Fixing Teaching Illusions

Fixing the Purpose Principle

From teaching children to draw straight lines in numeracy classes to insisting on specific fingers in music lessons, we all have championed principles around which our profession has been built with neither any consideration for the uniqueness of learners nor any thought for their individual preferences. What if I want to draw curves? What if the idea of not pleasing my teacher terrifies me? What if I prefer to have my right hand up on the saxophone? Why doesn’t anyone tell instrument makers to make saxophones the other way? If everyone thought the same way about the same things there would be no inventors on the planet.

We evolved ‘standard’ expectations which have held too many children back for too long. We think this or that is why they are in school. We leave little room, or none at all, for expecting them to be themselves. Sport coaches have had to bench students who got low grades in math. Worse, we sold these ideas to parents. At a time the best singer in school got denied performances because her dad felt awful with her grades in an examination which has no bearing on the girl’s preference – music. Good to mention that some parents didn’t buy into it. I once had a mother who pulled her daughter out of the laboratory to my music room afternoon after afternoon.

Understand, students are humans, albeit young. They came to this planet on purpose. That one reason should drive our school system. The day – or semester – we begin to care less about language grades when a student is soaring in physics, is the day school gets worth their while. Let them be! Let them take the lessons knowing they don’t have to fit our stereotypes. We have gained too little developing children from neck up. This principle of erroneous perception of learners’ purpose is a societal fault line needing an immediate fix.

Fixing the Pompous Principle

At a jazz masterclass I asked a Berklee professor what was paramount on his mind whenever he taught his students. Permit me to paraphrase his answer here: “I know they have come to learn, but I also know I could learn from them.” A professor of music, I had thought, shouldn’t have anything to learn in that field from anybody for that matter, let alone a student of music. Well, I was wrong. He learns a great deal from them. In contrary, I hear about a teacher shutting up a child who finished a sentence for her. Why teachers feel like horses drawing chariots will never be clear to twenty-first century learners.

The time has come for a test drive with students in the driver’s seat. We shouldn’t be afraid to arrive at a place where our lesson plan is no longer necessary especially if it can’t be adjusted in the learner’s favour. Moreover, we should stop marking them wrong. Simply schedule a discourse over what the lesson was about allowing them to share how they conceived it. Then would we realize how wrongly we have been teaching and grasp how best to communicate in such ways as they might be able to learn. The way doctors think they are greater than their patients (until they get down with something) is the same way teachers think they know more and can do better than their students, until they find the words of Will Rogers to be true: “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” Whether or not it evolved from the school administrator’s perception of herself as higher than the janitor, we need to correct this professional fault line of superfluous status now and always.

Fixing the Process Principle

If you don’t like meetings don’t become head of anything. In the world we now live in there are many of them lacking objectivity. Then you have to do a round of the stores, window-shopping. You would follow that up with drawing papers to back-up your proforma invoice. What you have to do next is another meeting with your supervisor to defend the papers you filed. There’s one more meeting after that. It’s holds with the school administrator and, if you don’t sound convincing enough – even if your students badly need the item you requested – you’d need yet another meeting with the purchasing manager. Beyond this point you have to hope the accounts director doesn’t think it’s too expensive. And on it goes until you start wondering if you were hired to teach or meet.

Creativity is lost in the maze of too many steps. Once the path is cluttered the person is confused. The surest way to sicken a system is to hire straight-jacket bureaucrats in the name of processes. An indication of this may be found in meetings and procedures devoid of empirical substance. When there is only one way to do right there is one certain result – death, from boredom and/or disorientation. Nothing matches flexibility when it comes to running a community of learners for passion is certain to wane should you have to sign papers in four offices to get anything done. They were supposed to help keep a structure in place but they do little else than ensure it crumbles on its own head; or worse, crack open to swallow everything serving it. And so must we overcome this administrative fault line or run the risk of demotivating our work force.

