OMG! Learning is fun!!!

There's a note sitting on my desk as I write. It was given to me by a transition year student who just spent two weeks in my lab on a work placement. It says, "Thank you for everything, I really enjoyed myself". This sits alongside a similar note from another TY student a few weeks earlier.

Now, you may be wondering what amazing didactic tools I used to garner such a reaction.  Did I wow them with high-tech gadgets? Did I carefully engineer some questions for them to answer? Did I dazzle them with facts and tidbits of Genetics? How about some specifically designed experiments to illustrate some core principles of research?

The obvious yet surprising answer is I did none of these things. I did nothing except ask them to help me search for information on a few topics I have been puzzling about lately (in fact, background information for some of the LoveLab experiments) and then (and here's the important bit) I just trusted them to get on with it.

There was no 'correct answer' that I was waiting to receive (I didn't know any of the answers, that was the point!), so it was as natural as anything to shrug off that curse of Leaving Cert students, the dreaded search-for-the-expected-answer -- that guaranteed way to stifle creativity and interest. Instead, they reported to me regularly with what they had found and we talked together about which reports were credible and which were interesting and even amazing.

Seems that you can enjoy yourself by simply being allowed to learn. Who would have thunk it?