Aaron McDaid

I mentioned previously that I am doing a one-year teaching training course. I'm loving it now. I've enjoyed it all so far, but I'm particularly happy just in the last couple of weeks as I'm settling into my second teaching practice quite well. My mentor is really fantastic, a really nice person who knows how to train a teacher. As a result of a few of the lessons this week and a couple of interesting discussions with Denise, my mentor, I think I've learnt more about teaching than I learnt in the entire course since September!

I taught lessons on logarithms and the Binomial Expansion recently. I sometimes give the same lesson to different halves of one group. This is great because I can make changes after the first lesson, so that by the end of the second lesson I might actually have found a good way to explain the topic. We are, naturally, encouraged to think about our lessons and consider what we would do differently next time. But that usually is just written into a file and you still think "I wish I'd done that differently"; I am lucky to get the opportunity to teach the same topic, with the changes, and therefore find out which changes are actually good. And, don't forget, sometimes the changes one makes might make the lesson worse!

One has to learn to walk before learning to run, and my mentor seems to realise this. In my last school, and in the weeks we spend in the university, we are expected to just magically soak up expertise by watching videos and having conversations with other trainees. But I've watched many hours of Formula 1 racing and I would still probably die if I tried to drive at top speed; and to train to be a Formula 1 driver I would need to be thrown in at the shallow end, not the deep end, doing karting and then maybe some rallying.

The students at my new school are fantastic. They're quite patient with me usually and won't riot just because I have I haven't filled every second with noise! This means I can then think clearly about what is and isn't working. I'm getting some excellent feedback from some students, but I know I still have a way to go to earn the respect of all the students.

My friends among the other trainee maths teachers will know that I am quite skeptical about some of the educational theories and how we are taught about education at the university. The word "evidence" is bandied about carelessly. Quite often, intellectual literary theory mumbo jumbo is called "evidence" just because it uses big words and fancy logic. The problem is that there is little connection with reality, or experimental data, in the theories. An experiment performed on learning in infants is used, without any hesitation, to make bold claims about learning in adults; some experimenters will be spinning in their graves at the thought of how their results are often misinterpreted and overgeneralized. This is why education is still a long way from being a real empirical science like modern medicine. In the past, medicine was based on studying the great writers like Aristotle who taught that breastmilk couldn't be any better than any other milk simply because he couldn't think of any reason why it is better. Modern medicine finally accepts that the results of well-run experiments are the be-all-and-end-all, and only a better experiment is allowed to overturn the result. New medical hypotheses that are dreamt up in the university library are, rightly, kept away from the front line until a proper experiment has been done.

Many educationalists do not yet understand how science works and how educational research should operate. They will often pretend to be in favour of "evidence", but they will still give priority to theoretical ramblings over hard data. Of course, there probably are many education researchers who are capable of doing their job properly, but they are not always heard through the fog of intellectual theorizing from the ivory tower.

Read Taleb's The Black Swan for a fantastic description of these problems that are endemic in all fields from journalism to economics to psychology.