I was meandering along the streets of Mumbai and found my way out to the shore, moving amongst people, always people, and everything around was people within thousands of activities, and for some strange reason I got thinking about noise, and the way we typically think of noise as, well, noise: "This place is noisy," or "Where's all that noise coming from?" or "How can there be so much noise?"
And I thought about learning, and how the best learning is usually quite noisy. For instance, I think that learning might not always shine with its brightest light within "systems". Content might be framed by a system, a curriculum might be defined systematically, a schedule might be established within a systematic approach to optimizing time - but the learning itself?
But before you go off running in the direction of children jumping around yelling and chattering and making a general ruckus and ruin of their learning environment, let me explain something about how I'm envisioning noise.
Noise as a word has a very close connection to the word "nausea" - a close cousin to seasickness, a drinking buddy with tipsiness, being a bit off-kilter, sort of dizzy, sort of off balance, befuddled, woozy and wobbly, dazed and confused... Like a mariner out on the high seas, rolling with the crashing of waves, getting battered about and getting feeling a bit out of sorts, but hey it's not all smoothness and sheens of calm out there. And that act of learning - those noisy moments when things crash upon themselves, wheel around and do the dervish with understandings sending assumptions weavingly away and causing us to rethink so many layers and depths and even the smoothness and sheens of so much of what we might even want to maintain as smoothness, but finding that it all just wobbles a bit, and makes the surface upon which we stand wobble, and makes the landscape or seascape or whatever scape has been constructed around us shift about in ways that may not have us feel like we're in as much control of our posturing as we might have imagined just a second before.
Then the ship rolls down into the sheltering trough and learning might call that brief moment of calmness knowledge, or understanding, as it gets its sea-legs set firmly on the deck in anticipation of the next beg swell.
And it can begin with the simplest of words and what do we know about layers of thought or conscientious depths? For instance, how do children learn? What is the noise? Sometimes it's so difficult to envision what sparks a child's sense of learning and so difficult to maintain a perspective of this without drifting off into some space of one's own beliefs of what is best and right and proper, and we should be vigilant because that's when the "systems" tend to begin to re-emerge with their tendency to calm the tempests and smooth out the seas?
And I thought about learning, and how the best learning is usually quite noisy. For instance, I think that learning might not always shine with its brightest light within "systems". Content might be framed by a system, a curriculum might be defined systematically, a schedule might be established within a systematic approach to optimizing time - but the learning itself?
But before you go off running in the direction of children jumping around yelling and chattering and making a general ruckus and ruin of their learning environment, let me explain something about how I'm envisioning noise.
Noise as a word has a very close connection to the word "nausea" - a close cousin to seasickness, a drinking buddy with tipsiness, being a bit off-kilter, sort of dizzy, sort of off balance, befuddled, woozy and wobbly, dazed and confused... Like a mariner out on the high seas, rolling with the crashing of waves, getting battered about and getting feeling a bit out of sorts, but hey it's not all smoothness and sheens of calm out there. And that act of learning - those noisy moments when things crash upon themselves, wheel around and do the dervish with understandings sending assumptions weavingly away and causing us to rethink so many layers and depths and even the smoothness and sheens of so much of what we might even want to maintain as smoothness, but finding that it all just wobbles a bit, and makes the surface upon which we stand wobble, and makes the landscape or seascape or whatever scape has been constructed around us shift about in ways that may not have us feel like we're in as much control of our posturing as we might have imagined just a second before.
Then the ship rolls down into the sheltering trough and learning might call that brief moment of calmness knowledge, or understanding, as it gets its sea-legs set firmly on the deck in anticipation of the next beg swell.
And it can begin with the simplest of words and what do we know about layers of thought or conscientious depths? For instance, how do children learn? What is the noise? Sometimes it's so difficult to envision what sparks a child's sense of learning and so difficult to maintain a perspective of this without drifting off into some space of one's own beliefs of what is best and right and proper, and we should be vigilant because that's when the "systems" tend to begin to re-emerge with their tendency to calm the tempests and smooth out the seas?
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