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.