When I was in school I used to hate classroom discussions. The subject always devolved into who's more intelligent, boys or girls, or whose innocuous comment was actually indicative of closet racism. I could get that kind of stuff on the street. I thought the purpose of school was to be taught by people who know more than I do.
A while back I put this opinion into a blog post, and to my surprise, it provoked some pretty interesting replies. One commenter was obviously a teacher. He said that he could tell that I never had any first rate teachers in school, because if I had I would never have questioned the value of discussion. He said a good teacher guides the discussion. The idea is to take a cultured, articulate, and well organized mind (the teacher's), and show the students in detail how that mind handles the topic at hand. It can only be properly done in groups small enough to allow some personal attention, and only with motivated students. Amazing!
Well, the guy called it right. I had some teachers who were okay, but none who were really first rate. There just aren't enough first rate teachers to go around. The mind boggles to think how fast you could learn something, if you had the personal attention of someone who was really skilled in that subject. And that brings me to the point of this post: teachers aren't able to give you individual attention...but tutors can.
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I'm a huge believer in tutoring. It's not something that's only for slow students, it's something for the the brightest kid in class. There's no faster way to learn than to have someone personally talk you through a problem and digress if need be to teach you something you failed to pick up earlier. In the case where you already know the material, a good tutor can put you on a whole different level by exploring interesting tangents or by putting the material to practical use. A motivated student combined with a motivated tutor is a powerful combination.
Schools like Oxford used to teach almost exclusively by tutoring. There were regular lectures by professors, but the real education took place in the student's own quarters, arguing with, and being prodded and interrogated by the tutor (the don). In Japan after school tutoring is common, even for gifted students. I wish it were more common here.
There's another good reason for tutoring. If tutoring were widespread, if it transcended the remedial and got into some meaty subjects, if it was handled, not by the school bureaucracy, but by free agents and by private industry, then we'd have a chance to re-introduce imagination and competition into the schooling process. Who knows? You could even have tutors like the ones in the illustrations for this post!
15 comments:
Well said, Eddie. I hate classroom discussions that devolve into a whole bunch of meaningless nonsense that not even I can understand, like the daily conversations in my guided study class (usually about politics, video games, or music that they hardly know anything about, and my teacher just lets this go on day after day, unless the student is really disrupting class.) or even some of what goes on in language arts class, when it seems that people are merely competing for bragging rights, rather than actually wanting to learn about the said material.
I've never had to be tutored by someone by the way, since for the most part, I've always done pretty well in school, but your post made me really think about how effective the tutoring at my school really is. The school always brags about how they have higher SAT scores than every other school in the county or the state or etc. and how they were voted one of the best high schools in the country by Newsweek magazine, etc., when they never really teach students about competition or imagination too much. What do you make of this?
I WISH I had teachers like the photos above, but instead I get fat, old, grumpy, milddle-aged women that hate their job and want to quit badly.
I actually had some pretty good classroom discussions in high school, but in college I always hated them. I tended to prefer giant, anonymous lecture classes where someone with more education and knowledge than me would spell out exactly how it is, was, and ever should be... and then afterward I was free to think about whether I actually agreed with the ideas or not.
I think the thing that really derailed it were the people who had what I call "Gold Star Syndrome"- people who built their self-esteem solely on the basis of grade school teachers being shocked, amazed, and flattered that someone actually knew something about the material, and carried that on too late in life, wasting everyone's time. I hated those people in college. I think that if I'd taken a fifth or sixth year as some folks do that I would have finally realized my dream of being able to psychically transfer my (then numerous )hangovers to frustrating people.
Roberto: It seems to me that class discussions are best handled in a rhetoric class, like they were in Greece and Rome. There the subject at hand was less important than the presentation. You learned to be eloquent, and to think on your feet. For the purpose of class, how you said something was more important than what you said.
Look up Quintillian's book (Quintillian = Roman rhetoric teacher in the time of Augustas) and see how he handled class discussion.
If you want to teach yourself rhetoric look up Demosthenese' "On the Crown" speech (which for comparison should always be accompanied by the speech of his adversary). Try to analyse how Demosthenes structured his argument, and say it out loud like an actor would. Be emotional when it's called for. Also go to YouTube and look up Paul Muni's courtroom speech from the Dreyfus movie.
Class discussions that aren't aimed at rhetorical improvement are hard to pull off. A famous teacher and writer, Mortimer Adler, tried teaching that way in a famous documentary series for PBS, and even he failed. He kept the focus on philosophical issues like the meaning of beauty, but the focus was too narrow, and the discussion was awkward in the extreme.
If I were to lead a class discussion...and I don't know enough about rhetoric to handle it that way...I'd debate another teacher for half the class then invite the students to participate in the second half.
