As a student, I always struggled to sit in a class and listen to a teacher talk at me for hours on end. For the whole day. Day after day. Year after year. Did we honestly think that adolescents want to sit in front of adults in a boring atmosphere surrounded by friends and listen to what they have to say?
As a teacher, I always think to myself how can this session be so different to what the students expect, that I will be able to engage them, and allow them to choose to step into the learning experience?
Over the past decade or so, much has changed in traditional schooling. Not just what we value as subjects taught, but also the way we teach. It is no longer as taboo to be creative, instead of scientific. There used to be an implicit understanding that if you were good at Maths and Science you were clever, and if not, you were stupid. Now instead, schools are beginning to measure “different types of intelligence”. That is much more helpful than branding a child incapable. No child is incapable. It is part of the teacher’s job to assist their students to discover their innate abilities.
The other factor is the way we teach. Failing schools and derailed students has forced us to re-evaluate the way in which we transmit information. Simply telling over information is not an effective way for the majority of students to learn. The teacher must speak the language of the times.
One example I love, from our Jewish heritage, is the Oral Tradition. It was originally all verbal. Nothing written down. Firstly, take a moment to appreciate how cool that is. A whole corpus body of knowledge that you couldn’t find on Wikipedia. It was just there, hidden in the minds and hearts of those who trained themselves to commit it all to memory. Cool. Secondly, it was fluid. The Mishna for example, was written in shorthand, to be memorable, sometimes choosing brevity over accuracy, in a calculated attempt of the author to provoke a question-answer dialogue. And lastly, the examples used in the Talmud are often simply speaking the language of the generation it was codified in. Meaning, had the Talmud remained a purely Oral Tradition, we would not learn “If my ox gores your cow, and the cow has a foetus inside, if the cow dies, how much does the owner of the ox owe and why?” we would probably be learning something like “If my Range Rover hit your BMW, and the BMW had an upgraded turbo booster, which was damaged, how much does the Range Rover owner owe, and why?”
The point is simple. Teaching is more of an art that a science. Instead of seeing the teacher as the source of all power and information, there to bequeath the ignorant audience before him; rather see him as the facilitator of engaging those in a dialogue of understanding through questioning and experience. That would be a totally different learning experience.
It would be worthy to note at this stage, with Pesach fast approaching, that the whole concept of Seder night is engaging the audience in a first-hand experiential taster of what was. Our Masters teach us that we are meant to feel as though we left the slavery of Egypt. A big ask for such a privileged generation. But they taught us how to do it. We re-enact the whole story, with props, food, wine, and stories. What could be a better way to learn.
