Introduction

“Good morning students”, greeted M’s Crabapple standing front and center of the tidy classroom. A throng of more than 30 students responded, “Good morning M’s Crabapple.” She continued, “First we’ll take roll call.” Then proceeded to call and check off each student as they responded, “present”. Next was an explanation of the proposed lessons for the day. There was copying of board work – lots of board work, and the staccato of lecturing and copying interspersed with recitations, was broken once in the morning for a fifteen minute recess and again at noon for lunch. The drilling resumed at the one o’clock bell, and continued until broken by the day’s final recess bell at three. “Don’t forget to study and do your homework”, the school-marm bellowed at the fleeing mass of students rushing the exit like they were abandoning a sinking ship.

Such might have been typical of “a day at school” for millions of students over a period of decades.

Learning Alternatives

Now however, the traditional role of schooling has radically been altered. A number of viable learning alternatives are available. What are some of the benefits and disadvantages of each of these learning alternatives? Let’s look at some of them.

Correspondence course

A correspondence course is traditionally, a class conducted through the mail. Lesson materials arrive by mail. The student then returns their completed work by return mail and waits for the next lesson to arrive by mail. The process continues and repeats until all the required lessons have been completed. There is no teacher to student contact other than the written word. Some programs nowadays do allow for telephone, e-mail or voice-mail contact. Only highly motivated, independent learners are able to benefit greatly from this type of learning.

Field Trips

Associated with both a traditional school setting and independent learning, field trips consist of students visiting a location outside of their school or home to learn about a topic or theme. Places visited might include businesses such as manufacturing facilities, a park, a museum, the Zoo or an aquarium, public services facilities like fire stations, TV or radio studios, hospitals or police stations. An effective learning strategy, this method does require a teacher or guide to fully accomplish. Also, setting up visits to some locales may be difficult or impossible for the individual learner.

Independent Study

Independent Study involves design of a project which students then complete by various means on their own. The collective work may require a number of intricately interacted facets to complete. Investigative research, writing, field trips, interviews, extensive reading and lectures may all be involved and required to complete project work. The final production is often a presentation, paper or report extolling the details of the student’s work and acquired knowledge.

Vocational School

An educational bastion for learning trade or technical skills, a vocational school teaches practical skills. Students are most often immediately employable by the private and commercial sectors upon completion of a course of study a vocational school. Fields like Health Care, Nursing, Electronics, Computer Science, Construction and Manufacturing that have a demand for skilled labor or technicians receive a steady supply of their labor force from these types of schools.

Educational Television Course

The vast majority of major metropolitan areas have one or more public broadcasting stations which feature educational programs. These programs are frequently part of an accredited course of study at a local College or University. Students watch (and often record) the TV programs at home, take notes and study the broadcast material as an integral part of their learning. Another effective strategy for the highly independent learner, this method does not promote interpersonal contact between teacher (if any) and learner.

Continuing Education

When adults want to resume their education at some point in their life, programs offered by Post-Secondary institutions which cater to these students’ specific needs are called Continuing Education. Some may last for only a day or two. Other programs can run for weeks with an intensity that can vary from an hour or two per week up to everyday class contact. Courses may be of personal interest topics like ethnic cooking, gardening, writing and photography, or employment-related areas such as welding, plumbing, languages, painting and construction. A highly popular option of today, these types of courses and programs promote interaction between students in the class, interactive learning and full teacher to student contact. There is usually lots of feedback between teacher and learners, and the learners themselves.

We likely will never see a return to “traditional” learning as was illustrated above. But with the growing variety of learning alternatives, there certainly is something to suit almost everyone. So get out of your rut. Take a chance – take a course and improve your mind and your life using one of the many learning alternatives available to you. If not, there’s always a M’s Crabapple waiting.

Do Meta-Learning?

What strategy do 98% of us apply when seeing a word that is Greek to us?

Ignore it or try to dope it out.

Meta-Learning has something to do with learning, but what exactly?

It is one-step higher than ordinary learning and means Learning-About-Learning.

How vital to your career is being your own teacher (autodidact)?

Meta (mee-ta) is from Latin meaning after, along-with, and beyond.

Meta-Learning was coined by John Biggs University of Hong Kong, 1985 to show how we can take control of our own learning.

The answer to your question – who cares? – is we live in the Knowledge Economy.

That means like it or not – you will be involved in learning new information throughout your life. You taught yourself how to use the computer, surf-the-web,

use a cell phone, and how to burn disks. You can even get your bucks out of an ATM. You are already an autodidactic (self-taught) learner.

Are you aware the average college graduate will have five career (not job)

changes in their working life? Think you should own the skill of meta-learning

also called meta-cognition and self-regulation to survive and thrive in our Information-Culture?

Clues

Ever be in the mood NOT to learn and had it forced down your throat?

School of course, and how about a mandatory company meeting?

Who is in charge of your mental attitude, state-of-mind and emotional intelligence?

No one can make you learn, it is a conscious-emotional decision every time.

The first secret is motivation. Don’t you consciously ask yourself what-is-in-it-for-me before you give your brain permission to offer up the feelings leading to learning

and memory. All conscious learning requires the involvement of your power hormone and pleasure neurotransmitter. Adrenaline drives learning and dopamine

rewards us for the behavior.

