Category: Education

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My Love-Hate Relationship with Math (Part 1)

I wasn’t a bad math student. I had a pretty good understanding of it in my elementary years, but I wasn’t that fast in operations. I had trouble memorizing the multiplication table at the higher digits. If you asked me to do 8×7 for example, I would still have to tick off the multiples of 8 on my fingers: 8, 16, 24…and so on until I got to my seventh finger, then write down the answer — I would do that all the way till high school.

I remember that at the start of every year since around grade 4 or 5, I would have trouble remembering how to perform certain operations like adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions and decimals, or how to get the least common denominator (LCD) and how that was different from getting the greatest common factor (GCF).

Despite that, I was chosen to be one of a handful of “math-gifted” students in sixth grade though I didn’t really feel all that gifted. Looking back now, they must have been pretty desperate. We were asked to cut short our lunch break and come in 30 minutes earlier for special lectures on advanced topics. Again, looking back, was that really a reward or punishment for being “gifted”?

I don’t remember much from those classes except that I struggled to keep up and that it highlighted what I hated most about math — word problems. In all my elementary years, I never understood how to solve a word problem. There was no step 1, 2, 3 to it. At least when multiplying fractions, as long as you memorize the steps, you had a pretty good chance of getting the right answer.

But word problems frustrated me.

Oh I would occasionally get them right but I never felt confident with them and I dreaded seeing them in quizzes or exams. No matter how I studied, I couldn’t prepare for a word problem. Thankfully, teachers didn’t make exams full of word problems, and so I survived elementary mathematics.

Then came high school and the start of algebra. Oh my, here I was trying to remember how to properly multiply decimals and subtract fractions, and now I have to deal with x, y and z, and sometimes a, b and c as well? But given some time, I was able to make some sense of the algebraic rules although factoring left me confused for a good long while, especially quadratic square trinomials.

Somehow, I survived freshman algebra. Now on to my sophomore year.

We began with a review of the basics, how to perform operations with variables, the laws of exponents, and so on. Shortly after that, we were introduced to equations, and then our teacher handed us a page of homework to do over the weekend.

When I got the page, I was terrified. It was full of word problems.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Education and Reality

Photo Credit: World Bank Photo Collection Flickr via Compfight cc

If education was meant to prepare one for “real” life, then why is it so unlike reality?

Where else do you see people grouped together by age, then forced to listen and work on 5 to 6 different topics a day (on which they have little or no choice on the matter), and at which they are evaluated and labeled at the end of the year as either smart or stupid (though the latter is rarely said out loud nowadays — instead people say “needs improvement”)?

In a world where people are increasingly becoming aware of the power of free choice and personal responsibility, schools seem to be denying the number one freedom of children — the freedom to pursue their own interests. Instead, they are being told to sit through lectures that adults have deemed as important and basic (and yes, you do really need to know how to factor quadratic square trinomials, and you need to memorize the periodic table of elements, as well as the entire character list of Noli Me Tangere even if all you dream about is to become a world class gymnast).

Of course, one might argue that in the real world, you also often need to do things that you don’t like in order to achieve what you like. A good basketball player needs to put in a lot of work on his body, going to the gym, building up his muscles, stretching, exercising, having a proper diet, putting in hours of practice, and a lot these things may not necessarily be things he wants to do, but he has to do them anyway.

Well, yes, but it was the person’s choice to be that kind of player.

Did we ever ask if our child’s dream was to be class valedictorian at the end of their elementary or high school education? Or did we just sort of push them along that path? As parents, do we respect our children’s choices and ambitions or are they the vehicle to satisfying our own ambitions (or frustrations)?

I believe that if a person really wants to pursue something, he will simply see obstacles as challenges and will find ways to hurdle them by himself. If a person is forced to do something however, even a little hardship will be seen as a mountain too bothersome to climb.

The word education comes from the latin educere meaning to draw out. Ironically, education today is not so much concerned about drawing out but about stuffing in and cramming as much material as it can into our kids’ uninterested brains.

Good educators, however, are people who can draw out a child’s innate potential, who can assist and nurture them as they pursue their own interests. They know when and how to push, and they also know when and how to leave things be and let learning occur at the students’ pace. They understand that they cannot keep watering a plant the whole day in the hopes of making it grow faster. They would only succeed in drowning it. They need to leave it alone most of the time and just watch it grow. Sometimes the plant may need a little pruning here and there, but for the most part, there is nothing you can really do to make it grow faster.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Summerhill Three

Photo Credit: Paul-W Flickr via Compfight cc

For the past two weeks I have been writing about Summerhill School, the Free School/Democratic School movement, and I still find there is more to write and think about.

The schools systems of today focus too much on skills and knowledge. Yes, there is the customary, perfunctory mention of emphasizing values and attitudes, but let’s face it, it’s really just all about grades — even if the teachers, the principal or the school owner says otherwise, the system itself speaks louder than all of them. Get good grades and you’re ok. Get bad grades and you’re out. Get very high grades and you’re a superstar.

I also do not understand this idea of teaching values as a subject and giving grades based on it. For example, a school might have an item on the report card that says “Honesty.” How in the world can a teacher grade that unless they follow each child every minute of their lives?

Children easily see through falseness and hypocrisy. One day, my elementary kid came to me and asked, “Why is it that during school accreditation, the restrooms are extra clean and suddenly have soap and toilet paper? And why is  everyone cautioned to not be loud and boisterous, and to smile and greet the visitors?”

And it doesn’t only happen in my child’s school but in a lot of major private and public schools. In fact, fictionist Gilda Cordero-Fernando wrote a short story about this phenomenon decades ago entitled “Visitation of the Gods” and captures to perfection the tragically comic way school personnel and officials pander to the “gods” of accreditation.

