Boundaries and desire.

I have been reflecting on what motivates desire to act and what limits action in an institutional learning context.

As a teacher, there are varying constraints which limit action.

Some constraints are clearly desirable or even essential to our own existence, our identity or an institution's or a groups existence.

Faced with what is a considered unacceptable demand or threat, a person, a teacher even,  may be motivated to attempt to overcome, get around, ignore, physical, political, philosophical, pyschological, cultural, hierarchical...(other) limits.

Clearly what is acceptable to one person is not necessarily acceptable to another.

 The perceived risk of overcoming or simply ignoring constraints will clearly depend on the individual person or group.

At times, boundaries may be breached, or simply crumble and disappear.

Beliefs may over time change or be transformed.

Inside out, outside in.

Desire to act will depend on intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Desire to fulfill a role in an (educational) institution will depend on a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Can one say that purely intrinsic motivation exists?

Perhaps not in a professional setting at least.

He notes that question for another day.

He returns to the confines of he institution.

There are days when we would rather be elsewhere...

There are days when a feeling of professional responsibility, a desire not to let down one's friends or colleagues in the lurch or a fear of losing regular/irregular income only just outweigh the desire to walk away...

The desire to not lose face amongst one's peers weighs heavily.

There are people in all professional activities who hate every moment of their professional existence.

There are people in all professional activities who would rather leave the work to the others...

There are people in all professional activities who have an overwhelming desire for power over others....

Man and machine...  

I am a 'fonctionnaire' - a servant of the state, in service to an education system.

I am a cog in a vast machine. Like all cogs which 'malfonctionne' I am replaceable.

Within a university,educational 'cog's are given more freedom of movement than in schools.

I may define within certain limits the program for the students, (indeed it is my responsibility). I may define the methods, the means of assessment.  Teachers are rarely if ever observed.  Students need to be seen to be, or believed to be in class at particular times and grades need to be rendered to the administration every term.  If I am requested to attend particular training or meetings I go.

Complaints are to be avoided.

The smooth running of the institution's administrative machine is primordial.

Then the machine ground to a halt.

A few days later

What on earth was I thinking?

This is all so complex.

Hurried Conclusion.

This is all so complex.

OFF.

Cub clothing, conjugation, correction and community.

D'you wanna see my badges?

I loved the outdoors, the idea of camping, the idea of making fires, the idea of climbing.  

I was pretty pissed off with the rigmarole they asked me to go through to do what I loved.

You might imagine that I was born to be a Cub Scout.  

You would have imagined wrong. 

Cub clothing.

Week after week they asked me the same question.

"Have you got your Cub-shirt yet?"

"No, They don't have one my size."

"No, My parents couldn't find one in the shops."

"No, It got lost in the post."

Any excuse was good enough to avoid wearing that rubbish uniform. 

Pledge and Mottos

Then there was the silly Cub salute and pledge.

Then there were the silly Cub badges that the seniors showed off on their sleeves.

Don't ask me to explain to you what the pledge was, I refused to give even lipdub to their stuff.

Now that's got me thinking...

I am curious now. 

I shall have to Google it.

Here it is, in a ghastly blueish typeface,

The Cub Scout Promise:

I promise that I will do my best
To do my duty to God and to the Queen
To help other people
And to keep the Cub Scout Law.

The Cub Scout Law:

Cub Scouts always do their best
Think of others before themselves
And do a good turn every day.

The Cub Scout Motto:

Be Prepared

There it is, I was never prepared to accept their wretched promises, laws, caps, badges, shirts, mottos and miscellenaeous mumbo jumbo.

Conjugation.

"Sprechen sie deutsch?"

"Not on your Nelly."

There it was, I was a Germanophonephobe. 

There was nothing I could do about it. 

It was a strong allergic reaction to the teacher, the word order, the weird lexical assemblages. 

There was the associated war-time imagery...

A German Teacher

                                       

The teacher had a short crop, a black leather jacket, and a BMW motorbike...

At a quick guess, I would say he was the Wehrmacht motorcyclist second from the left.  

No threat of low marks, punishment, or physical torture would break my resistance, it was a question of patriotic pride. 

There would be no collaboration with the enemy.  

I was prepared. 

I had seen the Colditz series on the BBC 

They had no ways to make me speak.

Colditz Model School.

Correction

"Speak English."

"Why don't you speak English?"

I have spent hours being paid to say those words. 

There are times when being an English teacher seems like a big waste of time.  

(shhh don't tell anyone)

I had spent hours correcting that student. Nothing seemed to stick. Nothing seemed to stick...ever.

Epiphany

He arrived with his new English friends, with bright eyes, and excitement.

"I have just learnt loads of new expressions, Barry has corrected all of my English."

Well, I suppose that I was in part responsible for finding Barry to make friends with the student... 

It was clear that he was suddenly really keen to learn, he was taking pleasure to learn, he was learning like never before...

Engagement

Origin

early 17th century (in the general sense ‘a legal or moral obligation’): French, fromengager ‘to pledge’ (see engage).

I have just been reading a Dave Cormier post on the question of learner engagement.  

I have been thinking about the problem of learning within institutional settings. 

I suspect that we don't engage in learning, rather we engage with a person, a club, a community or an army. 

We pledge our belonging to a community.

