I believe it was Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, a Business-Management and Industrial Engineering thinker, who coined the term BMT for "Bad Multi Tasking." The idea is that when manufacturing anything in a production line, it takes time to change the production line from one product to another. The "setup time" should be considered whenever there is a need to manufacture more than one product or one version of the product. If the factory needs 10 "A-type" products and 10 "B-type" products, it would take less time to manufacture all the A-types first, then all the B-types. It would probably take more time to produce and A-type, then two B-types, then a few more A-types, etc. Every time the production line switches from one type of product to the next, we lose the "setup time." Goldratt took this well known fact from the physical production line to any type of work, including knowledge work. He shows that even if most of the work is done in the mind of the worker, it still takes time to move from one task to another, so we should not do too much "multitasking."
The same concept of BMT works for schooling: Kids switch between activities and subjects every 45-50 minutes. Set-up time and settling-down time takes up a significant proportion of the time. Let's consider two consecutive hours in a school-day:
- 50 minutes history -- WWII
- 10 minutes recess
- 50 minutes literature -- Shakespeare
- 10 minutes recess
How can anyone create or maintain a senses of meaning in the history lesson? Talk with friends about it? Ask the teacher for clarification? Keep it in mind to ask grandpa?
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Add to that the fact that often at the beginning of the class it takes some time for the students (and teacher) to settle down and get the relevant material prepared. Add also a possible roll call. Soon enough, the 50-minute class becomes 40 minutes long, producing the following:
- 10 minutes overhead -- settle down
- 40 minutes history -- WWII
- 20 minutes overhead -- recess + settle down
- 40 minutes literature -- Shakespeare
- 10 minutes overhead -- recess
33% of the time is wasted on measurable overhead. It's harder to quantify the mental setup time, and the lack of chance to reflect on the first history lesson.
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A possible improvement is to create continuity in the lessons by teaching two consecutive hours of history, and leaving literature for the third hour:
- 10 minutes overhead -- settle down
- 40 minutes history -- WWII
- 10 minutes overhead -- recess (no need to settle down again)
- 50 minutes history -- WWII
- 10 minutes overhead -- recess
25% of the time is wasted on measurable overhead - better than before. And the unquantifiables of mental setup and reflection are doing much better.
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We can then build on the previous success, and add the next hour:
- 10 minutes overhead -- settle down
- 40 minutes history -- WWII
- 10 minutes overhead -- recess (no need to settle down again)
- 50 minutes history -- WWII
- 20 minutes overhead -- recess + settle down
- 40 minutes literature -- Joseph Heller's Catch 22 - a novel about WWII
- 10 minutes overhead -- recess
28% of the time is wasted on measurable overhead - slightly worse than when our whole world was history. And the unquantifiables are doing great, with the added bonus of a multidisciplinary view of the same topic: WWII as seen by the historians, and as seen by a satirist. Shakespeare can wait until the history curriculum calls for studying Europe in the 16th century.
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There are many more ways to add substance to the discussion of a complex issue: Art, Civics, Math, Science etc. We can create a fuller context, with different aspects grabbing the natural attention of different students, and drawing them into the wider scope of the issue at hand - in this example, WWII.
In this post, I mentioned two dimensions along which we can accumulate a mass of learning: Time - consecutive lessons on the same aspect of the same topic, such as history of WWII; and Aspect - adjacent (or at least not far between) lessons on different aspects of the same topic, such as the historical and literary view of the same period. It seems possible that enough discussion from enough angles on a topic will constitute a critical "mass" that makes it easier for students to become concentrated and involved in the subject matter being studied. More research is due.
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