivation differs in each learner according to circumstance. Yet a common factor shared by many elearners, of all ages, is their isolation.
This year, I feel privileged to have a daughter who is studying in her first year of a BA course in Fine Art at AUT. I’m equally as fortunate to also watch her younger sister pilot her way through her first examinable year at High School.
The role of the parent
My daughters are capable learners, but I’m always aware of the roles my wife and I play in providing necessary support with their study.
As parents and supervisors, we are appreciative spectators, sounding boards, mentors, fund managers and sometimes even punch-pillows, for we love our daughters dearly.
Hannah is hostelling in Auckland; her family lives in Wellington. The presence of the Internet and reliable mobile phone reception permit a free flow of communication which we take advantage of every day. Despite the 500 kilometres between us, these digital links can close the distance, effectively at times to within a few centimetres.
Motivation and support
While adult learners often have a maturity that permits a greater focus on engagement, some can find it just as difficult to knuckle down to study as do teenagers. Elearners need support, and not only from their learning resources or their teachers.
A solo mother can find her motivation for learning academic skills dulled through the importance of her necessary child-care responsibilities.
A mother, who has a partner who may be less committed to her study, can meet similar snags to her motivation.
In much the same way as the younger learner needs support from parents or caregivers, a learner who is in a relationship needs support from his or her partner.
The eteacher may well be aware of circumstances where an elearner’s home lacks necessary study support. But what can a teacher do about such a situation so that there is benefit to the learner?
Teacher-caregiver support
Relationships between the teacher and the learner's caregiver can play an important part in assisting home support. Caregivers are not always aware of the needs of the learner. For instance, aspects such as the need for access to a computer and other study requisites may not be understood.
Communication between teacher and caregiver can often help solve learner difficulties. But sometimes it is as demanding for the teacher to engage the supervisor as it is to engage the learner.
How on earth do eteachers go about tackling this challenging task?
“We are all born with an innate need to learn so as to make sense of, and learn from, our experiences. The question is why do so many students lose this natural disposition?" –Bruce Hammonds
Bruce Hammonds’ opening statement and question in his recent post What do we all need to be lifelong learners? made me wonder why the mechanism for learning is there in the first place.
While I don’t entirely disagree with his supposition about the innateness of learning, I question the innateness of a need to make sense of experiences the way he suggests.
One way of rationalising the existence of the learning mechanism is that it evolved for survival. Learning what's good to eat and what's not so good would certainly assist with this. Learning to recognise dangerous situations as well as environments that are safe for settling for the night, or for raising offspring, would likewise tend towards a continued existence.
These abilities to learn are innate, and it is understandable how they may have arisen through evolution. But learning from experience, as an innate tendency, is less of a drive to want to learn. It is more a mechanism for survival. To have a drive to learn needs more than just instinct. It needs curiosity – a compelling urge to want to find out. Curiosity killed the cat
That ‘curiosity killed the cat’ is well known. In order to seek a learning experience, one needs the drive of the explorer, a curiosity that might be associated with a bohemian tendency to stray away from the safety of the pack.
Curiosity is not always good for survival, however, and it could well be why this trait is not so prominent in some as in others. Part of the curiosity that humans display at an early age can get discouraged by parental action, justified by the idea that curiosity may incur danger.
At first sight, the characteristics of curiosity and learning appear to oppose one another when it comes to survival. But, curiosity coupled with a keen tendency to learn is what all teachers look for in their students. A complement to learning?
Could it be that curiosity evolved as a feature complementary to the development of the learning mechanism? Curiosity certainly seems to stimulate learning in the young child. Several education principles encourage curiosity at an early age, advocating that it permits the unimpeded development of the child.
Though curiosity may be thought of as being instinctive, it has an almost random aspect to it that makes it different from many other mammalian characteristics. This complex quality of curiosity prevents it from being categorised as a true instinct. It is not innate in the traditional sense, for it is neither a behaviour that’s learnt, nor is it necessarily influenced by the environment.
A strategy for finding out?
What can trigger curiosity, however, is a stimulus that suggests the existence of something unknown. Just watch a cat when it senses movement in a clump of long grass. In situations like this, the creature becomes engaged in a series of actions that appear to be strategies for finding out. The curiosity that’s experienced by scientists, explorers and the like, and that drives them to search into the unknown, is often stimulated through chance observation. Yet the conscious act of being curious when these situations arise does not occur in these people by chance.
Curiosity and creativity
The importance of curiosity to creativity is implicit. Creativity is a curiosity to explore innovative thought. Curiosity is also important to those who are lifelong learners. It is what drives them to continue learning.
Might it be that the ability to be curious or creative cannot be imparted to everyone? Or are these abilities that should be encouraged at all ages, so that their occurrence in each individual, however scant, can be best put to use in learning throughout life?
Could it be that it’s not ability to learn that’s lost in the young as they progress through school, but the curiosity that drives them to learn that is suppressed?
Hiv U evr wundird wot it wiz lyk B4 dikshinariz? Wen da wurdz wiz spelt NA way U lyk? An ya cud spel wurds difrint onda sem payj an nobdy nyu ye cdnt spel? Sumtyms a git emale letirs frm da kidis in skule an dey ryt lyk dis. Sumtyms i git txts frm da kidis onda cell an dey txt jis lyk dis. Its frendly cos dey txt jis lyk dey tok. Sumtyms i repli da sem wey an i gits a frendly txt back. Das kyewl. Dat makes me feel wun o dey kiddis. Das kyewl 2.
So what’s with txt language? I notice that the e in ‘text’ is now dropped when referring to txting on a mobile, even in formal texts. The word is nearly new and is appropriate.