Any learning in the community may be inherent or incidental to one's belonging to that community.

I suspect that the community is always the curriculum.

Do communities really care about learning which does not reinforce the community?

Aside.

I love camping.

I love learning.

I love learning languages to speak with people that I like or to avoid people I don't like.

I love learning from people that I respect.

I do my best to help other people...

I have no particular longing to belong.

You can keep your badges, your pledges, your marks, your threats, your engagements... 

Disciplined Minds...

He was about twenty years old.

"Well we're not used to freedom, we are so used to being told what to do, what to learn. It's good what you are trying to do but you need to start with younger students..."

A remark of a wise old hand at the education game. It is already too late. He is nearing the end of his university degree course. He has important exams to take. Doing anything like real learning is perhaps fun but a bit of a distraction.

Class work Instructions.

• Take two tablets once a week.
• Give them a list of any old stuff  apparently very serious subject matter to cram revise a week before the test. 
• Don't give them too much, nor too little. 
• Avoid embarrassing spelling mistakes.
• Ensure an average mark of 12. (A higher mark will not be satisfactory for other departments.) 
• Make sure there is no brou ha ha in the classroom.
• Make sure there are no complaints, no cheating, and no taxing thinking for anybody to do.
• Don't forget how lucky you are. (to have a job)

We are all much too busy.

Those above, they have the time, they will decide for us. They are paid enough for goodness sake!

"What do I need to do to get the average? What do I do to get enough to retire?"

Completely unlinked links

Disciplined Minds 

The Stockhom Syndrome

One flew over the Cuckoo's nest

Settling old sores.

My son's football team lost this afternoon.

To be honest, they were whipped, pasted, buried, truly humbled 6-0, 6-0, 4-0, 3-0...

It was a dash to their young egos. Unfortunately, the expected transfers to Barcelona might not be on the cards this season, certainly not before the next mercato..

If the kids were taught a lesson today, so was I, by their young team coach.

He sat them down, as their heads dropped in disappointment and complimented them on their willingness to run and to play. "Don't worry," he said, "this is your first year, we'll work on it in training." "Your goal-keeping showed bravery," he said to my son. "Today, I just want to show you one thing," "Look.." and he picked them up and showed them just one new technique to work on. "There's no point me telling you everything you did wrong because you won't remember it and you won't go out and enjoy yourselves," he concluded.

They brushed themselves off, got up and lost their last match 2-0.

I am often struck by the parallels between learning a language and learning to play a sport. It takes years of practice to develop the skills required to compete. If you don't enjoy a sport, you will never have the motivation to put in the hours of training. If you don't have intrinsic motivation to listen and to read and to speak and to write you won't get very far in your acquisition of a language. Failure and mistakes are an inevitable part of learning and are essential to success. Michael Jordan's failure went on to become part of his Nike enhanced myth.

Failure, here in France, is unfashionnable; competence, quality, control is projected everywhere. 'Competent' teachers feel it a quasi duty to underline in red ink everything which is incorrect. The kids are often battered and bruised into silence and shame at their incompetence. Work, homework, is serious stuff, exercises unquestionnably given and children driven to unquestion.

Rewards, marks, averages and scores are settled in the educational psyche. Would it not be time to wonder if our time might be better spent?

I would recommend reading Daniel Pink's Drive! to teachers wishing to reflect on their motivations. Listening to or reading JK Rowlings 2008 Harvard Commencement speech entitled The fringe benefits of failure might accompany their leisurely read of Harry Potter.

While I am dwelling on my son's goal-keeping career, I can't help thinking that we need to celebrate heroic failures who came good despite their early disappointments. We all have so much to learn, we are all sensitive to the remarks of our fellow players.

When I was the age of my son I dreamt of playing rugby for England. I sorely failed in this ambition. My rugby teacher, however, left me with a few words of encouragement which have helped me deal with my repeated failures over the years. "This boy has a big heart," he wrote in my school report. "Give me 14 more players like him, and we would never lose." It doesn't take much red ink to build up self-esteem, perhaps much more to destroy it.

Samuel Beckett sums it all up for me,
"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter! Try again. Fail again. Fail better."










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Sense and nonsense...

A blog, oh for Christ's sake why? Technology blog, learning blog, education blog..in 2010 half a billion posts were read on this Blogger platform by over 400 million readers.

Why add to this cacophony on the net? What the hell can I possibly add? Why not just shut up?

Well, I must admit that for a number of years I would have agreed with you.I have kept at least five secret blogs which have untroubled your world and boosted Blogger's statistics over the past four or five years. They have been very useful personal journals, resource banks, classroom experiments and exposed me to no risk of ridicule! Now, I am in my 50th year and frankly I no longer care enough about  criticism (my own or that of others) not to want to leave a few touches of my own in this space.

Why am I going to speak through this blog about technology and learning?
In my work as a language teacher, I have been using the internet in my work since 1996, have worked in e-learning since 2000, with social networks since 2007 and am continuing to use social networks and mobile learning solutions in my work today. I am convinced that technology is changing the way that we are learning and that it is essential to imagine a new education system in the light of this.

I have amassed a wealth of experience about life, learning, learning technology and the need to never stop learning.  My interest is to play my part for the community and to learn from the community. This blog,  is a  web media-enabled dialogue from which I hope to learn.