Wow it’s been a long time since my last post — time is just flying down here in Guyana. I’d written an amusing post last month about some Guyanese cultural quirks, but it was tragically lost before I could post it. So, instead I’ll give you some of my thoughts on education. Hopefully I’ll muster the strength to write more about my life soon. . . enjoy.
Teaching is a struggle here. Never mind that students are subjected to an unstructured environment that is hardly conducive to learning, they are products of outdated and ineffective teaching methodology. Most “teaching” consists of students copying copious amounts of notes off the blackboard, which they are expected to memorize and regurgitate on tests. Or sometimes teachers will expect them to be able to apply that information (especially in Maths) without ever teaching them how to do that! Uninspired students (most of them) simply fail. In the fall, my homeroom, the top stream of 8th graders had an average overall percentage of 60%. The highest in the class was 77%. And yet, even if the students did do well, it would be meaningless — they’re not actually understanding anything they’re doing. They’re not actually learning. They have no logical reasoning abilities, they have no creativity. But boy do their notebooks look beautiful (it takes them about 10 minutes to write name/date/class/subject/topic at the top using 3 different colored pens and underlining with rulers). And it’s evident when my 11th grade students struggle with things I know for a fact they were “taught” in 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th grade. They simply never LEARN it. And the worst part? The school simply wants me to fall into line, follow their crappy policies and guidelines that are clearly ineffective. The Ministry of Education has its head so far up its ass they think the more ridiculous regulations they half-heartedly push on the under-resourced schools the better their system will be. Ignoring the fact that students performance is abysmal. For example:
–I am frequently given a talking to for not following the exact format in writing my lesson plans. Well maybe not every person in the world prepares for a lesson in the exact same way? You know, multiple intelligences and all that jazz? Oh wait, they definitely wouldn’t know a thing about that.
–Teachers have no control over how students are evaluated. I am “supposed” to give one quiz (10 marks), one individual assignment (20 marks) one group assignment (10 marks), one midterm (30 marks) and one final (30 marks). This means I get to use my mathematical prowess to just fudge all my marks at the end of the term…
–The final exams I write must be approved by the ministry. It must have 40 multiple choice questions. 30% of the questions must be knowlege based, 20% must be application based, or some other crap. Oh, and the final exam needs to be submitted half way through the term (because yeah, heh, I know exactly what I’m going to teach in the last half). I got around this one last term because I’m good friends with the guy who photocopies all the tests (heheheh).
–I was told that the way I write on the board is wrong because the students notes are supposed to look exactly like the board. That means I have to draw a margin line on the left side and maybe even three circles for holes. You know, to make the mindless copying easier.
As an American volunteer in Guyana I’m constantly trying to figure out my place. Why am I here? Why do they want me here? Who should I be trying to please, the Ministry of Education or my students? Who am I trying to help? Should I be trying to improve the system here by bringing in ideas on education from home? Well the administration doesn’t care about that, I’d just be stepping on people’s toes. If I don’t follow the rules, maybe in an attempt to help my students learn, my Head of Department just get’s shit on. Do I really want to do that to the guy, who’s just trying to make a decent living?
I’m increasingly curious to find out how many similarities there are between Guyanese and American schools, and I fear the systems might be disturbingly similar. It’s so amazing how easy it is to fool somebody into thinking teaching has been effective with the right paperwork. Oh, just look at those beautiful lesson plans! Look at the students’ beautiful notes! Look at how many words they wrote on that assignment! Look at those standardized test scores . . .
So, instead of heeding to the pressure to fall into line, which I admit is so tempting because it makes life quite a bit easier, I decided to see if I could actually teach the kids something. The obvious place to test this was my 10th grade physics students, who are for the most part very hard working. These are the kind of students who would literally spend a whole day (or several) copying every word out of a textbook into their notebook. Unfortunately, their energies are almost exclusively channeled to such tasks. I was tired of being frustrated and feeling like they weren’t understanding a single thing I tried to teach them in the fall, so for this term I decided to draw from some my experiences learning physics at Carleton College. I was especially inspired to try something different by the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, whose book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” saved me from a few days of boredom down here. In the book, Feynman describes his experience teaching Brazilian university students while on sabbatical in 1951. His experience was amazingly similar to my own. After school closed, he was asked to give a lecture about “anything he wanted”. So he decided to eviscerate their science education system.
‘The main purpose of my talk is to demonstarte to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!’
I can see them stir, thinking, ‘What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes.’
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil — why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.
Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek — even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between truth and Beauty?” — and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrr-up” — he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!
What the Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences, and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has every translated them into words the students can understand.
