IN education there is always a fad that is currently in vogue

I don't know that from personal experience, I've just been told it enough times by weary teachers for it to have shifted from the 'rumour - handle with care' part of my brain to the 'God's honest truth' part.

Currently teachers, though, are spoilt. They have two fads - Interactive Whiteboards and Mind Friendly Learning. Both, to me, seem perfectly logical, not like fads at all, but then what do I know?

Interactive Whiteboards are exactly that - part whiteboard, part remote control computer. Naturally, some teachers hate them. Whereas once the only thing blighting their teaching life was the weekly task of operating the video, now they have a '3,000 gremlin in the room.

However, it's Mind Friendly Learning that I want to focus on. The name would suggest that it's come about as a reaction to Mind Unfriendly Learning, which would be a ridiculous concept if it wasn't so close to the truth.

If you wanted to devise a scenario in which someone definitely wouldn't learn it would go something like this. Sit learner down, lecture to them for an hour, set a couple of quick questions, end the lesson and then move onto a new area the following day.

It's a method favoured by poor practitioners across the nation.

The results of this method are entirely predictable. The information goes straight into the short term memory meaning that it can be called upon for those end of lesson questions.

Seeing this, the teacher assumes they have done their job in explaining the new concept and move on and in so doing fail to make the necessary reinforcement that transfers information into the long term memory.

Several weeks later, the teacher cries out in despair, 'we did this the other week' being the refrain of choice, when a quick test shows that the class have actually learnt very little.

Mind Friendly Learning is all about making it easier for the brain to hang on to those pieces of information that we deem so important - Pythagoras' Theorem, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the melting point of Mercury - those sort of things.

To sum up several thousand research papers and years of academic study in a few words, it's about helping the brain to make connections that establish learning as part of a big picture.

According to the Mind Friendly workshop I went to today, it's about understanding how the brain works (at least on a basic level, we're not brain surgeons after all).

The brain, and I'm putting this as fact even though I only heard it a few hours ago from a total stranger (the paperboy, since you ask)) doesn't actually want to learn every piece of new information, if it wasn't selective we'd simply overload.

I've decided to call it the Sherlock Holmes theory, based on the fact that the great detective didn't know simple facts like the names of the planets, claiming that clogging the brain up with useless information only served to slow down the more vital functions.

Admittedly, it's a theory pinched from a fictional, drug-addicted private investigator, but then he wasn't wrong about much else.

To counter act our brain's natural reticence to take on extra work, knowledge has to reinforced, revisited the following day, the following week and the following month. It also has be given some relevance and applied in a real life setting.

It's like learning foreign languages - probably everyone reading this learnt a language at school and yet only a handful will be fluent, and that's despite up to five years study. The reason is simple, without making the link of applying the skill in a real life setting, for example speaking French in France, it won't ever become an automated skill.

I could go on, but there's really no point. MFL preaches that we only actually memorise things from the start and end of a lesson so, assuming that also applies to columns, the middle of this is already a dim and distant memory (as it is for me, too).

I could have written any old rubbish, and indeed I did, but then what's the point of wasting great prose on the deliberately dysfunctional human brain?

That's right - none what so ever. It's far better that i give you a piece of fascinating information to finish with as that's the bit you'll actually remember.

And so here goes, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo is Brazzaville. Got it? Good. I'll be testing next week.