The ways and means of learning...
One of the interesting things the wood shop at Clear Spring School has accomplished has been to offer an alternate means to learn. Activity, is important, not as mindless distraction, but as active expression of learning. As they say, "use it or lose it." Those things that you have used or have use for are easily cataloged in the brain, more quickly and easily retrieved in memory for reuse because they are connected in the sequential train of experience.

In a normal classroom, during a lecture, it is necessary for the mind to wander. You hear ideas expressed by the teacher, and then have to anchor that information to a catalog structure of previously known and accepted information or circumstance. This requires the attention to be withdrawn from the lecture for seconds or minutes as information is processed in internal dialog, and questions are formed in the mind when things don't fit. You may, if you are normal, find your attention being recalled to the lecture, after the teacher's train of thought has left the station and is miles down the track.

When that happens, it is difficult for most students to catch up. They are abandoned on the classroom sideline to wander in their thoughts and useless fantasy. Please don't take my word for this. Observe yourself. Pay attention to the wanderings of your own mind as you reflect on information that is presented and as you fit it into your own life and experience.

One of the subjects I discuss with my students in the wood shop is how we learn. If our students are to become actively engaged, self-motivated, lifelong learners, it is important that they become engaged in observing their own learning styles, that they become conscious of the workings of their own minds as they process information, and that they begin to control and better utilize available material and experience. The choice is whether they become masters, knowing how to best take in and utilize the wide range of information available to accomplish their goals, or that they be left at the wayside of learning in idle fantasy and useless chatter.

When we started the Wisdom of the Hands program at Clear Spring School, I knew that I was clueless about education. But I did, as a craftsman, know a bit about myself from observation of my own lifelong learning. If I want to learn something, I throw myself into waters over my head, where I either sink or swim. Acknowledging the dangers of sounding colloquial, through trial and error, where there is a will there is a way, and where there is a use, things will be learned and remembered.