Tag: learning

Posted in Learning, Writing

Lesson #3

Posted on by Sharon

2004. Launceston, Tasmania. Lecturing to third year students I share with them an idea:

As a teacher

your job is to generate thinking

not control it.

I don’t know if it’s a truth (are there any of those left?) but it’s something I firmly believe. I hold that idea as a central tenant of my teaching. It’s important to me, part of who I am as a teacher. Part of my teacher identity.

****

 2012. Burnie, Tasmania. A first year student evaluation: Sharon wants us to think what she thinks.

I am caught by surprise. Shocked. Disappointed. Silenced. Immobilised. I can’t move on/get past it/let it go.

I want to, but it’s like a pebble that I can’t dislodge. Sharon wants us to think what she thinks.

I shake my head, and silently protest, deny it.

Has my position changed in the eight years since I taught the third years?

If it has, why wasn’t I aware of it? If it hasn’t, why aren’t students aware of it?

****

Today. Burnie, Tasmania. I’m puzzled. I have a situation and I’m not sure how to deal with it. It speaks to thinking and learning and power and control and authority and … and … and who I am and who I profess to be and student perceptions and clarity and lack of clarity and what I can/could/should do.

****

I learn through conversation: sharing ideas,talking them out, hearing an idea spoken aloud so that I can determine whether it’s an idea worth pursuing or if it needs to be tweaked or tossed aside. Through conversation I hear others’ ideas and determine how they might fit within my worldview or why they might not. I engage in conversation to understand, to learn.

I learn through questions: asking them and answering them. When I ask a question I want to know what the person I’m asking thinks, feels, values, believes. I want to hear their response. I ask to challenge my own thinking. I am interested in different perspectives, different ways of understanding an idea/concept/theory/practice, different values, different beliefs. I ask questions to understand and learn.

I learn through writing. I come to understand myself-others-the world-ideas-thoughts-traits-distinctions-dichotomies-polarities through writing. I use language deliberately. I think about the words I write with and the meanings of those words and the way one word/one idea/one thought fits with another. I think about cadence and rhythm and connection and clarity. I write to understand and as I write, I learn.

I think.speak.question.write.realise.

I don’t have answers. I have ideas.

That’s my realisation. Today. Right now. This moment.

****

Ideas can be challenged, adapted, re-formed, tossed aside, melded with others, stretched, explored, evaluated, weighed, talked about, shared. They can enrich and empower.

****

The puzzle: I am an academic. For some students that means I have authority. For some students it means I have answers. I contribute to the discussion online and some students think it’s a truth: definite, complete, authoritative. I float an idea. I suggest, propose, offer. There is conundrum inherent in my contribution. I write authoritatively, I am in control of my ideas, my words, my expression. I am an academic. I should know and therefore I should tell.

Should I?

I don’t have answers. I have ideas.

Ideas can enrich and empower. They can be shared, talked about, weighed, evaluated, explored, stretched, melded with others, tossed aside, re-formed, adapted, challenged. Even my ideas. Yes, even my ideas.

I want students to do their own thinking. I want them to think about the complexities within the books they’re reading in Children’s Literature, to make connections to what’s going on in the world around them, to be aware of the world around them, to see other people’s realities, to have ideas and share them and get to the crux of the story/character/plot/reality writ large on the page.

I share my ideas … not my answers.

Ideas can be challenged.

Even mine.

 

Posted in Learning

Lesson #2

Posted on by Sharon

1968. East Nowra, NSW. I’m finished I call, somewhat excitedly.

Mum comes over to do an inspection. She seems suspicious, but doesn’t say anything.

Okay, you can go now. I jump up and run outside to play.

Scene repeats on a daily basis for a number of years.

****

1973. Murwillumbah, NSW. I am aghast. I cannot believe she would do this me.

Nan!

I am betrayed.

****

1976. North Nowra, NSW. I am not allowed to move. I must stay here till they’re all gone. Dad makes that quite clear.

I will not give in.

I am not wilful.

I am not stubborn.

I am … intractable.

Fourteen year old me learnt that word the hard way.

****

Vegetables.

I will not eat them.

Peas placed carefully under my knife so mum won’t see them, despite her suspicions.

I get away with that for years. Or so I think.

In 1973 a concern is shared. It appears the middle one, the troublesome one, the intractable one, will die a lingering death (along with millions of starving African children) if she doesn’t eat her vegetables.

Nan-in-Murwillumbah has a solution.

Custard.

Vegetables in the bowl; custard on top. Sharon won’t even realise!

Sharon did realise. And didn’t eat custard for years.

****

In 1976 a new rule is instituted: no-one leaves the table till Sharon finishes all her dinner.

All means vegetables.

****

I learnt the strength of my resolve at that moment. I learnt that I am patient. I learnt that I have a core of steel.

