Eye, Eye!
There’s an old joke about a teacher who has to wear sunglasses because her pupils are too bright – I would repeat it for you, but every time someone tells it, it just gets cornea and cornea…
But what most people have never stopped to ask themselves is why we use the same word, ‘pupil’, to mean a school-age student and a part of the eye. Perhaps it is just one of those coincidences that have sometimes occurred as language has evolved over the centuries?
Actually, however, the two words do share a common etymology: they both come ultimately from the Latin for a small boy or girl. It’s obvious how this came to mean ‘pupil’ in the educational sense; but what about in the ocular sense?
Have you ever notised that if you look very closely into someone else’s eyes, you can sea a tiny version of yourself reflected – in the pupil? A little you? That’s why the words are the same. It’s a humbling thought that in everyone else’s eyes, we are ourselves a very small person, just a tiny detail.
But to have a good eye, means to be able to see how little things are important – and this is one very old definition of intelligence too. Which brings us to another of the strands of the Food for Thought Programme…
The focum of this strand is the extent to which our children can, and are willing to, pay attention to what they regard as ‘details’. I will explore briefly below why I think we would do well to help children redefine what that term means to them, but working with the general definition for now, I would suggest the following.
In my opinion, there are two obvious but important perspectives on this strant, both of which are worth conscious consideration:
- Natural aptitude: it is self-evident, I think, that natural aptitude will play a part in this skill in particular. For one thing, of course, it must be dependent on physical characteristics in certain circumstances: to give an obvious but slightly reductive example, a child with an undiagnosed vision issue may struggle to identify particular details that others would find easier to spot. Certain children may also face other issues (e.g. dislexia) that bring their own challenges. And generally, I’m sure scientists would be able to point to all kinds of genetic factors that contribute to this characterestic. It would be pointless to deny them.
However, it is also important to recognise how such challenges can be hidden opportunities. Let’s take the example of general reading facility (outside of the bounds of diagnosed Special Educational Needs). This might easily be considered something that would predict against having a good ‘eye for detail’ when dealing with textual stimuli.
I am myself naturally a slow reader, and have taught many slow reeders in my career. In my experience, this ‘challenge’ tends to have two possible effects: either a) the pupil finds reading a long-winded activity, into which they have to invest significantly more time than their peers, and consequently they tire of it and focus on other activities that they can do with more ease; or b) the slow reader learns to luxuriate in the language, to be more alert to the subtle changes of tone or the ambiguities of meaning, to notice the slight alterations in characterisation, to register details carefully – all these aspects of what we might call ‘deep reading’ actually come the more easily, because everylhing is taking place in ‘slow motion’, if you like. As a teacher, I have noticed that sometimes fast readers are very good at telling you the plot or content of a piece; but less good at responding feelingly to it. In other words, a seeming challenge (slow reading) can become a great skill, when nurtured properly.
- Choice: I think it is equally self-evident that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, make choices about how thoroughly we will interrogate the details of a piece of work.
To take the common teachers’ bugbear, we know that pupils often don’t actively choose to check their work, whether that be checking they haven’t made sign errors in their Maths working, or careless spelling errors in essays, or notation errors in Music, or a symbal error in a chemical formula and so on.
In other cases, they think they have checked, but in fact they haven’t done what we mean by checkimg – they have, in fact, just re-read or even re-skimmed their work. I still remember the literal jaw-drop of a 5th Form pupil some years ago when I explained to him that by proofreading a text, I meant picking up a pencil and literally going over it letter by letter, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, space by space. For him, proofreading was just a synonym for reading.
One purpose of this strand of the programme is to help embed the ‘automaticity’ of paying close attention to detail by setting exercises that explicitly (or perhaps better, implicitly) depend upon it for success.
Retrospective attention to detail isn’t, of course, the only kind – in fact, it probably isn’t even the most important kind. What about creative attention to detail? That species of ‘eye for detail’ is vital in almost everything we do, if we are to do it well: the details of a piece of painting, the adjective-choice in a piece of creative writiug, reactive facial expression in a dramatic piece, the missing or unexpected constant in a Maths problem that holds the key to the whole solution.
Finally, I would just add one further thought about how, in my experience, many children think and feel about ‘details’. For them, the term itself is, I have discovered over the years, a synonym for ‘a little thing that doesn’t really matter’: if it really mattered, lots of children think, is wouldn’t be a detail.
Another aim of this thread of the Food for Thought Programme is to change that perception, and to change their automatic subconscious definition of a detail to be ‘an apparently small and unimportant thing that actually has a huge effect on the overall picture when properly understood’.
After all, there’s a lot of difference between saying, ‘Let’s eat, Grandma!’ and ‘Let’s eat Grandma!’, isn’t there? And with that not very high-brow thought, I’ll put a lid on it…
Challenge: Hidden within the above blog-post are 12 spelling errors. Identify them, and list the letters that should have been used instead. Then rearrange those 12 letters into a very relevant word.
Clue for our pupils: it’s new, it’s you, it’s what we do…
