Recently we got into discussing Carol’s “the brain craves novelty” idea, and though the brain does indeed crave novelty, James wrote in response:
…here’s what we do in class. I speak in Latin in ways they can understand and they pay attention. Or else I give them a reading they can understand and they read it and show me they understand it. Those are the two things we do. Of course there are spins and twists on those–using actors, dictation, movie talk, cartoons, etc.–but, really, isn’t everything else a waste of time?…
I’m with James. In fact, I was hoping somebody would say that because lately for the past year or so there have been so many novel things in this work, new catch phrases and such, that we risk losing our basics in favor of cute stuff to entertain the kids and then where would we be? I know where new teachers would be – holding their heads in hopeless amazement at how complex this work looks, when in reality it’s the simplest work in the world if we just present it that way.
I was just speaking with Diana Noonan yesterday about this. We were talking about ways we could prevent this work from morphing out of shape. A lot of what I have done in my books is to protect, defend and illustrate the original and foundational aspects of Blaine’s work.
Like James, I also felt pressured by the term about novelty. I suggest that we just let the term go, knowing that we naturally know when to shift a class into another activity and give the kids’ brains the variety they need just as a matter of course. Let’s drop the term from our discussion here. We have enough new terms and ideas to work with here every month, it seems like. For years now we all have resembled the guy grabbing onto the back of the trolley with one hand, arms and legs akimbo and hat flying off his head, in a horizontal wind blown position trying to keep up with the regular changes in this work as it is.
On the other hand, a good list of brain break activities could serve us well, in my opinion. I have explained my own concept/research on brain breaks as involving the crossing of the hemispheres in some kind of physical action to drop the new material every 20 minutes from the desk top to the hard drive of the mind. Now Catharina and anybody else can we make a comment below with those brain break ideas on the Forum from Diane that some of us won’t read because we can barely keep up with the reading here? And then people can add ideas in further comment fields and in a few days we can have a solid list of brain break ideas for easy reference (maybe during class!) when we need them. I will make that into an article and add it to the categories as well.
So let’s take the brain craves novelty thing down a view notches (it is only useful to us if it doesn’t intimidate us) and move the list of brain break ideas up a few notches.