Layer 266 . . . Teach Yourself . . . Everything

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The movement away from force-feeding children on didactic teaching and a system of so-called education based on passing tests and exams began in Europe in the early part of the last century. Many enlightened British educators contributed to re-thinking the aims and methods of schooling throughout the last century, and achieved worldwide recognition for their efforts to make learning more interesting, more relevant and better matched to the developmental needs of children.

Sadly, Britain now lags way behind other countries in offering education that's geared towards the real needs of learners rather than the needs of academia and the prejudices of the 'traditionalists'. Here and there, however, there are signs that our more enlightened educators, entrepreneurs and even politicians are beginning to see the light.

Last year The Guardian was involved in promoting a DVD called "We Are The People We've Been Waiting For" - http://www.guardian.co.uk/we-are-the-people/welcome-to-the-real-world .
http://www.wearethepeoplemovie.com/

Elsewhere in the world, education systems are being redesigned along the lines of the ideas expressed in Dryden and Vos's book 'The New Learning Revolution'. The Guardian has also reported on this educational revolution.

http://www.newhorizons.org/future/dryden.htm

Lucy Tobin's story in this week's Guardian Education is another piece of good news, and Professor Mitra's work will be embraced by all who care about better education and the rights of children to schools that motivate, inspire and engage their creative energies.

This work is a development of initiatives that began long before microcomputers were even invented, and were put into practice by teachers who saw the need to promote collaborative learning and to enable children to use their creativity and initiative in becoming more autonomous and self-directed learners, through which they could also develop creativity, social skills and emotional intelligence. It is NOT essentially about IT and computers, as such, although the use of the Internet offers tremendous benefits for independent lifelong learners of all ages.

Slumdog reveals learning treasures

The education project that inspired an oscar winning film is now being tried in schools in the north-east

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/16/slumdog-millionaire-education-online-independent?

In the most destitute slums of India, many children lack any formal education. Where schooling is available, the classes are enormous, spanning young and older pupils and offering little one-to-one attention. It's an unlikely source of inspiration for a teaching method to boost attainment, self-confidence and behaviour in Britain's classrooms. But, then again, Professor Sugata Mitra has never been one to follow established educational philosophy.

It's a year since Education Guardian exclusively reported Mitra's Hole In The Wall learning project, in which he installed computers with internet connection in Delhi slums for local children to discover. He found that the children began to teach themselves English, computing and maths, just a month after starting to use the PCs. The project inspired Vikas Swarup's Q&A, the novel that became the film Slumdog Millionaire.

Like the film, Mitra's project has since found massive success: there are more than 500 PCs in walls across India and Africa. Now, as professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, Mitra is turning his eye to Britain. Working with eight- to 12-year-olds at schools across Tyneside, he is helping them to use computers to carry out "self-activated learning" in the classroom.

"Having watched hundreds of Indian children learning without teachers at the Hole In The Wall computers, it became obvious that all children can work by themselves, if they want to," Mitra says.

"Most British children grow up with the internet and have the means to learn what they want in minutes, and this challenges the traditional idea of school being about learning things that will come in handy in the future. They become disengaged."

Mitra is not alone in noticing this problem. John Dunford, head of the Association of School and College Leaders, last week told the group's annual conference that computer games and websites have made children impatient and harder to motivate.

But Mitra thinks he has found a solution, with Hole In The Wall. "It proved that if you encourage individual learning, and give children interesting questions to look into independently, the learning process is sparked by curiosity."

Mitra asks students to divide into small groups to answer GCSE-level science questions on topics such as how animals adapt to their environments, and how the human body works. The children can change groups at any time, look at what other groups are doing, chat and freely use computers. The effects, as recorded by the teachers, are astonishing.

"If you give children time to investigate an answer, it's surprising what they can learn," Mitra says. "Instead of guessing, they do their own research, and acquire an advanced, university-style of learning. The children have a common goal, and bounce ideas off each other."

