Education: Back to Gaffer's Archives.
Many of the people who teach and write text books fail to take into account the fact that a great number of their students are intimidated by the subject matter. They make no effort to put their students at ease. The key to teaching is a friendly caring relationship between the teacher and the student. Without that, learning is darn nigh impossible.
If you don't care about your students feelings, you can't help them to learn anything. I say this with the full knowledge that an educational environment is not an encounter group setting. Even so, it must have the element of caring to be effective. The only way you can really care if your students learn is if you care about them as people.
We must recognize the fact that some people will learn even when the teacher does not care about them. That, however, is an inversion. The teacher is not educating. The student is learning in spite of the teacher. The teacher becomes nothing more than a passive resource to the student, not unlike a vending machine. These are the students who would learn with or without a teacher.
One of the weakest areas of teaching in our system is in mathematics. We can conclude that when we look at the population at large and notice how people react to math. Most folks are intimidated by the very concept. Their reaction is overwhelmingly negative. That is simply sad because it's a great loss of potential for no good reason. That is why William has decided to write about mathematics. It is also why I have decided to write about education.
We find that most of the people who know mathematics really well are unable to explain it to ordinary people. They fail, not in concept, but in communication, yet they insist on writing text books and teaching. Then, they will complain that it's not their fault that most people, even some of those who graduate with math degrees, don't know or understand math.
They may claim that math is so complicated that very few people can understand it. To that kind of bologna, here is the good news. Math is the least complicated of all the subjects we have to learn. It is totally and completely logical and progressive in all phases, from the beginning to the end. It's the same as counting all the way through. It is not complicated. The problem is, you cannot learn trigonometry, if no one ever taught you arithmetic. It is all progressive.
The reason most people do not understand math is because it was taught wrong right from the git-go. Right from the very beginning, the approach was wrong. Rote is the wrong way to teach anything, especially to children. Learning should be a joyful process of discovery, not a painful chore. Rote simply makes the learning process painful. It is intimidating on the face of it.
As a consequence, most of us are intimidated by math to some degree. We avoid it if we can. That's a darn shame, because it's really a thing beauty. Mathematics is a conceptual masterpiece. Each new concept in math builds logically on the previous concept. Most of the people who teach math fail to make that connection. They assume a link which does not exist in their students minds. They are so enamored with their own knowledge of the subject that they fail to see the students predicament.
Learning should and can be a joyful process of discovery. Whether it's math, English or something else, the teacher must nurture a process of discovery in the student. That is a difficult concept for many teachers because it requires them to think. So they lecture, explain, and issue rules from the book, but they do not think about how to draw the student out. They do not think about how to let the student discover the concepts and the rules. They replace thought with memorization and rules. They make it threatening instead of challenging. It becomes tedious rather than exciting.
Memorizing is a painful process. If we must remember, the best way to do it is through association. It is very gentle and very permanent. Here is one example of a technique I use for remembering names. One of my nieces married a gentleman with the unique first name of Brent. I have a great number of relatives and I knew I would have trouble remembering that name. My solution was to say in my mind that he was Bent with an "R". He may not approve of that particular association, but he likes the fact that I remember his name.
Back to education. One major part of our current problem is that public education has lost, for whatever reason, the support of the community. Be honest here. It is not all the teachers fault and not all the fault of the system. If the parents and the community do not support the public schools, they will not function as well as they could with support. Is that common sense or what?
Many years ago, when I went to public schools, most of the teachers were inept. They treated teaching as a job rather than as a love affair. Most of the teachers were women then. For a single woman, at that time, becoming a teacher was somewhat more desirable than joining a nunnery. It was an acceptable, respectable way for a single woman to earn a living. It was almost the only way, excepting marriage.
Back then, most people became teachers for the same reason most of the rest of us take jobs. They saw it as a respectable way of earning a living. Not as a way of caring for children. I suspect the same is true today. The practitioners will never be perfect. They are, after all, human. The difference is, when I went to school, the family and the community supported and supplemented the system, so it worked. It worked, and it could still work, because it is conceptually sound when the community is involved.
Most of us are not creative in our work. We follow a set of rules, which are supposed to be correct, and we turn the crank. Why do we expect teachers to be any different. It is the rare teacher who takes the time and energy to help the student see that learning is about discovery. We should also notice that, too often, a teacher will be ostracized for being creative in their methods. Many of us do not like people who are different. We say they are breaking the rules. They are not doing it "Right!"
I'll have more to say about this next week.
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