Emotions and the brain borers

Is boredom an emotion? Last time I was talking about an assertion:
3. Emotions are critical to successful learning.

(From a list in Brain-Based Learning: Possible Implications for Online Instruction Stephanie A. Clemons http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Sep_05/article03.htm)

So I looked back over my earlier discussion of the Brain Borers. If boredom is an emotion, then I take the statement above as a caution about the risks in casual use of abstraction. In logic, of course, people learn to deal formally with the difference between some and all.

I doubt that anyone believes that boredom is critical to successful learning. I don’t believe educators intentionally design instruction to be boring. It just seems to work out that way. Perhaps managing boredom is critical to successful learning.

As I suggested earlier, feeling bored is just your brain’s way of telling you that what you are doing is not important. And therefore, not worth remembering. Feeling emotional is your brain’s way of telling you that something is important. And your brain remembers what it identifies as important. Generally without any conscious effort on your part.

So one way to beat the Brain Borers is to get emotional about it. Last week I talked about the value of immediate reinforcement. That is an emotion often overlooked by educators. Never overlooked by retail marketers, game designers, or drug dealers. Maybe that’s why retail marketers, game designers, and drug dealers make more money than educators.

That leads me to another learning objective:
The student will learn this principle: “If you want something done to suit you, you have to do it yourself.”

Admittedly, I haven’t seen this cited as a learning objective. I inferred it from educational practices that I have observed.

The Thinkerer is about doing it yourself. So the section on studying carries a relevant page “Once more, with feeling.”

And as to immediate reinforcement, the Thinkerer cites a counterproductive practice, Vagoaling. With this practice, people (including students) deny themselves to satisfaction of immediate success by failing to know what they mean by immediate success.

There another trick I use. I have a set of pet peeves. I notice when a writer triggers them and I react. You saw one such reaction at the start of this page. I call it lazy logic. “Emotions are critical…” All emotions? Some emotions? If some, which? A blurred abstraction saves the writer a lot of effort in specification. Leaving the learner to figure out what the statement means.

Another of my pet peeves is the passive evasive voice. Here are several examples:
Brains are designed for fluctuations rather than constant attention. Designed? By whom? And how did anybody get access to the design specs.

Brains are poorly designed for rote learning.

Multi-sensory input is desired by our brains. The desire of brains? What your brain really wants? What is the evidence about brain desires?

Brains are considered “plastic”… By whom? Sure, you can buy brain models for educational demonstrations. They do seem to be made of plastic. But that’s not what this sentence is about. By using the passive evasive and putting plastic in quotes, the author avoids citing any authority and avoids stating the authoritative conclusion.

Mental meringue. It looks like something good, but when you bite into it, there is noting there.