Fixing the Promoter Principle

Discussing the fault lines in our education systems would be an incomplete attempt if we don’t zero-in on the classroom experience. Students sit in class for endless minutes listening to an ‘expert’ rant about the wildest topic from the strangest subject. It was one head of school who made me realize how strange the treble clef seems to dyslexics. I had always thought it a very beautiful curve around five lines and the spaces in between so long as you ensure it runs around the second line. Now, what in the world have I just described and why should it run clock-wise around the second?

Seeing that all students can’t learn this way, I chose ever since to trivialize and simplify that pitch symbol. To make it seem less of a big deal, I suggest its function and make them play with it; to make it easier to draw, I show rather than tell while engaging them with the actual pencil work. This is what the science teacher ought to do rather than talk and give lengthy notes to eleven-year-olds on separation techniques. Mix grains of sand with a pinch or two of salt (sodium chloride) and share how this mixture could be separated. Then leave them to do it. We would need fewer preps if we spread out contact periods for real-time learning experiences than hoping they can ram it in their heads from notes and textbooks. This productivity fault line can be mended.

Fixing the Pointless Principle

There are more written assessment instruments in the world’s educational institutions than there are skill-based assessment structures. What is the appropriate measure of competence in vocational subjects – performance and creativity or explanation in writing? Americans began to worry when jobs went to Chinese firms no less than Africans express frustration when projects go to German companies. How did we evolve a society in which government contracts are won by foreign construction firms unchallenged by its people who are not any less trained or skilled?

Government is constantly under pressure to create more jobs at a time when schools are attempting to incorporate more vocational subjects into the curriculum. Which should we clamour for – jobs in corporations or entrepreneurial vocations – if we were certain that either would function at their very best? One reads in the dailies sickening reports of ailing African leaders who spend billions of dollars on foreign medical treatments, the kind of funds more than sufficient to fix their country’s health systems. Why should we raise professors of medicine who can’t/don’t treat their country’s ailing government officials because foreign medical trips are alluring tours?

Although fixing fault lines in governance, key to a better communal experience, is the responsibility of public office holders, it must begin in school. No government will operate better than its nation’s education system. No people will emerge a leader better than its finest constituent fabric.

Teaching - a Global Illusion

A colleague at one job-alike session shared how he walked into a classroom with a talking drum hanging down his shoulder for a lesson on rhythms. All his pupils were instantly hooked! Another music teacher would have rapped on in monotone – yes, rhythm is written in monotone, I know – the definition of rhythm and gone on to scratch a few sketches as illustration. You’re right: the children would have fallen asleep.

Understand, the boring teacher worries about content. (I agree, content is key.) The smart teacher stops to think of what might earn her the students’ attention. This is by far more important than your subject matter. Why? You may bag a Ph.D. in a strange subject. It means absolutely nothing to learners if you don’t get their attention first. If you do, ease into your subject. Only then would you ease-out of the rot that places teaching above learning – a global illusion!

Education in most of Africa still places superfluous emphasis on literacy and numeracy. This means society’s outcry over unemployable graduates may never fall on the ears of the continent’s governments. One needs not refer to under-funding and social vices which also plague our Asian counterparts. Recent news from out of India about how families and educators ‘enhance’ students’ performance is quite unpleasant, to put it mildly. Although erroneous instructional strategies ought to share in the blame, those of us in the vocation which clamours for memorization have forgotten that the industrial revolution informed our current school system. We see what we don't want to see and hope it can fix itself; what we see stares us in the face, yet we seem helpless to fix our mess.

Much coveted American education has been relegated into the background by a superior Finnish model. Breeding over-population in the midst of racial divide, plus stagnant funding and dwindling teacher innovation, inevitably result in such national retrogression of school systems. Political correctness does not wreck society leaving education behind. An x-ray beam on America, Nigeria and Britain would reveal that much even if it’s difficult to remember how it all began.

