You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14.

So, the first week of the second Trimester is now behind me, and I've just taken part in the two tutorials which are quite handily back to back hours in a really comfy timezone for me in Netherlands! That means I can actually attend the Zoom tutes live, but that also means that I need to sit through it in real time and not just skip and speed up the inane questions and showboating that happens when people get together in a group. Is that normal????... When you get a group of people, invariably the ones that make the most of questions are the ones that should have stayed quiet and listened/read instead? (of course, not everything is always like this... but I'm finding that majority are...).

Anyway, I did find that the literacy and numeracy course to be quite interesting in the first week. It really opened my eyes to what these terms really mean. Most people will have a primitive (I did) idea of these concepts: the Reading, Writing and Arithmetic models of the terms that is was quite popularised by politicians and non-educational social commentators.

But it is now seen that these are only the basic building blocks to being able to be literate and numerate in a modern society. Spelling, Grammar and Computation are not useful skills in themselves... it is how you wield these tools in order to communicate/comprehend meaning or to interact with society/universe. So, it is a broader definition that means that these skills are used and developed not just in a Mathematics or English classroom, but in all fields of learning.

Which leads to the idea that discourse is very much subject/group specific... and how these norms and concepts are formed and agreed upon is (can be) an interesting exercise in power dynamics.

Meanwhile, the Science course has proven to be a little bit less interesting in the first week... mostly because it recapped much of the knowledge from the first trimester courses. However, there was an interesting topic in the idea of how identity (social, not the crapped up hijacking from politics...) affects how you learn/teach. In that if the outside world perception of your identity is more in line with your personal idea of your identity, then it can make for a conflict or harmony.

An example of this was a teacher teaching out of field (something that I'm a bit scared about, I find Physics easy... Biology is crazily complicated and difficult!). If you define yourself as a "Physics Teacher", then it can be harder to learn and adapt to the new situation... however, if you identify as a "teacher who can learn complex ideas quickly, distill and transmit well" then out-of-field experiences are seen more as a challenge than an obstacle. Of course, I would have had a bit of that mindset already... I'm just curious naturally and like to learn lots of things, but I doubt my ability to transmit the knowledge if I don't feel like I have enough depth (an affliction that doesn't affect most people on the internet!).

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