I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.” (Big blast, right?)
Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. . . “By flipping the pages at random, and putting my finger in and reading the sentences on that page, I can show you what’s the matter — how it’s not science, but memorizing, in every circumstance. Therefore I am brave enough to flip through the pages now, in front of this audience, to put my finger in, to read, and to show you.”
So I did it. Brrrrrrup — I stuck my finger in, and started to read: “Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed … “
I said, “And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature — what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t.
“But if, instead, you were to write ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of plyers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called ‘triboluminescence’ . Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.” I used that example to show them, but it didn’t make any difference where I would have put my finger in the book; it was like that everywhere.
Finally I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. . .
Since I had gone to Brazil under a program sponsored by the United States Government, I was asked by the State Department to write a report about my experiences in Brazil, so I wrote out the essentials of the speech I had just given. I found out later through the grapevine that the reaction of somebody in the State Department was, “That shows you how dangerous it is to send somebody to Brazil who is so naive. Foolish fellow; he can only cause trouble. He didn’t understand the problems.” Quite the contrary! I think this person in the State Department was naive to think that because he saw a university with a list of courses and descriptions, that’s what it was.
But even the great Feynman had troubles of his own teaching physics. In his preface to the Feynman Lectures, his introductory physics lectures at CalTech in the early 60s adapted into a series of books, he laments letting most of his students down:
I don’t think I did very well by the
students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems
on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends
point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who—very surprisingly
—understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active
in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited
and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in
physics—and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, “The
power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions
where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)
Still, I didn’t want to leave any student completely behind, as perhaps I did.
I think one way we could help the students more would be by putting more hard
work into developing a set of problems which would elucidate some of the ideas
in the lectures. Problems give a good opportunity to fill out the material of the
lectures and make more realistic, more complete, and more settled in the mind
the ideas that have been exposed.
I think, however, that there isn’t any solution to this problem of education
other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct
individual relationship between a student and a good teacher—a situation in which
the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things.
It’s impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply
doing problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many
students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal. Perhaps
my lectures can make some contribution. Perhaps in some small place where
there are individual teachers and students, they may get some inspiration or some
ideas from the lectures. Perhaps they will have fun thinking them through—or
going on to develop some of the ideas further.
Reading this made me feel so lucky about where I attended college and learned physics. Frankly, there’s simply no way I could have learned physics in the environment of a large university lecture. I’m not as smart as Feynman’s two dozen. I was lucky to have an education centered around problem solving, direct contact with teachers, communicating ideas with teachers and fellow students. Maybe some students are able to learn through pure lectures, but other perfectly capable students (like me) will be left behind. So I went on a mission to try and adapt some of the teaching strategies I encountered at Carleton to the crazed environment of Three Miles Secondary school in Bartica, Guyana. I also set out to incorporate a few things I’d learned in my first three months teaching here — namely the magical power of hands-on activities in developing a deeper understanding of science.
I teach physics to two classes of students, the Science stream who are considered the “good students” and the Technology stream, which is the notorious slacker class. But time and time again, I noticed that the Tech kids were surpassing the Science kids. The ease with which they understood new ideas, it was amazing. Even with their deficiencies in Maths compared to the other class. The reason is that those kids have a closer relationship with nature. They’ve swung a hammer, used a wrench, taken apart an electric motor. Imagine a creature from another universe with totally different physical laws trying to learn our physics. It’d be impossible to crack the surface. It simply couldn’t relate to what was going on. Even today’s physics which often has little bearing on everyday life, is expressed in a way that attempts to connect abstract and obscure phenomena to everyday situations. One example that comes to mind is quark color: of course quarks don’t actually have a color but it makes a hell of a lot of sense if you think of them that way. (and yeah, I’ve been working my way through a particle physics textbook for the last few weeks).
At Carleton, I learned a few unconventional teaching strategies from a couple of excellent professors, Bill Titus and Joel Weisberg, several of which I decided to test out with my 10th graders. First of all, as Feynman said, lectures hardly help anyone learn, so no reason to waste my 2 hours of class time per week with that. Problem #1 — the school has a total of 2 physics textbooks (which are abysmal anyway). The solution? I write my own page of class notes for the students for each class period, and give a copy to each student (and pray the printer works, I’ll come back to this later). And, following Bill’s strategy that I dreaded back in college, I require them to read the notes before class and hand me 3 questions they had about what they read. This way, they come to class somewhat familiar with the topic, and it teaches them to be a bit more inquisitive (the most important skill any scientist has). In class I spend no more than 10 minutes answering some common questions I received, before getting the students into groups of 3-4 and handing each group a page of problems. I try to design the problems to address all the common misconceptions and misunderstandings students usually have, but I now realize that designing basic physics problems for young students could be a life’s work. It’s amazing the mistakes they make, and the way students think about things that I wouldn’t even dream of. During class I circulate the room talking individually with the students, helping them, asking them questions, probing their brains. It’s pretty exhilarating and I have basically 100% of the class engaged, rather than a lecture situation where there’s ALWAYS daydreamers and fidgeters. Just like back in college, I assign them weekly problem sets for more practice doing problems. Oh, and I also sent a letter home to parents informing them of everything I’m doing because, well, parent involvement can give an amazing boost to student performance, I’ve learned.