Without an emotional surge and a reward path, your brain stays dormant.

Second clue is interactivity. If you just listen or read without following a path of questions you will take away 20% of the key ideas available. To retrieve the other

80% you must listen or reading searching for the details of Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? We call it NoteFisting and it is a learning strategy.

Do know the two secrets of memory? This knowledge is critical because learning is 50% understanding (comprehension) and 50% encoding and decoding for long term memory.

Can you consciously construct mental visualizations in your mind’s eye?

It is part of your brain structure and how your mind functions. Try it now.

Imagine a elephant with zebra stripes and the name Dumbo painted across her

wide forehead. Easy, right?

The other essence of memory is called Association (linking). It enables us to link new information we choose to remember with elements of filed-away old knowledge.

We code new knowledge and link it with what we already have filed away.

Your brain thinks using mental pictures and codes new information by linking it to

what you already comprehend. Use your instinctive curiosity to discover the specifics of how to develop this skill.

Third clue is never reading or listening without a Pacer in your hand. How you direct your eyes decides how much your brain retrieves from the lecture or written

page. It has a fancy name – Vestibulo Ocular Reflex call it VOR.

Most of us cannot repair a car engine yet we can drive anywhere. VOR is not the key, using the Pacer is. Learn about using a Pacer and you can read-and-remember three books, articles and reports compared to your peers who can hardly finish one.

Motivation

Is this new knowledge valuable and useful to you, your career or significant others in your life? Does it engage me in something greater and beyond myself and my personal needs?

Religious folks learn and can easily retrieve whole sections of the Bible. Moslem children are expected to memorize the entire Koran. Many do and without Mensa IQs. It is all about personal motivation including fear, guilt, and a need to please

others in their society. What motivates you?

Negative Motivations

Emotions create behavior. Thinking and Action are inseparable. If you are worrying about paying the mortgage, believing the new information is irrelevant, imagining yourself swimming at the beach, feeling the sunshine and hearing the waves break, you are distracted.

These emotions destroy your focus; take your mind out of the Flow and Zone. If you are attempting to learn while the fear of failure fills your mind (SATs) you are distracted by negative mental movies. Distracts cause you to lose the ability to link new ideas to your filed ones in long-term memory.

Emotions

When we distance ourselves from what we are listening to or reading, our learning brain shuts down. Have you ever noticed yourself rereading the same paragraph

once-twice-three times and you still are not comprehending?

Profound Fact: the average college graduate will regress up to twenty-times per page of text? Ten would be bad enough but because of distractions, not using a

Pacer, and not being interactive with the text, we will re-read sentences and

even whole pages up to twenty-times. Talk about snailing.

Endwords

Master learners pay attention, have focus (awareness) and use their volition

(will power) to stay targeted when they are in a knowledge mode. The average

student and executive (life has continuity) will choose Instant Gratification over

a greater reward based on Delayed Gratification.

Muta-learning suggests pre-planning of new ideas. Directed Attention, Selective Attention (key ideas), Self-Monitoring and Self-Evaluation are required.

There are specific strategies and skills to being a killer learner. It is not just for

school but for a lifetime of success of internalizing knowledge.

We suggest you begin with speed learning to 3x your reading skills and

2x your memory. Let your intuition lead you to fulfill your dreams.

See ya,

copyright © 2006

Which Foreign Language?

It’s been said on other occasions that a key question people ask when thinking of learning a foreign language is “which foreign language should I try to learn?” Reasons for wanting or needing to learn a foreign language can be almost as many and as varied as the number of people themselves. Family, ancestry, employment, business, education, travel, adventure, romance and other personal concerns all may have their respective roles in the decision to learn and continue learning a foreign language.

With literally thousands of spoken languages in the world besides some of the major ones like English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, Japanese and German, obviously there’s no lack of choice. But many learners concede, “I hate trying to learn a foreign language”. Why? Here are the top seven of the most commonly given reasons.

The Seven Most Common Given Reasons

1. No way to practice regularly

“I know that learning a foreign language is a valuable skill, but no one I know speaks it and I have no way to practice”:

2. Long lists of vocabulary to memorize

“We get a 50-word plus long vocabulary list each week in class, and I just can’t keep up with memorizing them”.

3. Illogical Grammar Rules

“The grammar and rules of the foreign language just don’t make any sense to me” complain a number of foreign language learners.

4. Pronunciation Difficulties

“Whenever I try to speak in class everyone laughs at me because I pronounce my words badly, they say”.

5. Bad Foreign Language Teachers

Our foreign language teacher is absolutely horrible. She hardly seems to know the language herself. She really shouldn’t be trying to teach us”.

6. Not Enough Available Resources

“So what do we do with it (a foreign language)? We don’t have any good tapes, videos, songs, movies or games. For me, it seems like a waste.”

7. Foreign Travel is Too Expensive

“Hey, I’d love to visit a foreign country where the language is spoken, but I can’t get a visa”: “Even if I could get a visa, I’d never be able to afford the airfare and hotels.”

Lower Affective Filter

If an English as a foreign language teaching professional is going to do an effective job, these are but a few of the many possible difficulties and objections that may have to be overcome. Only then can the learners’ Affective Filter be lowered or compensated enough for both teacher and learner to get the most out of any language learning efforts.