Digressions

A common problem that teachers have to deal with in our days is the ever-diminishing attention span of young learners due to their addiction to the social media. That means that a session of study consists of a number of digressions from the main activity, which is studying.

Occasionally, I create activities which imitate this interrupted session of studying. They do not require a long attention span on the part of the learners and can be broken down to smaller units which gradually unfold as questions arising out of a larger framework – digressions. The questions are meant to challenge the learners’ notion of comprehension and get them to think about content, focusing on a deeper understanding of the input rather than a cursory read-through with the aim of answering some multiple-choice questions.

Here is an illustration of digressions.

I picked a BBC video called Can Magnets Improve your Brain and started showing it to a group of advanced students. As one can see, the video is subtitled and very easy to follow. 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180329-can-magnets-improve-your-brain

When the phrase Crafting cognition appeared on the screen, I stopped the video and asked the students to give me a definition of craft, which they did quite adequately and then I provided a dictionary definition of the word.

craft=exercise skill in making (an object), typically by hand

The next question was “How can one craft cognition”, which did not receive much feedback but posed a question, which  primed the students’ mind for what would follow.

The next question was what steroids are. The students had an inkling of anabolic steroids and explained how they are used, or rather abused, by athletes. At this point, I mentioned that there are natural and artificial steroids and gave them a short definition I found online.

Cortisol is one important adrenal cortex steroid hormone, and it regulates carbohydrate metabolism and has an anti-inflammatory effect on the body. Aldosterone is another steroid hormone that comes from the adrenal cortex. It helps maintain blood pressure and regulate the salt and water balance in your body.

The anabolic steroids abused by athletes are synthetic versions of testosterone, a male hormone. Both men and women naturally produce testosterone. But like all hormones -- which regulate the body's most basic functions -- throwing one's testosterone out of balance can have wide-ranging consequences.

As the main idea of the video is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, the next question to ask was what a magnetic field is. My students were old enough to have come across the idea in their science class, but a clear definition escaped them. So here is a short definition and a link I asked them to have a look at:

A magnetic field is a picture that we use as a tool to describe how the magnetic force is distributed in the space around and within something magnetic. 

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/magnetic-forces-and-magnetic-fields/magnetic-field-current-carrying-wire/a/what-are-magnetic-fields

   Motor skills came up next, which was answered in a very basic way:

           Typically, they are categorized into two groups: gross motor skills and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills are involved in movement and coordination of the arms, legs, and other large body parts and movements. They involve actions such as running, crawling and swimming.

Finally, I asked my students what an ethics committee is and why it is involved in scientific research, which they had no clue about. So I teased out the answer by asking what happens when for example scientists try to find a new cure for cancer (animals made sick and given the new drug, patients volunteering to try the new medicine). I did not fail to also give them a short definition.

An ethics committee is a body responsible for ensuring that medical experimentation and human research are carried out in an ethical manner in accordance with national and international law.

At the end of the class, the students were given a handout with all the relevant information and links, which they might or might not have a closer look at. The point is that they were made to see how much pith lies in a short video and how much interest it can generate.

Trivial pursuits: embrace the extraordinary

I will call this trivial pursuits as I feel it encapsulates my philosophy of learning and teaching.

Every single idea or brainwave – no matter how small and insignificant it might appear at first sight --contributes to the big picture of learning and shaping one’s teaching methodology.

The top to bottom approach of teaching has its value as teachers, especially inexperienced ones, need a framework to guide them in their first uncertain steps. Adopting a methodology should be the springboard for trial-and-error. Whatever works in one’s reality might not work in another’s. Theories are there to test and adopt creatively or turn down.

This goes together with my motto ‘embrace the extraordinary and build solidly on gossamer’. 

Children and -- I dare say -- many adults too are eager to follow the teacher’s forays into the realm of the imaginary and the unreal. Somehow the unreal and imaginary can provide the basis for real language input and practice.

I will illustrate both concepts with a painting I took to the moment I set eyes on it.

Houses in Motion by Jennifer Bartlett

You could build a series of lessons on this at any level you choose.

·       Elementary level: adverbs of frequency, present simple vs. present continuous

Ø Do houses normally move?

Ø Houses do not normally move, but in this image they are moving.

Ask your students to draw pictures of “out of the ordinary” and write their own captions.

Ø Cats do not usually bark, but in my picture the cat is barking.

Ø Birds hardly ever roar, but in my picture the bird is roaring.

·       You could use a different pattern for intermediate level:

Houses are not supposed to hover, but some houses are hovering in this picture.

The image lends itself to speculation too as it is unclear – at least to my mind – what everyone is doing in this topsy-turvy universe.

You could ask older and more advanced students to look for the cause of the commotion:

A whirlwind has torn off houses sending them in different directions or causing them to stand on their side. This in turn has set in motion a chain of actions – people running after their houses, cats in mid air in hot pursuit of their miniature houses, cracks slicing through houses, people throwing their hands up in despair.

If your students fail to come up with the items you are trying to elicit, you can provide them asking the students to write a paragraph using some or all of the lexical items given.

For homework you could ask your students to look at the following image of houses and think of a caption for it.

Waiting Houses by Friedensreich Hundertwasser

The actual name of the painting is Waiting Houses so if they fail to come up with it, you can provide it and ask why ‘waiting’ or what suggests in the picture that they are waiting for something or someone.