No, it shouldn’t be so easy to forget where, or why, we got here. The challenges posed by the evolving economies of England, Wales, Germany, France and the rest of Western Europe needed to be met. This object of functionality informed the school system which evolved, especially in nineteen century Britain. No one needs a study revealing a third of sex workers being graduates to understand that major education issues exist in British society. But why educational policy makers and school administrators fail to re-evaluate their systems in favour of functionality should worry twenty-first century teachers. Think of this as the purpose principle, our primary illusion, the thought that children go to school because the government says so.

Simply put, we shouldn’t be called teachers. We are learning aid givers whose students have come to learn so they may apply themselves to their world and leave it a better place for those behind. It is not so much what is taught as whether or not the transmission occurs. Did learners learn? We can’t afford to continue with all our attention on the teaching and the teacher much more than we focus our primary target, the learners. If we continue to reverse priorities we permanently engage a secondary illusion – the pompous principle. No, it isn’t all about us. Didn't Galileo say it all? "You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself."

Suppose I told you that I taught calculus to four-year-olds. Without thinking for a second, you would naturally question the possibility. But that’s exactly what many teachers do, in principle of course. We attempt to share complex unfamiliar content with young people who have no business whatsoever learning them. What if I told you that my puberty lesson with fourteen-year-olds was more interesting than my previous ‘experience’ with the four year old calculus class? Ah! You see. The fourteen year olds could relate to facial hair and round muscles whereas the four year olds could not make sense of my abstract further mathematics. The older youngsters could perceive my subject. In the case of the younger children, I had a round peg in a square hole. They needed to know certain things first before this would make sense to them. So, if the person for whom my subject is intended is unable to relate to its contents I don’t stand a chance. In other words, if my focus is me, I’m the same old teacher, a global illusion chief.

When I was a younger teacher, I could teach the major scale by sharing the number of notes needed, where the semitones occur and how these notes rise or fall, all in writing. Trust me, this is the worst way to teach that topic! Now, I simply slot-in a practice schedule. It never fails! When students play – if students play, how students play – learning occurs. I worry more now over if they learn than what I teach. They feel the key holes on their clarinets, hear the sound from their violins. As such they need not any teacher telling them the notes rise or fall. They literally see the semitones between E and F and can relate to B and C on the piano. They see the how in the what. The knowledge communicated in such a lesson will never be lost. They have indeed acquired a skill.

Perhaps I should state that to achieve this new approach we had to alter the curriculum. I’m ashamed to say I had to put up a good fight to get it approved. Why? We have processes! This is the process principle – our tertiary illusion. We have such process in place as if to ensure that students don’t learn, bureaucracy and all. We don’t want anything new, or we just want to kick the can down the aisle. Perhaps it would make sense next term, next session, next five years. Yes, we should check our processes and review them. The way we teach next academic year ought to be different from the way we taught in the last. (We are still teachers, rather than facilitators of learning. Wrong.) We prefer to teach. They prefer to learn.

They learn like a sponge on a wet table mops up the liquid. Assume the table to which I refer is the work desk of a visual arts teacher. When that lesson is over, he may succeed at squeezing out the water into a sink. Well, not the paint. It hangs in there. If it’s water-soluble, it may rinse off under a running tap. Otherwise, the precious sponge just got more precious with new colour. Thus must a teacher determine what students need retain for a short while different from what they need to hold on to for a long, long time to come. If he doesn’t, he practices the promoter principle – our quaternary illusion. Too long stories, too lengthy notes, too complex explanations, too many demonstrations, yet the salesman sells nothing.

All of our teaching efforts need to engage the transfer mode where students are able to use skills previously learned in other tasks. In twenty four years I have seen pupils who can define adverbs but are unable to pick them out of a sentence, let alone construct their own sentences with adverbs in them. You probably know nations in which engineers have been raised but whose governments contract foreign construction firms for infrastructural projects. This is the pointless principle – our quinary illusion – that doesn’t make me want to go to school.

