Teach them to understand...

Spoonhead claims he has a certificate in English proficiency. I haven't seen the certificate yet, but when he speaks, you will think English deficiency was his major. His conversational language skill is as rusty as the old wharf at Barra and you know why, because in school, he was only taught to memorise grammar rules in order to pass the exam, as if the art is not as important as the rule.

So Spoonhead is what happens when the teacher teaches his students to just memorise concepts, without helping them to think beyond the book, without using analogies as much as he can, knowing that people, especially kids tend to understand more when you use explicit representations, or cite known similarities to support what they are being taught.

Once I was assisting some kids with a certain primary school English passage. Unlike what they were used to, I said first, we are going to translate the accompanying photograph orally, and by their keen faces as we engage in conversation, I knew I was getting the understanding that I was trying to inculcate. So even before reading what was before us, we were able to extract and talk about not only the key words, but also new ones that they would come across in the passage.

Since the picture was about a hospital, these elementary school kids were able to know what an ambulance is, a stretcher, the difference between a medical doctor and a doctor because of a doctorate degree, etc. even a stethoscope became a part of their vocabulary. In the end, reading the passage became fun and effortless, not like it was with my junior school classmate who when he sees an unfamiliar word as he reads, he will say in Mandinka: "Nmalong" (I don't know) and move on.

I don't know how many teachers are aware of the significance of the pictures in those primary school books, but I am telling you now that they are placed in there to supplement the information being read, so that it can be understood more easily, and to make the words, terms and concepts therein less complicated than they may seem on paper.

About complicated concepts with small meanings, let's take "bank reconciliations statements" in accounting for instance; unless the kid learning this concept knows that reconciling is just about bringing two things into agreement, and that it could be about figures, ideas, people, nations, etc. unless that is clear, the kid may assume that there is no alternative way to reconciling except that one formula that he's caused to memorise.

To conclude this long piece, I am not saying this will transform your educational system from doom and gloom to bloom, but I believe it can help produce thinkers instead of tinkerers, and robust learners rather than robots. And for the record, I am not a teacher. I am just a concerned guy who aspires to be a parent someday.