At every opportunity I try to give the students a very simple hands-on activity to complete with their group. I have a theory about the hands-brain connection. Maybe some psychologist has even done this experiment. You take two students of essentially equal intelligence and ability. Have them read some explanation of a natural phenomenon. Then you set up a hands on activity to demonstrate it. Student A actually does the activity, student B just sits there and watches, very intently, to see what happens. Right after the activity you ask each student a series of questions to assess their understanding. Both perform equally well. Then, 1 month later you ask the students the same questions — I hypothesize that student A has a SIGNIFICANTLY better chance of retaining the level of understanding he had a month earlier. So that’s why in class I’m constantly hounding my students — “Hey, Safar, stop touching it, give Romel a chance to adjust the weights on the balance” “What are you doing sitting over there?? Go roll that ball!” “But Sir, I already saw it.” “I don’t care, go do it!” Did I mention how much I’ve come to love ordering people around?
I’ve been following this strategy since the beginning of January, and of course it’s not as successful as I imagined. Here’s the issues I’ve had so far:
1. Time. I only get to see my students two times a week for an hour each. That simply is nowhere near enough time to teach them anything. I hoped that giving them the weekly problem sets would help fix this problem by forcing them to spend more time working on physics during the week. But of course, no matter how much I beg them, most of them don’t start working on it early so that they can come to me and ask questions. They save it to the last minute and give me crappy half-assed answers. If only they’d just come ask me for help — it would take 5 minutes to vastly improve their understanding of the physics. We also had a random week off school in the middle of the term for Mashramani festivities which didnt help them any (I’ll blog on that interesting bit of Guyanese culture soon hopefully).
2. Technological limitations. My strategy relies heavily on being able to print documents and make photocopies. I was uneasy about this from the start, and my fears came to fruition 3 weeks into the term when Bartica experienced some unfortunate electrical issues. All of Bartica is powered by several giant diesel generators, which are apparently fairly unreliable and probably very old. We had nearly an entire week of blackout (sometimes current came on for a few hours in the evenings). So, for a week I had to partially go back to teaching from the blackboard, though I tried to make the best of the situation. They all got a week break from homework because I couldn’t print the assignment, which really pissed me off. Since then things have been going a bit more smoothly, but there’s always random issues like the printer ran out of ink or paper, or whatnot. It’s a bit stressful.
3. I’m breaking the rules. I’m kind of not supposed to teach this way. Since I’m doing all this work writing class notes and in-class problems and problem sets I have no time to write the required lesson plans. And regardless, my lesson plans would all just say, “Students work on these problems, I help them.” So When the “inspectors” come to check lesson plans I have to have Ron, the science department head, cover for me (I’m eternally grateful to that man). I’m a bit worried that I’ll get in more trouble at some point, but since I’m only here for a year, it’s nearly impossible for them to touch me. What keeps me going is the words of one of my students on the first day of the term when I was explaining my new class procedures. “Sir, you need to go tell this thing to all the other teachers, teach them how to teach”, with heads nodding all around the room. Definitely a high point of my time here.
4. The students simply do not know how to think. I mentioned this already, the students are products of a lifetime of terrible education. I have to keep reminding myself there’s no way I can turn this around in one year. Or even two. They don’t know how to write an answer to a question that is logically sound and actually proves the assertion they’re making. Their mathematical skills are abysmal (they can just barely handle solving a simple equation). So on this one, I basically have to just bite the bullet and try to do the best I can considering the circumstances.
In the end, I’m left wondering how I’ll even assess the success or failure of my experiment. I’m hoping to develop something that will last after I’m gone . . . im hoping all the work I put into my class notes and problems can be reused by future teachers. Maybe in a few years, with the help of future volunteers, the school can develop a more modern science teaching methodology — if the Ministry of Education allows it of course…
Hope that was somewhat interesting, and hope everything’s good back in the good ol USofA.
Stay warm
-micah