It should not be mistaken for the purpose principle. The principle of pointlessness is what makes us study the subject we can’t apply, whereas the former helps us lose sight of the need to study in the first place. I love the part of Chinese education policy which emphasizes vocation, crushing pointlessness. We are not teachers because we teach, we are teachers because we help others learn, in which case we ourselves have learnt how to learn and can use that skill for the benefit of others. If we can get the attention of students who can perceive our content enough to internalize skills, retaining the most relevant pieces of information that makes the learner able to use it in other climes, we have made learning possible. But we can do more than that.

        We can create a curriculum that sees beyond today, realizing that we came to help learners learn, working through the steps involved in what we do as well as those for editing what we do and how we do it. We can evolve a system that does not clutter the path of learners with stuff they don’t need but offers what they might apply should situation changes. When we do, we would have challenged our faulty principles and moved beyond the worldwide illusion tagged teaching. We are not teachers, remember? We are aid workers in learning fields.

The Pianist's Parkinson's

He begins at the place others quit: rudiments. From then on to fingering and preparatory exercises up till his delight at his own first tunes, he pores through page after page of five lines and the spaces in between. The moment he begins mastering his favourite key of C, he has G to face and F to conquer or be vanquished by A flat. He runs at the scales to visit with masters before his age such that from his first day before a synthesizer to his first night at the concert grand, he has seen several years of assiduous rehearsals daily, knowing that a day missed is made up for by another or two. With time he reels out the notes of his first performance piece.

Oh the monster-saint of performance! Should he show up as a demon, the child pianist is cast out of the concert hall to seek some other career. Should he grace it as an angel of the spotlight with the blessings of Beethoven and Chopin, unto us is a child of wonder born, and the grease shall be upon his knuckles that the feet of all la belle monde beat a path to the repertoire of yet another prodigy of awesomeness at the 88 keys. Performance is the place where he begins, the place where he peaks, the place where he flickers. Thus he approaches each piece as though it were a performance, always seeking to make the appropriate impression, whether it be in the privacy of his home studio or in the grave quiet of a packed Carnegie Hall. Whichever way it is: the pianist makes the performance or the performance makes the pianist, no one can tell them apart for nothing matters more than the ebonies, the ivories and the phalanges that make them sing.

Be he self-trained, gone through a school of music, exercised under a tutor or submitted to a mentors challenge in a church choir, this one man has endured a soldier’s regimen without a lash or a bullet wound. Yet there had been lashes of agoraphobia and the internal scars that curse the knuckles with pain, both from which he has been delivered. But never does he recover from the moment of hesitation before each first bar, the smoothness of a flawed scale flow, the sensitivity of replicated touch or the rigours of precision dexterity featured only in privacy. These constitute the pianist’s Parkinson’s―a caution to his soul, a quaking for his body.

So, with hundreds of tunes played, volumes of hymns read, scores of maestro classicals fingered and dozens of delicate jazz chords jammed, he arrives at a point where he seems to have seen it all. Nothing is sufficiently challenging anymore than the perfectionism of a sniper. The great eagle begins to clip worn quills pouring out his own masterpieces of improvisations for the next generations of pilgrims seeking conquests of mythical and mystical legends of the score.

Learning Styles

I once invigilated a Basic Seven physics examination in which candidates expressed frustration about what separation technique worked for which mixture. Out of sympathy I asked how they were taught. I’ll paraphrase their response – to my shock – “He (the teacher) explained it all to us. Then he gave us a note.”

While that may serve some students well, it certainly wouldn’t count for knowledge with the rest. Reason? Students learn in different ways. Whatever happened to little old experiments?

Learning styles are the different methods of processing new information. This means that different people take in, understand, express and remember information in different ways.

There are four predominant learning styles: visual, auditory, textual (read-write) and kinesthetic.

Visual learners learn best through what they see. A teacher should therefore use pictures, diagrams or charts to reach them in class, otherwise he will lose them. Using a symbol to represent a section of the note, or to drive home a point, help them more than anything else. The colours in your note will also help this group. A video clip, a sketch of cartoon or whatever else can spark up an image of the new information in their head will not be lost on visual learners.

