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.
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.
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.
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