ILLUMINATION

With a pressing deadline, it is tempting to work right through the weekend. I have resisted, taking off yesterday evening to have a little bit of a life. This morning I rose early and started fatiguing the “ancient” poster I will present at the national ELT conference on 23 April, and put together with a Powerpoint presentation for the less lateral thinkers in the audience. Then I chilled flat-out.

Is relaxation justified? According to Wallace ( reference not found), genius works in five stages: the first are concerned with gathering information, and the final with “illumination”. While no step should be underestimated, the fourth is the one that fuels the revelation: “incubation”. Stepping away.

There was an area of my literature review that simply seemed labyrinthine: the myriad typologies of learning styles make them difficult to pin down. After my afternoon of sloth, I sat down with my distilled notes and a few coloured pens to find direction. Suddenly, it all fell into place: those many typologies can be boiled down to four continua represented as spokes of a wheel. A person’s learning style can be represented as four points on the axes, and connected to a kite. To verify my loosely structured interview data, I can ask students to use the wheel to represent their perceived styles, and use the resulting kites for analysis.

Is there time, in modern life, for a full-time professional studying part time to take a day of rest? I believe the day lost is more than compensated for in the efficiency gained every other day, and in the insights gained from stepping back to see the forest and the trees.