foolfillment: the blog

Dave McLeod, amazing rock climber and fairly prolific blogger writes this today: I hated school:

Before I found a focus, I was in the same situation as many kids. I went to school and sat in classes where teachers spent a big proportion of the time keeping order and not developing interest. I didn’t enjoy it, and even as a kid I could recognise there was much time being wasted.

Once I started climbing, and began skipping school, I was the opposite from a draw on resources. I learned by myself, eagerly.
…
The solution for teachers? Find a way to communicate the power of the ideas, rather than force feed the detail of a world youngsters can’t connect easily to. It is possible, even within the constraints of ‘the system’. If you don’t dig deeper to find a way to achieve it, who will?

He makes it all sound so easy! Real learning becomes happens when there is a meaning to the information you are getting, so if you can find something that you love doing then chances are there are all sorts of things you need to learn about to enable you to do it better. The thing you love becomes the way of creating meaning around discrete pieces dry information. Like Dave says, it stops being a chore and becomes just something that you do, something that you want to keep doing. The challenge for a learner is to find that hook, the challenge for teachers is to find 20/30/60… of those hooks!