How can a school talk about honesty when it does things like this? Children get the message loud and clear and it doesn’t matter how many lectures the teachers give on honesty.

Or how about “reverence to God?” How do you measure that? How do you know if that merits an A or a B or a C or even a D? And what if the child believes in another god, or a goddess, or gods, or doesn’t believe in any god at all?

Words are cheap, and words in a lecture are even cheaper. The best way to teach is by example and experience.

This is why the self-government structure of Summerhill intrigues me. Everyone, even 5-year olds, get a vote — and teachers don’t get more votes than students. At a very young age, children learn that their voice matters. They learn to express their thoughts and ideas. They learn the value of cooperation, agreement, and keeping their word. They design their own laws, their own system of rewards and punishment, and even their own system of enforcement. By experience, not just by textbook, they learn how democracy works.

That is the central system and structure of  a free school — not the subjects — those are left for the students to explore by themselves according to their interest. I think it is a far better teaching method than any bunch of lectures can provide.

I read about a teacher’s account of a student who came from a traditional school (I’m not sure whether this was Summerhill or some other democratic school — I cannot find the source anymore). When that boy found out that he could do anything he wanted in this school, he promptly went to the couch and slept.

That’s all that he did for the entire year. Every day, he would come to school, go to the couch, and sleep — and no one bothered him about it, not the teachers or other students. He was exercising his freedom to do it, and he wasn’t bothering anyone or impinging on someone else’s freedom. So he was left alone.

The following year, he proceeded to do that again. Until at around the middle of the year, he approached a teacher and asked how one becomes president of the self-government system. The teacher tells him that he has to get others to vote for him.

“Well, I want to be president,” this boy says.

“And how do you expect people to vote for you if all you do is sleep all day? People have to hear you. They have to know what you can do for them. They have to see that voting for you will be in their best interests,” replied the teacher.

So from that day forward, the boy stopped sleeping on the couch and began doing other things and interacting with the other student. He became active and popular and yes, he indeed became president shortly after.

Sometimes, like plants, all children need is space and time to grow and mature. All the nudging and shaping that we do often doesn’t really help and might even cause resentment and fixation on that which was denied them.

Let me leave you with this little food for though from A.S. Neill himself, “There is no case whatever for the moral instruction of children. It is psychologically wrong. To ask a little child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist. The world belongs to him. His power of wishing is strong; he has only to wish and he is king of the earth. When he is given an apple his one wish is to eat that apple. And the chief result of mother’s encouraging him to share his very own apple with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother.

Altruism comes later, comes naturally if the child is not taught to be unselfish; probably never comes at all when the child is taught to be unselfish. The young altruist is merely the child who likes to please others while he is satisfying his own selfishness.”

 

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

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Summerhill Too

Photo Credit: oiZox Flickr via Compfight cc

After writing last week’s short piece on Summerhill, I reflected on the state of education and employment in our country and could only begin to wonder what it would be like if we had more Summerhill-type schools. Career and college education mismatch is a problem, not just here but also in the United States (not that it should surprise us as our educational system is patterned after theirs — and so its problems will predictably be ours as well) and the numerous studies concerning this proves that there is indeed an issue.

Several educators have noted that schools have a factory-like, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach. The school bell, for example, is similar to the factory bell, used as a way of signalling breaks and changes in shifts. Students are grouped into “batches.” Schools talk about “producing” graduates of different majors — business, accounting, chemistry, engineering — as if they were specialized parts designed to fit the societal machine.

Of course, there are those who object to this comparison saying it is a misleading comparison of the history of the educational system — as there are no hard references to schools being modeled after factories or of producing graduates primarily for the purpose of being employed in these factories. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post contends that even if there are indeed factory-like conditions in schools, removing these will not solve the main problems of education, which she asserts are disengagement and shallow learning.

In her view, “Young people would rather be socializing than learning, and though some learning can happen through play, much of it can’t. Young people, like adults, would also like to avoid exhausting and effortful work; but thinking is hard, and much of learning involves thinking. Finally, young people aren’t naturally interested in many of the things we want them to learn in school; yet as long as school is designed to serve the needs of society and not just the desires of the individual, much of education will involve steering students away from what they are naturally interested in and towards something else.”

So the solution, she says, is “great teaching” which involves “cultivation of environments of trust and care. It means finding adequate space for play and for hard work. It means nudging and cajoling students, pestering and praising them. It means uncovering puzzles and conjuring mysteries. It means drawing connections to student interests, engaging with the real world, and cracking the occasional joke. Masterful teachers know this. And their classrooms are places of wonder. No observer would ever liken them to factories.”

While I would agree with her assessment that we need masterful teachers who can transcend the limits of the classroom’s four walls, those teachers are few precisely because they have been molded in an educational system that doesn’t look too kindly at those seeking to test its borders. It is unrealistic to expect a lot of out-of-the-box thinkers from a system that trains people to be in the box.

What attracted me to democratic schools like Summerhill is that students are really free to pursue their interests, and the teacher’s role is not to say, “Oh, that’s not very useful for society. What you need to do is study so you can become a lawyer, banker, doctor or engineer,” but rather to help the child process and maybe think through their desires and even helping them along with what they want.

I remember reading the account of one of the teachers of such a school. He had a 14-year old student who said that he wanted to be a mortician someday. Instead of steering the kid away from that path, what the teacher did was to contact the local funeral parlor in town and then asked the manager if he would be willing to take on a young apprentice. The teacher had to drive the student to the funeral parlor and then pick him up every week. That student eventually opened his own funeral parlor when he became an adult.

Now, try doing that in a traditional school.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.