I sit close to several teachers of English in the office at work. They are cool people and although some are boomers like me, they all agree that language and how we write it is evolving all the time.
I have a special interest in language. It is so relevant to thinking and learning in a subject. It’s the bricks and mortar of being able to think.
When I was very young my reading and writing was atrocious - I’d no chance of spelling that word correctly either. My spelling was shoking. My mother, who was concerned about her son’s literacy, tried valiantly to entice me to read. She bought me novels. I read some but not much. I preferred to read comics. My mother disapproved of comics.
My grandmother, who was experienced and knew what her grandchild liked, would secrete a bundle of comics under the bedspread in my room for me to enjoy. She knew the worth of comics. She knew that ANY reading was better than none. She knew that it was the mind that needed the skill to lift the letters and words off the page and understand - that it didn’t matter if it wasn’t approved high school reading.
My reading skill was improved by me reading comics. Eventually I graduated to reading short stories and novels and hundreds of books on Science for that was my interest. Books have always been a part of my life since then. Linda and I read books, and our house is often a mess with them. Both our daughter's are avid readers.
My daughter Catriona, barely 3 years old and well before she could read, would take her favourite book down from the shelves in the hall.
She would sit and turn the pages. Sometimes she would sniff them. Sometimes she’d hold the book upside down when pretending to read it, for there were no pictures. That didn’t avert her fascination. It was one of my little books of poetry, the smallest book on the shelves. Catriona identified it as her book because of its tiny size. She never tore a page and always returned it to the shelf when she was finished playing with it.
When our children were both primary school age, our living room floor was always littered. In our house you could take your life in your hands by trying to walk across the living room floor in the dark. It was always littered - with books.
When Catriona was older, I would sometimes find her reading under the blankets with a torch when she was really supposed to be asleep. I just left her to it. She’s 15 now and has read every Harry Potter book published, some of them twice.
She has also read Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy. I've seen the movies, but I've never read the Lord Of The Rings books. I found them hard to read.
Catriona uses txt language on her mobile all the time, yet she writes in near perfect English when she does her assignments for school. Her spelling’s not bad either. There’s a lesson to be learnt here.
I attended my daughters’ Prize Giving Ceremony last night. I have two at the same school. One got a prize.
We filed into the large hall for a ceremony kicking off at 7.30. And what a ceremony! Speeches, musical entertainment, speeches, singing, speeches, prize presentations, more musical entertainment, prize presentations, speeches, prize presentations, and more singing and speeches.
The performances by the girls were magnificent. Their singing and their orchestral music were truly inspiring. Much of it was arranged and conducted by the girls themselves.
The highlight of the evening was the Head Girl’s speech. It was the only speech by a student. She was by far the best orator. And she delivered by far the best speech – full of wit, it had real punch. I felt good about that, for the other speeches were, well . . .
I couldn’t help but thinking that a prize-giving ceremony that ran to over three hours must have another message. It certainly wasn’t a message for the students of the school.
The audience, of girls, parents and family, was exhausted after the first two hours. Some had left by 10-o-clock, and the ceremony was still going on with no promise of an end in sight. Sigh.
When the ceremony eventually came to a close, after a summary of the guest speaker’s speech by another well-meaning speaker, we were invited to tea and sandwiches.The rooms of the hall were milling with hundreds of people.
My wife and I spent a good 15 minutes looking for our daughters. We found one. She was utterly exhausted. I went off looking for the other.
Approaching midnight, as I drove my family carefully home, I was reflecting on all that I had witnessed. I wanted to feel like a proud parent. I was a proud parent. But none of that parental pride was left. I felt that my daughters had been duped by their own school.
I had my reflections confirmed by a colleague and father of a girl who’d collected a prize at the same ceremony. “It’s all about the school patting itself on the back,” he said.
Why do school’s do that? Why do they need to do it? I thought that schools were ‘putting students first’. Perhaps I was wrong in this case.
Secondary Futures, New Zealand is writing a paper on how will we decide, in future, what technology is good or bad for kids. YOUR opinion is important.
Check out the video. Then go to the Secondary Futures Post to leave your opinion there in a comment.
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It is my daughter Hannah’s 18th birthday today. We took her to lunch at The Hummingbird, Courtenay Place, Wellington, an award winning restaurant/cafe. The Hummingbird certainly has ambiance and it doesn’t need a jazz band for that. Being Monday, the first day of the school hols, there was no band. But the warm atmosphere, good menu and service certainly made a special day, one to remember.
My wife, Linda, suggested we bought a bottle of bubbly to celebrate. Catriona (14) had a ginger beer, which was her choice and Hannah got her first legal sips from a fine bottle of Morton Estate. She took two hours to sip her glass with the meal. There was no fuss. And she didn’t treat it as something-specially-over-the-top for she’d tasted sips at home from her mother’s wine glass from time to time over the years and sips from my cider glass (I don’t drink beer – gives me headaches).
Neither did Catriona feel that she was left out of it, though she didn’t get her usual sip, being in a restaurant would have made that illegal anyway and the proprietors would have been within their rights to throw us out on the street. Maturity
I couldn’t help but admire the mature attitude of our newly 18-year-old, while at the same time feeling some concern for the younger generation of New Zealand over matters of consumption of alcohol and moderation.
New Zealand has a youth-alcohol problem. It’s not helped by the rugby-beer-swilling culture that's so prevalent in that country, and it's exacerbated by a recent return to 18 from 20 as the legal drinking age.
Parental responsibility
As a parent and a teacher, should I feel guilty about introducing my daughter to the demon drink? Shouldn’t my wife and I have known better than to publicly allow Hannah to booze unashamedly in a restaurant? Shouldn’t I be extolling the virtues of abstinence in the face of a growing youth-alcohol problem in New Zealand?
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