Like to learn, but hate school

by | Friday, June 12, 2009

In this TCRecord piece, Daniel T. WIllingham uses what we know about cognitive psychology to explain  Why students don’t like school. He suggests that

although most people believe that humans are good at thinking, it is actually the weakest of our mental faculties… Our minds are biased against thinking, because thinking is slow and effortful. In addition, it’s error-prone; it may not even produce an answer at all, much less a good one.

What we truly hate, according to him are things that are (a) either too easy; or (b) things that are incomprehensible. What fascinates us are problems that hit the sweet spot, not merely unpredictable but rather postdictable. He defines this as being initially be surprising, but then be understandable with a bit of thought.”As he says:

… interest is engendered by an appraisal process: that is, a process by which we evaluate the potential interest of something before we delve into it. If we perceive an event to be novel and complex, but also comprehensible, we find it intriguing and worthy of continued thought. Tasks that lack complexity seem too easy. Tasks that lack comprehensibility seem too hard.

Just two points here. First, most of school, it seems to me, lies at these two extremes, either lacking in complexity OR lacking in comprehensibility. Combine this with the diversity of student interests and background it is hardly surprising that even students who like to learn, learn to hate schoo.

Second, I had never heard of this term “postdictable” before but I think it is going to become a part of my vocabulary from now on. It helps me explain and categorize educational activities that work from those that don’t. Additionally it helps me explain movies and books I like – from ones that don’t. I know I hate predictable plots and stories (something I am trying to get my daughter to realize particularly around the typical Disney fare she so seems to love). However, complete unpredictablity is also a pain – a waste of time. Movies I like are postdictable… surprising at first glance but understandable later. Cool.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Manoranjan ka baap

The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL...

Flip/Flop: Goodbye 2022 – Welcome 2023

Flip/Flop: Goodbye 2022 – Welcome 2023

Since 2008 our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. Our videos are always typographical in nature with some kind of an AHA! moment or optical illusion built in. This year’s video is no different. Check it...

Election 2.0

An op-ed in today's NYTimes by William Poundstone about how the web can be used during an election to prevent election fraud. As the article describes a computer scientist and a mathematician "have proposed an ingenious method that would combine paper ballots and a...

London Underground Map

One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...

Academic publishing, a changing world

A few months ago I had posted a note about Harvard faculty considering and passing a resolution to freely publishing all their scholarship online (see this and this). Now it turns out that faculty at the Stanford University, School of Education have gone the same...

Educational Technology @ MSU

The Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at the College of Education at Michigan State University offers a variety of programs in educational technology. The College of Education is one of highest ranked colleges of education in the country (see...

Seeing patterns with eyes closed

Oliver Sacks has a fascinating piece in today's NYTimes (titled Patterns, as a part of his NYTimes blog, Migranes, perspective on a headache). Oliver Sacks describes the visual auras he has suffered through his life as follows: tiny branching lines, like twigs, or...

TPACK & Activity Types

Judi Harris, Matt Koehler and I just submitted an article on Activity Types and TPACK. We had presented this at AERA last year and it took a while getting it ready to submit as a journal article. In this paper we combine the work that Judi (and her colleagues) have...

Chaos theory

PCWorld article on the The 10 Most Disruptive Technology Combinations. As the article says, "Often, even great new technology needs a partner to really change the world. Here are 10 marriages of technologies that have shaken the digital world over the last 25 years."

7 Comments

  1. Bob Reuter

    sorry, I seem to be a bit tired today… many little mistakes and grammatical errors… hope you’ll be able to read me nevertheless… 😉

    Reply
  2. Bob Reuter

    Punya, I totally agree with you that parents always try to push the kids 🙂

    I surely give my father some credits for the germ he put in my head… but on the other hand, I really think that human are complex cognitive “machines”, where it’s not that evident what causes what to happen…

    But I do think it’s a nice story to tell me children and grand-children, than my dad has been putting ideas (and behaviours and values) into my mind/brain… even though I feel that there were many other “mental-virus-planters” in my life, who “gave” me -or contributed to- my love for postdictable cultural artefacts…

    Reply
  3. Punya Mishra

    Bob, I agree that time and experience are needed to build these structures (be it for movies or music). As a parent though one is a bit eager to make it happen sooner rather than later 🙂 Moreover, this is not a process with a distinct end.

    I think your example (about your father) is an important one. It seems to me that you should give him some credit for putting the germ in your head that there were more complex things in the world. You have found it in jazz – not the music he was interested in… but the point is that you did make the “shift.” I think as a parent my purpose is to always point out the further horizon and prevent my kids from becoming complacent learners. As to how far I am successful, only time will tell (or again maybe it will not!).

    Reply
  4. Bob Reuter

    by the way, the point I was trying to convey was that, maybe, we need time and experience to build up some mental structures that help us “predict” the Disney plots, or the musical schemes, and only later do we become sensitive to less-predictable, but still postdictable ones…

    Reply
  5. Bob Reuter

    Well, probably you’re right… at least that’s what Vygotsky would say…

    Personally, I don’t know yet (not being a father yet, it’s hard to argue from the parent’s perspective)… 🙂

    However, I do remember one event from my childhood that fit’s here. My father and I listened to “my music”, which was pop and rock at the time… And he did not always really get it why and how I could like/love such awfully *predictable* music (that were of course not his words, but what he meant), when there was Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Berlioz, Bizet, Ravel and Schönberg, to mention only a few… 🙂

    And now, some decades later, I start to appreciate less-predictable music, like jazz, and to find “pop” so boring… 🙂

    Reply
  6. Punya Mishra

    Good point Bob, I completely agree… but isn’t part of being a parent always revealing future horizons of development 🙂

    Reply
  7. Bob Reuter

    Maybe those movies are actually (still) postdictable for your daughter, while they’ve become predictable for you… given your life experiences… 🙂

    Reply

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  1. Making teaching suspenseful and post-dictable – A reflection task « explore. create. share. - [...] predictability and chaos, and most importantly makes sense post hoc. See these posts here and here on the idea…
  2. Rethinking homework, some thoughts… | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Learning, Philosophy, Teaching, Worth Reading | No Comments » Other related posts and pages: |Like to learn, but hate…

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