It's twue, it's twue (George Harrison)

Common misconceptions are prevalent in all walks of life. The learning styles myth continues to flourish in education.

Mathematics remains a struggle for me, and many others.

Here's a maths misconception to whet your appetite (and to make me feel better about my inadequacies in this area):

If one were to flip a fair coin five times and get heads each time, it would not be any more likely for a sixth flip to come up tails. Phrased another way, after a long sequence of unlikely independently random events, the probability of the next event is not influenced by the preceding events. Humans often feel that the underrepresented outcome is more likely, as if it is due to happen. Such thinking may be attributed to the mistaken belief that gambling, or even chance itself, is a fair process that can correct itself in the event of streaks.

Well, you can't say yes and you can't say no; just be right there when the whistle blows (The Rolling Stones)

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There is no substitute for focused work when it comes to preparation for exams.

Our two week study break is coming to an end and students will have two heavily disrupted weeks to finish their preparations at school. Then they are on their own.

There are plenty of good tips out there for how to prepare for exams, like this article from Edutopia. But unless a student decides to commit to study and then use these kinds of techniques to focus on what they have learned and then be able to apply that to exam questions they won't do themselves justice.

Bottom line: commitment and focused preparation.

We all have our everyday hopes and fears and you'll find no exception in me (Todd Rundgren)

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Reports. Curious things reports.

I have written about the report conundrum before in 2015 while at Woodford House (you can check the post here). 

It's seven years later and I'm proofreading a set of the latest reports for  our seniors who are heading to external exams in a few weeks' time.

Musing again on the whole report writing thing, and how they fit with students' digital trackers, and modern technology's instant access.

The musings are set for a while yet it seems.

I did good, I kept it on track, yeah (Alex G)

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Penmanship is rapidly becoming a dying art, or even a thing.

We've started our Term  3 into 4 study break for two weeks, but the memory of students doing their recent practice exams on devices, lingers.

It seems rare now to see students using pen and paper in their normal day to day lessons, so it's inevitable that NZQA would introduce digital exams at some point.

Students still have the choice but not one of my students elected to forgo using their laptop in the two weeks of exams.

In the senior school, they are used to typing now, more than writing, so they reported positive benefits from the experience. They wrote a lot more and I would say the quality of their answers will be better, plus the marking of their 'papers' will be a lot easier - no deciphering of rubbish hand-writing any more.

Given all that, I'm not about to be a crusader for using pen and paper, but as I'm of an age, I still love writing with a fountain pen, real ink, on real paper. And I can still bemoan the lost art of penmanship, and encourage educators to persist against the odds.

Well-a, beat the drum and hold the phone, the sun came out today (John Fogerty)

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My students are about to start two weeks of study-break before they return to school for two weeks and then head off on exam leave.

If they are looking for an effective study tool for those external exams they should look at doing some successive practice.

A Mind/Shift article I have bookmarked from 5 years ago, outlines the advantages of successive practice (when students practice via techniques like doing practice essays until they can get their answers correct and then repeat that process every few days, by doing that they encode the information much better).

As the article points out: 

successive practice is the norm for many activities students are passionate about like sports or music. “Most of your students use successive relearning for almost everything they enjoy doing outside of classroom studies,” he said. For example, a student learning to play an instrument will regularly practice a piece until it sounds good and then practice again a few days later. After the first practice session some notes or phrasing are forgotten, but when they are relearned during the next practice session they are encoded even more strongly.

Don't ask. Act!

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Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you (Witold Marian Gombrowicz).

Without wanting to overthink it, here's the story about who I am and what actions delineate and define me as a teacher/ Principal in 6 steps.

Step 1 - having a fortunate birth. Given the odds it's a fluke that I ended up with parents who sustained my growth. Their example was exemplary and made me value relationships, the need for integrity, the importance of routines and good habits, loyalty, honesty, righteousness and much more.

Step 2 - Royal Oak Primary and Mrs Alexander gave me excellent early examples of how important reading and writing were to my self-development.

Step 3 - Corporeal punishment. At Manukau Intermediate I was given the strap on my hand by Mrs Kay and the injustice of that moment seared itself into my consciousness.

Step 4 - Mt Albert Grammar School and inspirational teachers like Warwick Gibbs and Barry Gough. But also confronting my weaknesses, failures, and liabilities and the subsequent encouragement from the school to pursue my goals beyond school.

Step 5 - Dogged pursuit of a goal (wanting to be a teacher, becoming a prefect, captaining the school's first XI, going to university, gaining an MA degree, getting into teaching)

Step 6 - allowing the universe to guide my decisions (a.k.a. fluking it part 2 - such as landing the exact right job to fluke the time, 1983, and place, New Plymouth, for me to meet my wife).

Booyah! That's who I am as a teacher and a leader.

I'm changing everything, Oh, everything around me (Marmalade)

 

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Stop. Walk away. Let go. Stop thinking. Move on...Bingo.

Sometimes Google won't do because the answer is within.

For instance it can be a fragment of a thought like 'what was the name of that Teacher Aide we had here three years ago?' Google doesn't know. Going through the alphabet sometimes works to jog the memory, but other times the answer won't come. 

Stop. Walk away. Do something else....and, Bam. The answer has floated to the surface.

I can't begin to calculate how many times I've used that technique when an answer won't come. 

It's like the brain goes into a loop and a distraction frees up the loop. And the answer comes.

This time and space strategy works for all aspects of learning too, and is a key thing to use when you get stuck in the learning pit (of despair).