I learnt the word intractable.

I learnt that while cauliflower and cheese sauce is one of the foods the devil serves in hell, it tastes marginally better hot than when it’s been sitting on your plate for four hours.

****

2003. Launceston, Tas. An envelope with Dad’s handwriting.

I’m strangely touched that he remembered.

Posted in Learning

Lesson #1

Posted on by Sharon

1972. Nowra, NSW. I clearly remember Dad driving me home from Guides. I was 10 years old and telling him about my friend Robin, who had just gained a badge.

In case you aren’t aware, badges were a big thing in Guides. Possibly still are. My memory is very foggy here, because to be quite honest I didn’t ever take too much notice of badges, but I think there were badges for things like making hospital corners on beds (there must have been because I still do them perfectly), and badges for finding resourceful ways of getting your little brother to stop bothering you.

I found throwing darts at him to be quite effective.

Anyway, driving home with Dad and telling him about Robin getting a badge … for radio. It was a radio badge. The Girl Guide hierarchy possibly thought that learning about communication was more useful than throwing darts at your brother, but each to her own I say.

My Dad was/is a very quiet man. Quietly spoken and getting quieter with age and Parkinsons. Some describe his quiet speech as mumbling, a bit like Pa in the Hillbilly Bears, but people just need to listen harder. Dad would sit back in conversations and only contribute when he had something funny, interesting, witty, insightful to say. He tended to tell stories rather than adding general chit-chat to the conversation, and when telling a funny story he would often laugh himself silly well before the end, thus making it difficult to understand the story at all.

Dad was keen to encourage me, the quietest (most contrary… hey, who let my mother in here?) of his three quiet children, to be less like him; and in the car that afternoon on the way home from Guides he said one of the hardest things about radio is being able to say your own name and not feel silly. Give it a try.

Ten year old me sat there feeling silly about saying my own name.

Hello. I’m Sharon Pittaway. 

Yep, silly.

No radio badge for me.

1991. Wynyard, Tasmania. A high school P&F meeting. Talk of the local community radio station needing presenters. Me tuning in and for some reason thinking: I can do better than that. What do you mean you can do better than that, the rational half of my brain yelled as I drove to the radio station for my audition. The non-rational half of my brain (the big half) wasn’t listening. It propelled me up the steps, through the door, into the voice booth and made me read the script as if I’d been doing it since I was 10 years old.

I started working in radio.

I said my name. Dad was right. It was hard and I felt silly.

But I learnt that there are times in your life when you have to do what seems hard and what seems silly. And it becomes less hard and less silly over time and the next thing you know you’re working for ABC Local Radio and Peter Cundall is telling everyone how you gorged on broad beans while the news was on and it was the most disgusting thing he’s ever seen, and you’re laughing so hard that you can’t say your own name.

The ten year old me gives a little smile and a nod, and pushes a homemade radio badge into the pocket of her Girl Guide uniform.

****

Jill set me a challenge for this week: to write about things I’ve learnt … not from teachers or from university, but the odd, scrounged learnings I’ve picked up along the way.

After writing this I learnt that a little part of me is yearning to go back to radio.

Posted in Learning, Writing

Writing challenge (Day Six)

Posted on by Sharon

Um

Well um

No, I’m sorry, I can’t do this. I can’t think of anything to say.

She sits down in a fog of embarrassment and dismay and silence.

Or the inverse.

Yeah well like my name is like Kimkourtneykhloe and I’m like 14 well almost like I will be next month and I’m sick excited because me mum, mum said that she’ll take me to like Devonport for the day and I’ve never been there before and I hear it’s a exciting place and I just can’t wait because I might get to buy like a new like clothes yeah. What else? Yeah well like I live with mum and six brothers and four sisters and seven dogs and five chickens and yesterday I got a new like kitten she’s called Kendallkylie because mum reckons that name’s really like cool and she said that if she had another kid it would be called that but we told her that she can’t have another kid because like me dad’s not here he’s having a stretch mum calls it and it only seems to happen when he’s around – or Uncle Max – but he’s in prison too, so that won’t happen which is good because there’s not enough room in the bed for us all anymore so yeah that’s it.

Three seconds start to finish.

People hear our voice when we have something to say. Or when we think we have something to say. For some of us, if we have nothing to say we say nothing. Our voice won’t be heard. I think mothers are responsible. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything. I don’t know if you’re like me in this regard, but over the years I’ve tended to substitute many words for ‘nice’: Intelligent. Funny. Inspirational. Witty. Imaginative. Clever. Interesting. Astute. Insightful.

I’m silent a lot!

I was unhappy with yesterday’s post.

I asked Tim what he thought. (I ask him that every day and he says the same thing: Yeah, it’s good with the rising inflection that gives me a little bit of encouragement but not too much.) Yesterday he said, I liked the picture of the kids jumping off the bridge.

