Altruism

It’s been a while since I wrote anything…a whole year in fact. My last post was about the importance of happiness and this is going to be about altruism. Pretty optimistic eh? You may not like the next one though because it will be about the joys of frugality.

What confuses me about altruism is that it is supposedly doing something good for no personal gain. It is not doing something good because you have to, or because you think you should, or because it will make you look good, but just because it is good. The difficulty for me is that altruism feels good, or to quote Sus, it is “happiness-making”. How can doing something that makes me happy be counted as doing it for no personal gain?

On the other hand, if doing good feels bad it is martyrdom and that should  never be confused with altruism. Altrusim is giving with a glad heart. It is not grudging or resentful. As soon as you begin to resent giving, please stop.

Another conflict I have regarding the whole business of altruism is that even after the buzz of knowing that I have made the world a little bit better for someone else, and therefore for the world in general, I start to find that I am getting all kinds of other benefits. I don’t go into the altruism business to get personal benefit but it just happens. Do these unintended gains disqualify my altruism?

An example. I have been helping a former student of mine with academic writing. About 4 times a year she contacts me for assistance to understand the requirements of her assignments and to plan her preparation. Then, a week or so later, she talks her essay through as she writes it. Why is this process necessary? She is dyslexic. The work is intensive and exhausting, especially since we both have demanding  jobs but I have gotten to learn so much from the experience.

I have learnt about what it is like for a very competent and ambitious young person to have to struggle with academic tasks..something that  frustrated her all though school and I didn’t notice because of all the behaviours that had gotten her thrown out of numerous English classes. Of course I have read about dyslexia but there is no way I could have gained as much understanding as I have through donating the occasional weekend morning.

I have also learnt about her world of Early Childhood teaching and thought about things like how competencies and dispositions that are being developed  in young children are also relevant to the teenagers I work with. Talking about learning intentions and success criteria , or principles of language teaching, in a completely different context really challenges my brain and gives me a deeper understanding of my own work.

Of course I also get the usual altruistic buzz, knowing that I make a difference, that my student has the chance of a successful career, knowing that she will make a difference to countless children because she is an excellent, caring teacher. My egotism tells me that the world is a better place because I am in it, because I do what I do.

This altruism game sounds rather selfish but anyone can play. The best thing about altruism is that it is free!

The importance of happiness

A few days ago I watched a circus act. Not the bigtop, animal variety but an acrobatic busker show with ropes and a trapeze. I enjoyed it and it made me think and those two things go so well together.

I enjoyed it because it made me feel good. In my mind I was flying and tumbling and stretching and performing amazing gravity-defying feats. I am sure that lots of other people were feeling something similar because we were oohing and aahhing and gasping and cheering in unison. We weren’t conciously thinking about responding, we just were. We were feeling what we were seeing. I don’t know what other people were feeling but my body felt wonderful and I walked away feeling light and free.

I felt happy and part of a spontaneous community of happiness. I don’t know how long that experience lasted for other people, or how intensely other people experienced it, but I do know it was a good thing. I also know that lots of little good things add up and that happiness can be built by fostering happy experiences.

Our society could use a whole lot more happiness, especially communal happiness and there is absolutely no reason why we can’t make it a priority. As a teacher, I know that people learn better when they are happy (Maslow etc) but its crazy to justify the creation of a safe happy environment on the grounds that it will promote better academic results. Happiness is worthy in its own right. Learning, mental health, safe communities etc are way more likely to eventuate when happiness is valued but happiness comes first.

Learning difficulties (2)

Whenever I think about teaching, I always eventually end up hearing Carl Rogers’ wonderfully sensible voice. Maybe I am going bonkers, because of course I have never actually heard his voice. Another more recent realisation about teaching, is that normal people are not teachers so perhaps being bonkers is part of the package.
The latest Rogerian moment of insight is related to thinking about working with students with learning difficulties. I don’t know how they think or how they got to the place of learning difficulties, or in fact anything important about them at all. They don’t know how I think, or why learning is easy for me or how I can help them or why I might be able to help them or anything important about me at all. If we were a Venn diagram our minds would be circles floating in random isolation.

