How I learned to stop worrying about my stroke and love cogsci

Since the fashion for cognitive science (cogsci) overtook education, I have been that teacher. The one with their arms crossed and their eyes rolling during whole-staff training. The one who’s not taking notes during the presentation.

I was the one who’d seen it all before, who said that what goes around comes around in education, that they’ll be riding out this fad just like they rode out learning styles, lollipop sticks, and diamond nines.

As far as I was concerned, I knew it all already. The three breathlessly amazing, astonishing and profession-changing insights from cogsci and researchEd and most of eduTwitter seemed to boil down to the oldest and most basic teaching methods in the world:

• Tell people stuff (direct instruction)
• Don’t say all the stuff at once because it’s overwhelming (Sweller’s cognitive load)
• People forget things in predictable ways, so ask or quiz them about the stuff on the regular (Ebbinghaus’ gloriously named ‘curve of forgetting’)

But then I had a stroke.

Eight weeks ago, while I was eating a cheese sandwich, the artery supplying blood to my right parietal lobe was blocked by a clot, causing irreparable damage to that part of my brain. Damage to the right parietal lobe doesn’t cause any of the classic symptoms of stroke: no facial droop, no problems with speech, no muscle weakness. It manifests in much odder ways.

The right parietal lobe contributes to, or controls, executive function, visuo-spatial attention, verbal and numerical working memory, and the management and regulation of all sensory input. It is how the brain manages cognitive load, sequencing tasks, and the attention and working memory required to do those tasks.

If that seems naggingly familiar, it’s because it maps perfectly onto those three core insights from cogsci and researchEd and most of eduTwitter – the very ones I’ve spent the past two years laughing at. Oops. Dear everyone: sorry for all the eye rolling!

I now realise that I knew very little about the classroom experience of my students. Teachers are a self-selecting group. We’re not representative of the general population: all of us were able to manage the cognitive demands of learning or we wouldn’t have the degrees that are required for professional qualification.

But I can’t manage those demands effortlessly anymore. Not right now.

Right now, I lose track of tasks by step three if they require me to keep steps one and two in my working memory. I can’t even begin to plan an activity if it involves taking into account several variables. When there are multiple sensory inputs and cognitive demands, my ability to process information shuts down entirely and panicked white noise takes over.

And, most unnervingly for an English teacher whose entire life is defined by reading, books have become hostile terrain. So many things to remember! All those characters and their maddeningly elusive names! So much constant attention to be paid!

Many students can of course do all of these things without trying. But many cannot. No, they have not had strokes. They are simply experiencing perfectly normal levels of cognitive overload and forgetting. I learned far more about it when the rehab specialist set me my first homework last week and chose an English teacher task.

It was the type of task that requires the same underlying cognitive demands I require of my students: read a chapter of a novel, wait a while, then write a summary of it. Cover themes and character depictions.

Such tasks rest on managing cognitive load, processing information, and keeping it in your working memory. They require that we use our prior knowledge; they demand that we sequence a learning activity and maintain focus on it until completion.

Here’s what I learned from trying to do that homework: I owe my year 10s an apology and a very large cake.

It’s impossible to tell yet what damage from my stroke will remain six months or a year from now. I am – as the neurological rehabilitation service is fond of telling me – at the beginning of my recovery journey. But when I recover, if I ever fully recover, I will not forget or regret the insight this has given me.