I like an honest man, I honestly do, but yesterday I secretly wished he’d listened to my mother. A. Thousand. More. Times!!

I was unhappy with yesterday’s post because I felt that I had nothing to say. I had nothing intelligent, funny, inspirational, witty, imaginative, clever, interesting, astute, insightful to say ….

I had no point to make, no advice to give, no wisdom to share. My words came haltingly, it took three times as long to write as my posts generally do, and in the end I clicked the ‘publish’ button quite reluctantly. I felt like a student who knows the deadline is NOW but needs one more day to figure out their argument, to push the fog away so that their point becomes clear. And then a strange thing happens. It’s not one more day you need, because within an hour of the submit/publish button being clicked, it all becomes clear in your head.

It’s too late. It’s submitted and you know your reader/marker will be saying to him/herself I can see what you’re trying to say, but it would be better if you just said it. 

Finding your voice is hard if you have nothing to say: if you don’t understand the topic, if you don’t have a view on it, if you are unclear about the point you want to argue, if you don’t have an angle. Writing a blog post, or writing an assignment will feel like torture, each sentence wrung out a word at a time. Ideas will scurry to the darkest corners of your mind and hide under boxes labelled one hit wonders of the 80s, or tram stops from South Yarra to the city, or high school teachers I’d like to see today so that I can say see, I did make something of myself.

We tell students to plan their assignments. I tell students to plan their assignments. But I can’t write like that. I can’t plan. I do however, need an angle. My voice will be weak, will desert me, if I don’t have a hook: that first idea, the approach I’m going to take. My first sentence is the most important one for me. It shapes my whole post; when I was an undergraduate the first sentence shaped each assignment. Until I had my first sentence I couldn’t write.

My first sentence sets the scene, gives me ideas that grow as I write. Once I have the first sentence (the initial idea, the angle, the perspective) then I can write. From then I write by writing not by planning. I understand through writing – I write to understand.

When I know I have something to say – something intelligent, funny, inspirational, witty, imaginative, clever, interesting, astute, insightful – then my voice will emerge.

How does it work for you?

*****

Tomorrow is day seven of the writing challenge. The final day. Free choice says Tim. Yikes! That’s a challenge.

But I’m up for a challenge.

Do you have one for me?

Posted in Learning

Learning … pain … achievement

Posted on by Sharon

I haven’t been well for two weeks now.  I generally don’t get sick and so it’s a shock to my system.  I haven’t been able to think clearly, to expend much energy on normal, everyday, regular things.  My breathing is short, my chest is tight, and my cough is just plain annoying.  And not just to me!  I’ve thought about writing a blog post but haven’t had anything to say … I keep searching my mind, but it’s a blank.  There is no inspiration.

Until I read this: “Probably the most violent and aggressive act that any person can do to other persons is to invade their minds with ideas and twists of meaning which disturb the comforting security of things known and faith kept. Yet this is what I, as a teacher, am required to do.” 
— R. W. Packer, “Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Dramatic Presentation” inTeaching in the Universities: No One Way, McGill-Queens University Press, 1974.

At Orientation in February I talked about the leap from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence (through a few stages) and how that process – the process of learning – is not straight-forward and is not painless.  There are bumps along the way, and periods of time described as “ouch” where learning bites. But I hadn’t quite considered it in this light – in the light of a violent and aggressive act.  Of invading minds; of disturbing comforting securities.

A student enrolled in Curriculum and Pedagogy is frustrated with my lectures: “Sharon just asks so many questions!  Why can’t she just tell us stuff?” is the cry (and I know there are other students who feel the same way – even tutors ask that question: why can’t you just tell us stuff?).  My questions disturb comforting securities, invade students’ minds, force them to think.  My questions are painful.  They suggest that there are no certainties, that students must create their own responses, must deal with not being completely sure, must live in the land of I’m not sure if this is right – the land of ambiguity. Wendy remembers this land and the frustration of being there; of being forced to go there through question after question. 

It hurts.

It’s not always a pleasant place to be.

It stretches us.

When you’ve spent the day in the garden, you wake up the next morning feeling a bit stiff (particularly if it’s been a while since you gardened).  You stretch your leg out and there’s a twinge.  You twist your body and feel the tug in your back.  Lifting your arm above your head brings another source of discomfort.  Just slight, but you can feel it in ways you couldn’t the day before.  You stand up, and realise your whole body aches.  Reaching for the kettle, climbing the stairs, bending over to empty the dishwasher … ouch.

But you look out into the garden and it looks fantastic.  The roses are tidy, the weeds are gone, the pebbles are all back where they should be, the edges are neat again.  Your effort, your pain, has produced this.  It feels good.