Auditory learners need to hear you speak. The teacher’s explanation must be clear and concise. They don’t care so much what your diagram is saying so long as you say it clearly in a well-articulated speech. Where words fail the teacher, she can employ a song and be certain to have effectively communicated to this group of learners. An audio works perfectly with them. They are excellent listeners. They would rather read out loud to themselves or to the whole class than read with sealed lips.

Read-write learners may be better referred to as textual learners. Give them a note and they will be fine. Tell them to write down the idea in their own words and you are home and dry. Your job gets very well done when you give them an ebook to work with. The dictionary is their friend. They love glossaries. Give them the assignment to re-arrange a list and they will think you’re the best teacher in the world.

Kinesthetic learners love to do things. If the teacher can plan hands-on experience into her lessons, they’ll be jolly well ahead of the pack. It makes sense to include an activity or two into each lesson. Let them use their hands, eyes, legs, etc. Practical work and projects help these learners. They’ll stay awake if there is something to do – walk, hop, skip, jump, ride, climb or run. So, the teacher can take the entire class out of the room into the school field for a science lesson, get them to plant the bean instead of draw it. (The latter would serve visual learners better.) Otherwise, the lesson – every lesson, or even school life – is boring! This is why it’s so important to have sports in school or an entire category of learners are left out of the school experience.

Today’s Treasured Teachers

To be better teachers, it becomes imperative to align what goes on in our minds with what goes on in the minds of our pupils/students on the one hand, and to project the appropriate image of an expert on the other. But how can we begin to do these if we don’t even know who we are?

We are teachers. We teach so people can learn. However, learning is a complex process. A teacher cannot analyze everything that goes through the mind and body of the learner while she teaches one lesson. Yet we must try to pass the message across either despite what goes through their minds or using what goes through their minds. As such, the role a teacher plays in school are varied and webbed.

ü  The teacher should become less of a provider of information and more of a facilitator of the learning process.

ü  The teacher should assess students after assessing the curriculum.

ü  The teacher should be resourceful and be a developer of resources.

ü  The teacher should become more of a planner and a better role model.

This is how we become treasured teachers. When parents come in, they want to talk to you. When management is troubled, you’re the go-to guy. When students have real issues, they seek you out. When you’re buried in work helping one kid, the other one is very jealous. You become truly indispensable. These happen because, you’ve built into the fabric of your personality that special something which stands you apart way ahead of the lessons you teach.

We transform into treasured teachers because we understand how learning takes place. We understand who our students are as individuals. Their style and strategy for taking in new information, retaining it and using it in other settings is borne in our minds way ahead of the lesson delivery itself. Our lessons are planned with these styles in mind, otherwise learning becomes difficult, if at all possible.

           But as the teacher adjusts the delivery of his content to suit learners, subtle nuances come to play. These must be brought under the control of the teacher so that what is not intended does not become a clog in the learning wheel for that day, or even the entire academic year. Therefore, apart from what is done, how it is done is of some importance to the learner. Think of this as the packaging of the product.

The Learning School

Beneath the base of a rich and robust curriculum, past the point of prolific and passionate teachers, beyond the bond that binds playing and spirited pupils, learning will only become the experience of all when we learn what we should have learnt thirty years ago. Thirty years! That’s how long it’s been since Howard Gardner shared his Frames of Mind with us: That one child plays the piano while the other can’t even hum a tune doesn’t make the latter any less intelligent. We haven’t learnt that, have we? Or why in the world do we have a ministry of teaching rather than a ministry of education?

When a people can afford to throw a party over a tenth rather than demand a rightful third of the national budget, its graduate can rejoice in the rot that they went to school to learn to read and write. If yesterday’s child had a school to learn in, today’s adult would have a house to vote in. That is a tall order since our schools still admit based on numeracy and literacy scores, yet lack the courage to disclose the content of our disrespect for the child who is naturalistic. Why we don’t care to check for existential intelligence at our facility’s entry point is one question parents never dare to ask. We don’t even have a curriculum that covers these. Our teachers gave us notes to copy. We expended the last three decades re-inventing the wheel.