What we need to do is create an intersection. A common space where we can work on the learning difficulty together. I am not psychic and neither are my students, so we have to put the relevant bits of our experience and skills and understanding into the common space where we can work on them together. I need my students to teach me how to teach them. That concept of a common space is what brings Rogers back to me and improves both my teaching practice and my mood. I am most effective as a teacher when I am part of a learning community and my students feel that they are members of that same learning community.

I have been a much nicer and better teacher this week. Carl Rogers would have been pleased.

Learning difficulties

I have intended to write on this topic for some time but….. Anyway, I have decided that I shall just start writing, and post whatever I have written, whether it is to my satisfaction or not, and then go back and edit it later. Those of you already in the know, will know that I have just demonstrated metacognitive knowledge of myself, the nature of the task and the special advantages conferred on blog owners. Lucky me.

The current focus of my interest in learning difficulties is….. dyspraxia. (note: ask susan how to do one of those clever little in-text hyperlinks to a definition). Basically, dyspraxia describes a whole range of difficulties that arise when the brain does not co-ordinate planning with movement in the most efficient way. So, it includes the clumsiness some people exhibit when they reach out to catch a ball, or the inability of a child to write ON a line, or the lack of spatial awareness of someone who accidentally sits on your lap instead of on the seat beside you. Of course, it also includes many other things that range from inconvenient to disabling and life-threatening.

Why am I so interested in dyspraxia? In part, because it is so common in its milder forms. Also, we tend to blame dyspraxia on the sufferer as if they choose to be clumsy, or messy, or forgetful, or disorganised. This is so unfair because who chooses to have a disability? Of course another reason for my interest is that because since it is a LEARNING difficulty, it can be remediated by teaching and I am a teacher.

Primary and Kindergarten teachers do lots of things to help children learn to co-ordinate their brain with their movement. If this was always enough, I probably would not be interested in dyspraxia. The fact that it is not enough for some children. That Secondary teachers do little, and know less, about dyspraxia is rather shocking because we see its effects everyday and spend a whole lot of time nagging and punishing students for things they just can’t do much about themselves.

We don’t penalise students or yell at them for not being able to read, or do Maths (well we are not supposed to!). We know that if they can’t read, it’s not their fault and it’s our job to teach them those skills or refer them to someone else who will. What about students who can’t estimate time, so don’t know how long it will take them to get to their next class and are therefore often late?

How about students who are given a multi-step task and can’t sequence and so don’t know which instruction to start with and then what to do next? At this point you may be saying, “Well, surely they know to start at the top and work their way down the list?” Your first wrong assumption might have been that the teacher wrote down the instructions. The second was that the student knew there was a top. The third was that it is automatic to work down a list systematically. The fourth was that the student realised that the items on the list were connected in any way. The fifth might have been that the student had a clue that he was actually supposed to do something related to those written or spoken words.

Of course, most students in an average ability high school class can indeed follow multi-step written instructions. They don’t interest me, except in regard to what they do need, i.e clear instructions that are accessible to them as they work through the task. This is called “good practice”. I am interested in the students for whom “good practice” is not enough because they need more practise…duh…lame Englsh teacher pun.. in the micro-skills needed to develop the big skill of following written instructions.

A divergence here, sorry this is not good practice but…this is how my mind works when I am not teaching.

At my SPELD course recently, I asked why it was that even though kindergarten and primary teachers are drilled in the Vygotskian vocabulary of scaffolding and apprentice ship, they let children write stories full of spelling and grammar mistakes? My tutor’s answer was that the teachers are misunderstanding the concept of “first steps”. In other words, they see the end product , for example a magazine article, and think that the first step for the children is to write sentences. I fact the first steps are to form letters, to spell common words, to use punctuation etc. A master would not ask an apprentice to make a complex finished article, unaided, until he was sure that all the steps had been mastered. So, why do we ask students to write “authentic” pieces unaided when they can’t spell, or punctuate?