Trudi (not her real name) reminds me of this on the weekend.  I first met Trudi in 2008.  She was ‘just a …’ and couldn’t imagine being anything else.  I’m just a mother; just an SSO … I don’t think I could be a teacher.  (Trudi couldn’t imagine being a university student either.) Trudi has a core of resilience and tenacity and strength but wasn’t fully aware of that back then.  She enrolled in the BEd course, fearful, uncertain, not confident.  She started studying, at home, alone, surrounded by her family who didn’t know what it was like to study at home, alone.

Trudi’s mind was invaded, her way of seeing the world was challenged, her taken-for-granted assumptions were drawn to the surface and she had to examine them.  It was painful.  There were tears, and feelings of I can’t do this, and late nights, and other students (friends now) to support her.  And there was pain.

Most of all though, there was learning.

Trudi started studying in 2008; she was timid and not sure that she could do it. Now, in August 2012 Trudi is a teacher. She glows with it.  It shines from her, and despite her thinking that any minute now someone’s going to come into my classroom and tell me thanks, but I’ll take over now, she’s the teacher.  Her students love her. The parents of her students love her. Her principal comes into her classroom to tell her that she’s doing a wonderful job. She kept going through the pain; she stretched herself, she grew, she learnt … she achieved.

And I feel a sense of achievement too; a small sense of pride because I know I had a part to play in Trudi’s journey – even if that part was painful.

I might be causing pain, but I know the rewards are worth it.

Posted in Learning

What happens when …

Posted on by Sharon

What happens when we don’t understand something?

What happens when we don’t get how to do something?

What happens when we are faced with something new?

What do you do?  How do you react?

What do I do?  Am I ever faced with something I don’t understand?  Or with something I don’t know how to do, or with something new?

Yes, of course.

Until I was 15 I had never driven a car.  But I learnt how to do that. A 1962 Hillman Minx that you had to start with a crank handle when it decided not to work.

Before I was 16 I had never had a baby.  But I learnt how to do that.  I eventually had five of them.

Before I was 17 I had never been married.  I learnt how to do that too, and the second time around I’m learning even more.

Before I was 25 I had never been on radio.  I took to that like a duck to water.  I learnt how to open the microphone and speak.  I learnt how to record sponsorship announcements, and would you believe it, I learnt how to edit tape – yes, tape.  Physically cutting the tape to delete the bits when I’d giggled instead of saying whatever was on the script.  I learnt how to record interviews and edit them using digital recording and editing equipment, I learnt how to tell when Peter Cundell was pulling my leg, I learnt that when you’re on ABC Radio and you do a live broadcast some people want your autograph (weird, I know).

Before I was 29 I had never been to university.  My first class – 9am Monday – was acting.  Then Tech Theatre, then Drama, Voice and Speech, Movement (at 8am on Tuesdays), Theatre, English Literature, Education.  26 contact hours a week.  Rehearsals after class and on weekends, lines to learn, props to find, costumes to search for, lights to hang on ceilings way way up high.  Fresnels and barn doors and gels and a lighting board that looked like it had come off the flight deck of a space craft.  Working in groups to choreograph a dance piece that signifies connectedness, performing in front of a paying audience, calling a show, stage managing. Poems to understand, The Summer of the 17th Doll to write about, Wilde, Shaw, Ibsen, Buzo, Williamson, Hero and Leander, An absolutely ordinary rainbow – a beautiful poem by Les Murray:

The word goes round Repins,
the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,
at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers,
the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands
and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:
There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him.

And on the poem goes … until …

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street. (Les Murray, 1969)

Not to mention learning about Piaget and Vygotsky and grammar and teaching English and teaching Drama and pedagogy and curriculum and referencing and writing academically and caring for students, and having high expectations of them, and not saying (never saying) ‘good girl’ or ‘great work’ because those phrases are meaningless.

I learnt all that, and more, at university.

There was so much to learn; so so so much to learn.

Everything was new.  And much of it was difficult.

Email came in while I was at university.  We had to email our lecturers our assignments.  We were told that we had to name our assignments properly otherwise the lecturer would receive 15 assignments all titled Assignment 1 and he wouldn’t be able to tell which belonged to whom.

The Internet came in while I was at university.  Computer labs popped up all over the place.  Girls would gather in the computer lab and ‘chat’ with each other … online.  I could never work out why they didn’t go to the caf and chat.   Students in my class were nervous about computers.  Some had never used one before; they thought they might break it.

The internet was new, finding information using the internet was new; finding ways around the internet was new.

And for many it was difficult.  New meant difficult.

In 1732 Dr Thomas Fuller said: All things are difficult before they are easy.

What happens when you don’t understand something?

What happens when you don’t get how to do something?

What happens when you are faced with something new?

How do you make the difficult thing, the new thing, easy?

Sharon