Isn't it possible that the child who wears our labels appreciates the Fibonacci sequence much better than we understand the subject we got our degree in? But we seem faster at springing standard stigma for the pupil who can learn in the way we can’t teach, than transforming our schoolrooms into the learning fields they were meant to be. Simply put, we don’t know the child. Or did the world in the classroom really know George Washington and George Patton? Did the school system know Whoopi Goldberg or Steven Spielberg? Was there a palette for Leonardo da Vinci or a brush for Pablo Picasso on their first day at school? The business ideas bubbling in Richard Branson’s brain didn’t get an air in class. Neither did those industrial sparks flickering in Henry Ford’s. If teachers were endowed with the gift of dyslexia, school life would have been better for Tom Cruise and Thomas Edison.

For each of these geniuses is proof that the learner can learn without the teacher or, at the least, that learning fields exist because of learners. Socrates was right: “You can’t teach a man anything.” So, if all we do is rote and ‘perennialism’ perhaps we may learn that there’s a learner who needs more pictures. There is another who needs a song. There is yet another who needs to jump or dance or fiddle with stuff. And every lesson can reflect all these as much as the learner must be encouraged to find his own level within the group.

Thus must a teacher transmute her head knowledge into a spongy setting for every different learner with the creativity of a master sculptor entrusted with the blade of a knife and a piece of mahogany, so that a reconstruction of the scenario to suit the learner who learns in his own way is accepted as crucial to a learning school.

There’s a problem though: assessment. Can today’s learner whose learning environment has finally been adapted to suit his learning style be fairly adjudged to have learnt anything under examination conditions? Yet assessed, he has to be. Therefore, our assessment strategy ought also to improve. If a child may record what he learns in his own way, he should reserve the right to reproduce it in a way he chooses.

We have delayed the learner for thirty years. The earlier we changed our frame of mind, the better for the world. Teaching as a professional practice gets easier when learners learn in their own way.

The Teacher as an Opera Conductor

The demands of the teaching profession circles around learning. Without a doubt the teacher is a learner. The graduate who signs up for this call becomes that learned teacher with time. Well, who then is the learned teacher?

1.       The learned teacher has learned how to learn.

2.      The learned teacher has learned how to unlearn non-working learning.

3.      The learned teacher has learned how to help others learn.

4.      The learned teacher has learned how to check if learners learned.

5.      The learned teacher has learned how to find how much they learned, if at all.

6.       The learned teacher has learned how to address whatever hinders learning, if any.

To transform into that learned teacher therefore, s/he adjusts from day to day, sometimes an inch at a time. The profession demands it. When that adjustment is done, s/he turns something like a successful trial lawyer, a genius neurosurgeon or somewhat skillfully, an opera conductor.

If the opening speech of a trial lawyer has no bearing, the entire case falls flat. If the first thing a surgeon does in an emergency is all wrong, the patient dies. If the structural fiber a civil engineer designs into the foundation is weak, no matter how great the building is, all the people in it are simply waiting for a collapse whether they know it or not.

There’s no point painting a dreary picture. We are teachers. Let’s think of exciting things, say a theatre, an opera. If the first scene is boring, the audience is forever lost! So, the play’s director – in our case, the teacher – must ensure that s/he captures the attention of every person in the audience. In an opera, that first piece of music is called the overture. It must be beauteous so that everybody who bought a ticket is entirely and irresistibly raptured in the production.

The job of a teacher in school is something like that of a conductor of the symphony orchestra. The members of the teacher’s orchestra are not violinists, flutists, trumpeters and percussionists. They are the styles, sequence and strategies of learning that come to play during the lesson. They are the comeliness, comportment, methods and management principles with which he carries himself from day to day. Members of her audience – pupils, students, parents – would feel they have been served well when she has assessed her students and they have come out in flying colours. But that’s not where she began, although assessment is a crucial part of the learning process.

    You might want to see an opera. I recommend Guiseppe Verdi’s La Traviata available on YouTube.