Jj is for Jottings 38. More Comments from Experienced Teachers.

This is a follow-on from Jottings 35. I said that it would be continued next time – and that was on 6th December! Somehow Christmas and other issues intervened, but here is the second half now.
Both primary and secondary teachers comment on the fact that children are less able to make connections and “join up the dots”, which is something I frequently observe myself. It’s as if they have pieces of information in separate boxes in their heads and they haven’t formed nerve pathways to join them up. That’s what Baroness Greenfield (see Jottings 28 and 29) meant when she said that you can cruise through YouTube or Google saying “Wow” and “Yuck” but you’re not actually making sense of things – i.e. not making connections.
A secondary teacher said that it is quite common for students to just lift information from the internet and paste it into their assignments, frequently without even linking up sentences properly. She told me an even more extreme story of a student (admittedly she does have some difficulties with learning) who lifted a passage from the internet. When the teacher saw it she asked the student to read it. She struggled with the first word, so the teacher suggested she try reading on. She had no success at all – because the passage wasn’t even in English! I’m still wondering why the student chose that particular passage as being appropriate to the task she was working on, as opposed to anything else on the internet.
The same teacher and I have had conversations about how some secondary (and primary, of course) students actually need to be told to anchor the piece of paper on which they are writing with their other arm or hand, to avoid the paper moving about as a result of the movement of their pen. Instead they continue to write with the paper jiggling about, making the process awkward and less legible.
Many teachers comment on the poor nutritional level of the food that children bring to school, and I see that frequently myself because I have children for therapy sessions during recess and lunchtime. Poor nutrition is obviously going to have an effect on all aspects of a child’s development. See Jottings 27.
I’m sure I will collect more snippets from teachers as time goes on.