I'd deliberately avoid subjects like politics and music, which people have automatic and culturally conditioned responses to. I like the idea of debating things like whether or not "Catcher in the Rye" is a good book or whether Macbeth is a good play.
In a student debate I'd make students take the side that they disagree with. If a student didn't argue it forcefully, with good examples, even though he completely disagrees with his own point, I'd give him a failing grade for that assignment.
Yeah I seriously think that there needs to be more competition in the teaching industry. I'm in college and I constantly have a hard time with my writing classes because all of the discussions end up in biased messes. How the hell am I supposed to properly debate with someone who's argument always boils down to "my religion says it's wrong".
Also, another thing that I noticed in high school was that teachers (at least in my school) wouldn't try to really teach classics at all. It was all about trying to relate to the majority of students first, and then teaching second. We never read any classics in literature class, instead we had to read book after book about how hard it is to be some whinny minority teenager in the white man's country.
Allen: Aaargh! I know what you mean. A lot of school=propaganda nowadays. Maybe you could suggest debating about whether Shakespeare's Brutus was right to kill Caesar, whether Pope was a good poet, whether Blackstone's Commentaries are relevant..things like that. You're not getting a real education. Better suppliment school with self education.
@ Allen, that's unfortunate. I had the luxury of reading lots of Shakespeare's, lots of Greek mythology, Romantic period poetry, and learning Latin and Greek roots, i did have to read medieval lit which I absolutely loathed. This was a public school and I graduated in 2007 or 8? I have to admit that it's really all about the student, my sister is an English teacher and despite how knowledgeable she is and willingness to work with them she has difficulty having them get into the work, parents are also not much help either (in fact, they can be darn right horrible). Since I started school recently I've made sure to talk to teachers after or before class about... well anything. Some of the stuff I already know so I talk to the teachers and ask if there's anything I can do to "shake it up" a little bit. I will say I don't miss high school at all and I'm looking forward to half the people in my program to drop out of it for more dedicated students and more time with the professors.
thats a great Idea if I ever heard one. I think you are definitely on to something.
In the 60's, I remember getting shown The Hand by Jiri Trinka on more than one occasion in big assemblies in the school's auditorium. Its the film where the huge hand breaks into the puppet's house and gradually destroys him. The film was made in Czechoslovakia during Soviet occupation and its about authoritarianism. Of course no background information was given to us, 6 to 10 year olds, no context; so what were we to make of it, except that they the adult teachers were the hand and we the kids were the little man about to get quashed.
We were right!
I've stumbled upon podcasts as a way to further my education after college. There a many good ones out there that focus on history and philosophy, and I can listen while doing my daily tasks like dishes or drawing. I now know more about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra than I ever thought I would. Some of these podcasts take the form of a discussion like the ones you are referring to here. Actually, there is a philosophy class at Oxford that has been recorded into a podcast, complete with student questions.
@thomas Aaah, The Hand! That's a great film. I didn't watch it myself until I was like 14, and I instantly got the symbolism right away. I mean, it's kinda blatant.
But anyway, my English Literature teacher gets us into class discussions all the time. I'm currently in the middle of my A-levels so there aren't many of us in the class, and my teacher is a very... opinionated woman, to say the least. When I debate against her, I really have to think on my feet, because she's VERY strong-willed person and it's pretty difficult to argue against her. Certainly makes me thinking about what I'm saying and question my rhetoric skills.
There's also the fact that students can be afraid to ask questions in a group, for fear that the others will make fun of them. Not everyone picks things up quickly. As a slow, stupid ex-student, I know this!
I never liked classroom debates. All we ever seemed to debate was corporal punishment and abortion.
WOW! There are a lot of great comments on this topic.
Tutoring is becoming a HUGE trend these days. Parents are either hiring tutors or using tutoring services like Sylvan and Kumon for students of ALL abilities - it's not just for students who are struggling in class anymore.
I disagree about introducing competition and the private industry into schooling, Eddie. I think public school is the most important thing is the world, and the appeal of public school is that's it's put together without a lot of planning and every sort of works together to make this little thing as best they can, and so you get students going into old buildings with new paint jobs over 25 old coats of paint that are chipping and dripping, and the teachers are sort of band together to make the kids learn. "Everybody join in," you know?
Jorge: Fascinating! I don't agree, but you do a good job of presenting that argument.
Bureaucracy is a big problem in schools now. Teachers like Marva Collins had to start their own schools in order to try out their ideas. Escalante's main problems came from other teachers, not from his students. In the present system there's no room for an imaginative teacher to break out and try something new. It's a system that penalizes innovation.
Even so, we all know that traditional teachers still manage to do a lot of good, and I'm a big believer in reinforcing the part of the present system that already works.
The thing is...after twelve years of schooling you should be a doctor or a skilled worker. It shouldn't take twelve years to teach the 3Rs.
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