"How am I supposed to be inspired by that?"

A few days ago, Jan Visser of the Learning Development Institute (LDI) posted this on LDI 's Facebook page

Attached is a link to Paul Lockhart's "A Mathematician’s Lament." A brilliant plea, in my view, to refocus education on such things as beauty and to acquire one's knowledge of disciplines like math and science within the context of relevant current issues that can be seen, also, within a historical perspective. Not an entirely new viewpoint, of course, but it's very well formulated. Enjoy! JV

Jan's right, it's a great paper on why our teaching of mathematics puts kids off instead of showing them what's fascinating and beautiful about it. Although it's several years old now (first published in 2002) it remains relevant - unfortunately. Here are a couple of tasters...

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules: “Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key." ... educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. ...

In the higher grades the pressure is really on. ...Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint. “It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.” Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. ... “To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. ... I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”

...Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

... By removing the process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It's like saying that Michaelangelo created a beautiful sculpture without letting me see it. How am I supposed to be inspired by that?

Check out the full paper on the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) website.

BTW - the BEST mathematics book I have ever read is The Number Devil by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

"Fans of Feral Learning"

How exciting! I've just discovered a Facebook page called "Fans of Feral Learning".  The initial post references Jan Visser's 2006 blog posting on feral learning, which in turn references my earlier blog ... so there you have a perfect example of social media nurturing and disseminating innovation and social change.

What an exciting example of the amplification process Sandy Britain talked about.

I wonder where it will lead next?

Reflection: How did I get here?

My mother was a secondary teacher, so one of the things I always promised myself growing up was that I'd never be one myself... which is a shame, because I L-O-V-E teaching, I just couldn't stand be a school teacher (!) I love learning new stuff, finding things out I didn't know before, testing my understanding and my thoughts against what other people know, and I love helping other people to discover the thrill of doing that.

Somehow though, that's not what school-teaching is all about. ECE, postgrad, workplace, anywhere else is fine - but schools and undergraduate university study are generally not. *sigh.*

When I left university with an Honours degree in economics I had had enough of formal study & promised myself I wouldn't ever go back. (It was a mediocre degree, university didn't engage or challenge me any more than school had. I've always regarded it as a double major - in Economics and Nightclubbing. As a consequence, the result didn't do me or the university in question much credit really. )

The thing that drove me back to education was having kids. In New Zealand we have a wonderful co-operative Early Childhood organisation called Playcentre (one word) where parents train to work as ECE 'teachers' learning child development, observation skills the ECE curriculum etc alongside their children. You get a very different perspective learning ECE pedagogy to support your own child and your friends' and neighbours' children from what you might otherwise. It can't help but be learner-centred. (Besides which, working in ECE settings is like herding cats - first of all you have to figure out where they want to go, then you work with that.... otherwise you're sunk!)

Once my kids had both gone to school I worked for about 5 years doing project management of course materials in a distance education institution, and as part of my PD there I began studying online in the University of Southern Queensland's M.Ed programme.

Postgrad rocks! You're allowed to have an opinion again - and to question and challenge and THINK FOR YOURSELF! I don't think it was just that I had learned by then to work to my own satisfaction, rather than anyone else's (although that was part of it), a big part of it I am sure was a difference in attitude on the part of the course leaders from what I had experienced in formal education anywhere before.  I loved it! Haven't finished my M.Ed yet, but I will (one day)...

The feral learning idea grew out of an assignment I did for a paper in Instructional Design. I once heard Marc Prensky quote his game designers as saying "You give an idea to an instructional designer and they'll suck all the fun out of it..." Frankly, I think they have a point - and not just instructional designers, professional educators across the board tend to fall into the same trap. And you know, none of those andragogy, pedagog or other-gogies actually describe how I learn, although Jack Mezirow's transformative learning is close (although he doesn't understand kids), and so is Linda Silverman's visual-spatial model. Why on earth not?

I was very fortunate to find myself participating in a group at CABWEB with Jan Visser of the Learning Development Institute (LDI), who was editing a book, "Learners in a Changing Learning Environment". Jan invited me to submit a chapter on feral learning (which I'd been holding forth on at some length) - so the ideas got formalised and incorporated into the book... which I'm very proud of.

So here I am... in a bit of a hiatus at the moment because Real Life has taken over again for a while - and developing my own PLN through interesting sites like Change the Schools,  Edutopia,  AERO,  Shifting Thinking and the like.

I wonder what's around the next corner?

Feral Learning in hard copy

One of the really exciting things that's happened in the hiatus since I stopped blogging has been the publication of Learners in a Changing Learning Landscape in Springer's Lifelong Learning series. Check out Chapter 6, Getting to know the Feral Learner.

Writing this chapter for publication was a great learning experience, and helped me to crystallise my thinking about feral learning.  It also demonstrated how much I still have to learn about preparing material for publication. I was very lucky to have Jan Visser's help & support.

The book is an interesting collection of perspectives on the 21st century learning environment and has just received this year's James W Brown Publication Award of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). We share the award with the authors of another important book that came out last year: Richey, R., & Klein, J. (2007). Design and development research. New York: Routledge.