When was the war of the roses?
What are the mating and feeding habits of the tapeworm?
Who invented the typewriter?

SO WHAT! ….
HOW IS THIS RELEVANT TO ME!! ….
I DON”T CARE!!!

This is what I spent most of my secondary education at Southway Comprehensive, asking myself in biology, geography, and all my other classes.

This isn’t how it started. I arrived on Day 1 excited, curious and filled with anticipation. At St Mary’s, my junior school, we created things, listened and told stories, played, explored, were asked to use our imagination and I couldn’t begin to imagine how fantastic it must be at the ‘big school’. In fact I was so excited that on the morning of my first day of senior school I got up in the middle of the night, put on my new school uniform and went back to bed in it!

Then came the first lesson, History. This is what it was like…
‘I am going to talk at you, then write on the board and then you are going to write down in your books what I write.’ For some reason, I thought to myself, why don’t you give me a book and I can read it myself?

After a week, my ’secondary school experience stats’ read as follows:

Interest 0 - 5%
Sense of purpose 0 - 5%
Focus on survival 90%

That week profoundly shaped what I think about learning now and I offer 9 Reasons why this ‘learning’ environment didn’t work for me:

1. I hate being told how to think, be, act or behave, that’s my job!
2. No-one really knew how I ticked, or cared enough to find out; I hardly understood myself!
3. The knowledge seemed meaningless; how did learning it apply to what was important to me?
4. I had endless lists of other stuff to focus on that was considerably more important; like not bumping into the big lad after school who seemed to have taken an instant dislike to me, getting Alison Pomeroy to notice me, being acknowledged by my friends as being funny….
5. I couldn’t understand what I was being taught to do; was it to change into one of my teachers???
6. I was mostly bored, restless and thinking about other things that did interest me. No-one asked me what these were, so I was happy to day dream and doodle.
7. Interestingly, the people I was ‘learning’ from also seemed to be feeling bored, restless and thinking about other things!
8. I had no choice over what I was learning; and if I wasn’t excited, curious or intrigued, then I was somewhere else
9. I could hardly remember anything we were taught!

So I left school at 17 and waited for the multi millionaire (who would really understood me and see my potential) to pick me up and whisk me around the world to make my fortune. After a year that hadn’t happened and then the horror struck… whilst working at the timber yard. HE WASN’T COMING and I WASN’T TRAINED OR QUALIFIED TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN PUT CEMENT BAGS INTO CARS… ARGGGGGGGGGGGGH! My boss contributed to this terror by announcing one day that if I worked really hard I could have a career here! ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGH!

What happened next? My ‘SO WHAT’ question got answered - If I don’t learn I’m stuck here for life!

So what have I learned about how I and others learn?

• Well, we must answer the ‘So What’ question - really answer it, for ourselves and no-one else.
• We must at least half understand how people are thinking before we say or do anything!
• We don’t learn anything new, we just remember things, or think about existing things in new ways
• What I learn must be relevant to me now - I need to be able to use it right now, right here, in this moment
• If its not hard I won’t learn….oh and just to make it a little more complex, if it’s not easy I won’t learn!
• How much I care about things changes - other ’stuff’ comes along and can be much more important to me

What I learn must be different, stimulating, funny, challenging, interesting, relevant in a way that the last minute, hour, day, week wasn’t.
… as the great philosopher David Gray said ‘tell me something, tell me something, tell me something I don’t already know!’