How the Environment Plays a Role in Learning

Now a father of a five and nine year old, I wonder how I ever made it this far. I often speak to my mother tell her stories of my kids and how hard it is to keep their attention. Every time she tells me “son you were the same way, I had a heck of a time keeping your attention, especially during math”. I often evaluate the environment in which I teach my son and most of the time it’s in one where I’m frustrated and he’s scared or nervous, then I get relaxed and he begins to learn. In the past few months I have realized that a learning environment is more than a state of mind in which the student and teacher are, but also the mood of the person teaching and they way they present the material. The way that the light looks to you at the time, the sounds that people make around you, or space. I also always thought that all people were the same, that if I was bothered by sound so would the next person. But that is not the case. In the next few paragraphs I will explain a few ways that people use their environment in order to maximize their learning.

Humor is often used as a tool to teach people. Just the other day I was listening to the radio, and in the news the results of a survey were given. The survey asked: Which of these news reporters do you most trust? The choices were, Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, and John Stewart. To my surprise John Stewart was the winner of the poll with 44 percent. It seems that most people want to hear bad news given in a humorous way these days. Tamblyn (2002) describes humor not as joke telling, but as creativity by finding how things connect to each other though creativity and openness. He also speaks about life and how nothing will ever be perfect. We will never have all we need to get the job done as well as the time to do it, which will result in almost never having something 100 percent perfect. This allows for embracing humor in a

way, since all the definitions that he gave of humor will be used. Creativity...