Emma Crawley, a year 4 class teacher at St Aidan's, confirms the scheme's success. "I'd seen footage of children using the computers in India," she says. "The children were learning things far beyond their years in a short time, without a teacher. It made me think we should give it a go here."

Perhaps because it seems like fun, the knowledge seems to stick. Three months after one session, Crawley gave the children a surprise test. "I was shocked when I marked the papers: they had all remembered everything, even though the test was a surprise."

Mitra acknowledges the well publicised dangers of the internet, but tackles the problem in the same way as in India. "In the slums, I put the computers in highly visible places. If using a computer is public, there's very little danger of children visiting inappropriate sites. Because they are working together in groups, on screens that everyone can easily see, the children stick to the task in hand."

He hopes to develop the project so that all schools will put autonomous learning in the timetable. "It could be a whole new way of schooling and will help people who have been excluded, or can't attend school, or are just struggling with homework," Mitra says. "Technology has given children the potential to be far more independent at learning, and we should embrace that."

Crawley now uses the method every time she introduces a new science topic to her class. To other teachers she advises: "You have to let go a bit and trust the children. At first, they get excited and move around a lot, and noise levels rise, but a calm atmosphere will develop."

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In the Letters section underneath the above article is a letter from Michael Rosen -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/16/ofsted-participation-education-letters

Ofsted is the problem

Rachel Williams reported that one in seven secondary schools inspected last term were graded inadequate by Ofsted under its new regime. A comment from our website:

Ofsted is part of the problem and not part of the solution. Ofsted is predicated on the Henry VIII principle of government and social life. If you don't like it, chop its head off. The repeated utterances of education ministers in league with Ofsted directors are of a kind: education can be improved by making loud aggressive noises about failing schools and failing teachers.

What is the philosophy behind this? That telling people they're crap improves them? After more than a decade of this approach, where's the evidence that this kind of approach gets results?

I would suggest that if all the time, money and effort expended on this useless and painful way of going on had been expended instead in assisting teachers and schools, and facilitating dialogue between the most experienced, successful teachers and the least experienced, weakest teachers, we would have progressed enormously.

Ofsted is merely the police force that enforces this state of affairs.

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What we then end up with is a state of affairs which is summed up in this Observer piece:

Sacking of school headteachers 'rises by 75%'

Tougher line adopted on heads who struggle to raise exam results, claims ASCL general secretary

by Jessica Shepherd

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/07/sacking-school-headteachers-rises

Record numbers of headteachers were sacked last year for failing to boost their schools' GCSE grades, it will be claimed today.

At least 163 heads or their deputies were fired in 2009 – 75% more than in 2007, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) will reveal at its annual conference in London.

Ministers and local authorities are adopting a tougher line on heads who struggle to raise exam results, John Dunford, the association's general secretary, will say, adding that other heads have been told to quit even if exam results have improved, because their schools have turned into academies and sponsors want new leaders.

The revelation on Friday that the number of schools judged to be "inadequate" has almost doubled in the last six months to one in 13 will further fuel the rise in sackings, Dunford told the Observer. Schools placed in this category are put in emergency "special measures" and risk being reopened as academies under new leadership.

Dunford said: "We have lost a lot of talented schools' leaders who are unlikely to return to another headship after such a bruising experience. When a school is put in special measures, the local authority is under pressure from the government to be seen to be taking action and this could lead to a head being sacked. Some local authorities think sacking a few headteachers is evidence that they are vigilant and active in school improvement."

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, promised heads the freedom to "transform" the national curriculum if his party came to power.

Speaking at the ASCL conference, Clegg said: "We will allow teachers to innovate for the good of their pupils. We will cut the reins and expect you to reinvent and transform the curriculum. The majority of what you teach will be at your discretion."

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Iconoclasts

Dr Maya Angelou describes herself as a teacher and a writer. She was on Sky Arts 1 this week.

I've said some pretty harsh things about Sky and the Murdoch empire in my time, but I'm a real fan of Sky Arts 1. The quality of their programmes is often superb, and the fact that they're uninterrupted by adverts is  . . . unbelievable.

