Educating Barky

Deeper reflection: Reconsidering what made great teachers great! Reflecting on the two teachers who had greatest impact on me, I had thought it was because they both knew their topics so well. Having listened and read through Week 3 materials, it is now clearer that we can isolate two very important qualities which stand out in memory of them… and it was these which made them great teachers! My mathematics teacher (Mr. Wilne) had a brilliant ability to take toughest elements of the subject – i.e. Pure maths, which is the theoretical world of the subject – is not easy to visualise. However Mr Wilne had many tools in his artillery and was able to conjure images of the material using metaphors, imaginative drawings and hypothetical situations to draw a clear idea in our minds of, for example, a cuboid with n dimensions, not an easy task! It’s now clear that he was an exceptional STORYTELLER . This trait is worth even more than full understanding of the material (which he also had...

My views on intelligence correlate closely with more recent research and theories positing that the application of learned facts to the world around us is what matters (e.g. Sternberg’s three-part theory, 1985). Having been taught traditional skills at school and tested only along these lines, I learned to associate ‘intelligence’ with test results , i.e. by associating a percentage score to relative intelligence. Scoring well in these tests meant that I was considered very intelligent and afforded me great opportunities for further learning , however I must now recognise that this also limited the avenues for further learning which I evaluated for myself – I believed that only ‘classical’ routes would be relevant for me and my ‘type of intelligence’. This meant that I was only encouraged to explore ‘logical-mathematical’ (c.f. Gardner) forms of later education , ignoring linguistic, spatial, kinaesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal learning… in hindsight, I have spent a majo...