Robert Redford is the Executive Producer of a series called Iconoclasts. In this week's programme there was a filmed meeting between Dr Angelou and a young black comedian called Dave Chappelle.

"You have to develop courage - the most important of all the virtues - because without courage you can't practice the other virtues."

"If you're not angry . . . you're either a stone or you're too sick to be angry. But don't be bitter."

"Human beings are more alike than we're unalike."

"A person who's well raised knows to respect the elders, even if they disagree with them. Just for having survived."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xEu8MAgOgM&feature=fvw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Chappelle

http://mayaangelou.com/

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/maya_angelou.html

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And talking of elders . . .

Kathlyn Hotynski, writing in the New York Times, says,

Aging, and Still Thriving

The specter of aging is ominous: wrinkles, memory loss, mortality. But fears of the inevitable can obscure the upside of getting older: being at the top of your game. As baby boomers age, many of them are realizing that life after retirement is not merely a long, slow decline. There is still wisdom to be gained, work to be done and adventure to be had.

Work keeps many baby boomers going. Some workers 55 and older are even seeking out new careers.

Others are taking decades worth of skills and contacts and striking out on their own. The number of selfemployed Americans ages 55 to 64 climbed 52 percent from 2000 to 2007, according to the federal Small Business Administration. Cinde Dolphin started her own marketing firm at 55 . “I’m having a ball,” she told The Times. “I can set up my own hours and work schedule, and do other things I enjoy.”

New research shows the mind keeps developing into late adulthood. “The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture,” Barbara Strauch wrote in The Times. “If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.”

Another benefit of the leisure years is having time to travel . . .

“This is an emerging market phenomenon based on tens of millions of longer-lived men and women with more youth vitality than ever imagined,” Ken Dychtwald, a psychologist and author who has written widely about aging, told Kirk Johnson of The Times.

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Who the fuck is Jude Law? Some kind of dipshit actor? He was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show last night. Big mistake, Jon! Not interesting. Not funny. Just promoting his latest film, which shall remain nameless.

JS asked him whether people in Britain were happy with the NHS. About 60%, said JL. Rubbish! How would he know anyway?

JS asked him whether doctors in Britain were happy with the NHS. No, said Jude. Why not? They're not well paid, and they have to work very long hours.

Fucking idiot. Anyone who knows even a little about doctors knows that since their last contract and pay award they're, if anything, OVERpaid. £100,000+ per year for being a GP is NOT underpaid. And they can now even opt out of doing home visits.

Here's a guy being given an opening to say something positive about a National health service, and the ignorant tit talks complete crap.
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Layer 45 Voices, Time and the Floyd

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This is a double blog, as I won’t have time to write one tomorrow.

Wonderful Radio 4 today featured a writer, a novelist, I’ve never heard of - Kate Mosse. The interviewer mentioned that Kate has created a very good website, on which she has a whole section of advice for writers.

http://www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk/advice/intro.asp

He website also has very interesting interactive section, like a blog, where she shares what she’s doing as a writer whilst she’s actually working on a novel - the idea being that she gets feedback from a certain section of her readership as she’s writing her next novel, which affects the way she’s writing it.

This is pretty much what I’ve been saying to friends about my enthusiasm for blogging - if everyone comments on everyone else’s blog it really helps to generate new ideas, helps to refine your previous writing, etc. The interactivity is crucial.

I guess in years gone by when people had no telephones, let alone email, if they wanted to share their thoughts and their lives with good friends then they pretty much had to write letters - lots of them. These days we can just publish blogs - letting the whole world know what we’re thinking and doing, or just letting a select readership have access to our journals, and giving them a means of instantly feeding back.

I have several good friends who are good writers, though most of them have yet to officially publish anything. Some of them annoy the living daylights out of me because they are so talented and such good writers, and yet they make little or no time in their busy lives for blogging or writing a journal, or whatever.

They all recognise that the process of putting their thoughts into writing is incredibly enriching, like a meditation. And yet they don’t have the drive or the energy to do it, at least not regularly. Or maybe they don’t think it’s worth the effort, or maybe they have misgivings about sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, and don’t see the point of keeping a journal that’s pretty much for their eyes only.

I’m now fascinated by the thought that the thing we might miss the most about somebody we don’t see frequently is their voice - meaning their unique perception, their take on the world, their way of expressing themselves, their sense of humour, their original thinking, and so on.

And the more I think about this the more I feel angry that our schools don’t recognise that this is the most important thing we can do for children - to help them realise that they have an individual voice, an individual take on the world, a unique perception, which they need to recognise and learn how to express to the full.

It’s all very well learning to enjoy the individual voices of great writers, through reading them as often as possible. But children usually take in an implicit message that only the voices of published writers are interesting and important and valid - i.e. their own voice is extremely unimportant and invalid. In fact they don’t even understand the concept of having an individual voice.

I remember coming across Harold Rosen’s efforts to address this issue back in the seventies, through his work as a secondary school teacher and researcher. And subsequently his son Michael’s continuation of this work, especially in books like Did I Hear You Write?

I remember my own time as a teacher, returning from a day’s outing with my class, and hearing them ask the dreaded question, “Do we have to write about it?” Well no, they didn’t. It took me only a few minutes to scribe on the board their recollections of the actual events of the day. What was the point of 25 - 30 children all writing a useless list of “We did this, and we did that; we went there, and we saw this, and we had our packed lunch . . . “

All that I asked of them, in return for a brilliant day visiting exciting new places, was to write down their individual impressions of their experiences. What was interesting? What was exciting? Funny? Scary? Puzzling? And then, having written their individual thoughts and feelings, their responses and their conclusions, they loved listening to one another read out their pieces. Lots of appreciation and laughter. Which then inspired another burst of writing - “Oh yes! I’d forgotten about that! That’s what I thought as well! I need to write about that!”

They soon learnt that what’s important in the process of learning is not so much recording the facts as recording their individual take on the facts, which is as true for a science experiment or the discovery of a new maths concept, as it is for a geography or history or art or geology field trip.

Being able to examine and reflect on our own unique and individual thoughts is a vital part of living and learning - about ourselves and about life in general.

It’s a waste of time being an individual human being unless we enjoy our individual humanity, and the individuality of others. Unfortunately our school system doesn’t care for developing children as individuals, and certainly not as individual writers, and it claims it has no time to do so, as it rushes each day to cover the ‘curriculum’ and prepare for tests.

A cracked record? Moi?

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Time and the Floyd.

Last night was Pink Floyd night on BBC4. A whole evening of brilliant TV, and music, and without a single advert. Pure magic.

The story of the Floyd is a fascinating one. There are so many elements that make their story so unusual. They were a unique band to begin with, thanks to Syd Barrett. I hadn’t fully appreciated what a strange, wonderful, courageous, charismatic and brilliant human being he was in those early days, before he lost his mind. I hadn’t realized either how much his talented peers had loved him, and how much they had missed him, both personally and musically, after he’d gone off with the fairies.

His whole spirit was unique, iconoclastic, anarchistic. And the band therefore didn’t give a damn about fashion and trends and commercialism. Sure, they wanted recognition and appreciation, but not as individual egos. It was all about the music, and what they had to say about life, the universe and everything.

I remember well their early days - the incredible live shows they performed just after “Arnold Layne” - coming into the mod haven of Coventry Locarno on the back of their chart hit, and playing unbelievable spaced out music that was nothing like Arnold Layne and nothing like anything anyone had ever heard; playing in semi darkness, with a liquid light show projected over the entire stage.

The audience wasn’t stoned, as such, but it sure felt that way. I guess people either loved it or hated it. Either you got it or you didn’t. I guess quite a few of my mod mates might have been unhappy that it wasn’t an evening of Arnold Layne type ditties, and headed off to the bar. I didn’t really notice anyone else. I was too wrapped up in the music and the performance. These guys were the house band of the incomparably trendy and freaky UFO Club, for chrissakes. Not that I’d ever smoked a joint, let alone taken LSD.

Arnold Layne, though untypical, was itself a great song. I still have a pristine 45 rpm copy of it. Such wry humour, such a strange thing to write a song about. Someone’s strange hobby. Collecting clothes. Moon shine, washing line. A see-through mirror. "He dug it". Lyrics and a tune you could never forget.

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/p/pink_floyd/arnold_layne.html

That was the beginning of a lifelong fascination and appreciation, right through to my current enjoyment of David Gilmour’s ‘On An Island’, and his band’s brilliant performances of ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ on the DVD. Nobody else plays and sings like that. The Floyd completely stole the show when they invited Roger Waters back to perform at Live8 in Hyde Park in 2005. Which would have happened with or without Waters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/06/30/bmfloyd30.xml

Their very early stuff, though immature and relatively amateurish, on account of them being non-musicians (apart from Rick Wright), was totally original, totally off the wall. They maintain, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that they weren't good enough as musicians to copy or imitate what other bands were doing, so they didn't. Following Syd's example they weren’t afraid to experiment, and improvise, and jam. Their gigs were all about improvisation and jamming. Nobody had ever seen or heard anything like it. And this was before Dave Gilmour joined the band.

By the time I saw them in Manchester in 1969, at a college gig, they were on their way to becoming megastars, and Gilmour was a well-established member. The light show was projected all along one side of the hall by now, as well as all over the stage area. They had well and truly mastered their instruments, and the stage was filled with their gear - a huge drum kit, amps, speaker units, even kettle drums and a gong.

Their catalogue of tracks by now included Astronomy Domine; Careful With That Axe, Eugene; Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun; and A Saucerful of Secrets. All of which are immortalized on the great live album recorded at that Manchester College of Commerce gig in June 1969 - Ummagumma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummagumma

Coincidentally I was also at the first ever live performance of Floyd's Atom Heart Mother at the legendary Bath Festival in Shepton Mallet in 1970, but that’s another story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Festival_of_Blues_and_Progressive_Music_1970

I also remember standing in the amphitheatre in Pompeii in the mid ‘80s and picturing the Floyd playing there, performing the amazing track Echoes from their album ‘Meddle‘, in Live At Pompeii. They showed clips from that last night on the TV, including shots of them strolling around the rim of Vesuvius, which is indeed an amazing experience. Awesome!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd:_Live_at_Pompeii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2hFZ8KnsSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sein6WnbY0

You can get a flavour of the film from the comment on the youtube video, posted by StripeyElephant - "Holy fuck this is the best thing I've ever seen."

My own favourite part of it is the middle section, where the camera tracks slowly around huge menacing black stacks of speakers - studying an unbroken black wall of speaker units, with protruding horn units looking like military grenade launchers, about to lob sonic bombs around the deserted amphitheatre. Roger Waters' bass thunders and throbs its incessant pulse

Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum
Dugh ga buh ba - ba dum

followed and accompanied by Gilmour's howling, wailing, pleading guitar; soaring and wrenching your spirit, demanding you go with it to some otherworldly place in his emotional universe, accompanied by Rick Wright's vibrating rotating wail of electronic organ and Dave Mason's precision drumming and splashing smashing cymbals. I still find electrifying the moment when Gilmour first cuts into the bass drone with the nastiest bluesiest most jagged chord imaginable, whipped into some previously unknown sonic dimension by his incredible mass of electronic gadgets and effects.

(There may be little point playing this video unless you're able to pump it through a good sub-woofer setup or some good headphones)

You may like to know that, according to an old book of mine about guitar players, Gilmour used to use (pre digital and Midi) an effects board consisting of a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, an MXR Phase 100, a Dynacomp noise gate, a Uni-Vibe, a Pete Cornish Custom Fuzz, a Jim Dunlop Cry Baby, and three sweep pedals. "This new state of the art board had sophisticated revolutionary switching capabilities - each effect could be individually by-passed or configured in any sequence, and there were three outputs for various amps." On the other hand, this may be too much information.

The centrepiece of last night’s broadcast was a documentary about the making of Dark Side of the Moon, which is now seen as their magnum opus, and which they are quite rightly extraordinarily proud of.

It was so interesting to find out that it was made in the Abbey Road studios, pre-computers and digital recording, and the sonic effects were all done on an early sequencer and using tape loops set up on banks of reel to reel tape players. Of course! And of course nobody else had ever tried to work in this way. Nobody else was so experimental and innovative.

Roger Waters’ lyrics might now be viewed as typically ‘angry young mannish’ (as he does himself), but he was able to encapsulate perfectly in words what so many of us were feeling in the aftermath of post-60’s disillusionment - feeling about materialism, about the rat race, about the lack of sanity in the world, about militarism, about mortality, about religion, and about ‘hanging on in quiet desperation’. Lyrics that were not wordy, lyrics that were economical and evocative and precise.

The programme told the story of how Clare Torry came to perform her incredible improvised wordless vocal over Rick Wright's brilliant ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’. They described how their old mate Dick Parry was invited to play his wonderful sax pieces on ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Money’. They also told the story of how the strange rambling voices and the manic laughter were specially recorded for the album.

I first heard Dark Side of the Moon lying beside a log fire in a darkened room in the house of a VSO teacher in Northern Nigeria in 1973. In the context of the time, and having just a week ago emerged from the Heart of Darkness, so to speak - from the jungles and rivers of Zaire and Central Africa - it was an unforgettable and mind-blowing experience.

Just listening to some new music on some good quality hi-fi would in itself have been mind blowing after all the time I'd been without it, after all those weeks of traveling across the Serengeti, through the mountains of Rwanda, and along the mud roads of the central African rainy season. Coming into contact with the Dark Side in those circumstances was a breathtaking sonic culture shock and mind-fuck of the first magnitude.

Dave Gilmour says in the documentary that he only wishes that he’d been able to have the experience of hearing the album for the first time, from start to finish, completely ‘out of the blue’. Well Dave, I can tell you, listening to it in its entirety in the stoned darkness of an African evening in front of a flickering log fire was spine-tinglingly overwhelming and incredible. And for that, many thanks.

It says something for the quality of the documentary and the strange brilliance of the band and their music that even my son, no lover of rock or the sixties or psychedelia, sat with me and watched it all through, even though he was dog tired after a double shift at work. There’s hope for him yet! He’s a wonderful young man, but has a lot to learn about music, which, by the way, he seems to have stopped listening to. He’s reached a hiatus. The day he plays and enjoys one of my precious vinyl albums on my turntable I’ll know he’s getting fully on message and fully on track.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398868/

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Having just re-listened to 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene', I'm still amazed by the insane power of Roger Waters' diabolical screaming, and recall vividly the effect of it during live shows. Thrilling, scary and and somehow liberating. I didn't realise at the time that you were allowed to be so full-on crazy and anarchic in public - so utterly emotionally over the top. If you were standing close to the stage it was as disturbing and disorienting as witnessing The Who smashing their instruments.

Sure, it was wild and anarchic and pointless and childish, perhaps. But then isn't this what art is supposed to be about, at least some of the time? Delving into our innermost darkest thoughts and feelings, and expressing them, in words, images, colour, movement and sound. As I say, a kind of liberation.

It's interesting that Michelangelo Antonioni was so determined to have this track in 'Zabriski Point', and I well remember what a controversial movie that was when it was first released.

And going back to Romeo and Juliet (see Layer 31) there an interesting image in Romeo's response to being told "From Verona thou art banished" -

"There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banished is banish'd from the world,
And world's exile is death; then 'banished'
Is death misterm'd. Calling death 'banished,'
Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe,
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.

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One final thought, Let Pink Floyd be an inspiration to all fledgling musicians and writers - don't be put off your desire to be creative and expressive by a lack of technical training and know-how. Don't worry about not being able to do what others can do. Do your own thing, create in your own way using whatever skills and abilities you have, and enjoy whatever you do. Be original and then you can't be judged by conventional standards. Start a new genre of your own perhaps. And the more you do it the better you'll become.
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