Monday 13 February 2012
Friday 10 February 2012
Exercise for MS Word
HOW TO MAKE STUDENTS
COMMUNICATE
Speaking well is something that
most people recognize when they see it and here it, but very few have any idea
how it works or works. Children lean to speak from there parents and other
adults at an ago when the process is note open to their conscious inspections.
Later on, they may learn other languages as adults, but in most cares the
fundamental groundwork of language and concept acquisition happens by age three
or not at ale. As a result, moist of us are unaware of howl this happens, and
have no controller over whether the process happens wail or badly. If anyone
has any control it is the adults who tech us, though of course their is a grate
deal of controversy over the relative rolls of nature and nurture in language
acquisition as well as other in forms of leaning.[1]
Once we
learn language, the road is open for other skill to enter our knowledge bass.
All these skills, mathematic and scientific, operate over the language plait form.
But it is unfortunate that we expand a disproportionate amount of effort on
teaching these loiter skills but comparatively little on maintaining or
upgrading the plate from on which they depend. What is worse, most high school
mathematics or science teachers do not think it essential that they acquire
optima linguistic skills in order to get their subject accurse to students; as
a result they often ‘teach by doing’ with minimal commentary, or with
explanations not tail ored to the needs and capabilities of their listeners.
The students observe the teacher solving a problem or doing an experiment, then
try to duplicate the process.
This
‘learning by doing” is a good method up to a pint, but is open to abuse by bland
imitation; the student may get the right results, but that does not guarantee
that he or she understands what is being dun or why these results showed up. If
there is no ‘de-briefing’ session, when the students, having succeeded in
solving the problems, then go back and think consciously about what they died
to get results, the students may become quiet skilled at an unconscious label
without that skill being open to their own inspection and analysis. They[RBC1] will be able to salve complex problems,
but unable to verbally satisfactorily what they are doing. This failure is not
restricted to the scenes; in the humanities also, say in teaching grammar, very
often the teacher merely parses sentences and makes students learn the rules
for doing so, without any of explanation why this should be done or attempt to
mike sense of the logic of language. Should a student be trained by this method
become a teacher, they will in turn become the sort of teacher who taught them,
and the cycle continues. Most of us, even if we do not became ‘teachers’ in the
formal sense of the term, have to instruct our junior colleagues in the field
in which we do work. If we do not do this correctly, we are not getting the vest
out of our workers, and they are not achieving their pull potential. Some will
be able and intelligent enough to compensate with self-learning, but sum will
not.
Part of
the problem is engendered in the subject divisions-//partitioning what we are
taught in school. A question very often asked to muddle school children in this
country is: which stream will you choose science or hearts? Accordingly private
two shuns are arranged, correspondence coarse material is acquired, friends are
dropped or cultivated and study hours are fixed. The conscientious parent is
usually over-joyed if his or her child chooses the former stream. Depending on
the child’s preference, pore or unsatisfactory results in humanities and social
sciences are excused for ‘science stream’ students, while indifferent
performance in the sciences is excused for ‘artist stream’ ones, irrespective
of the fact that ‘arts steam’ people need to know how to do there taxes or
maintain their car, and ‘science stream’ people need to know how to write laters,
make presentations and inter act with people.
Given
that the physical world is somewhat more unforgiving than the world of people,
there is a limit to how fear ‘arts stream’ people can get away with
impracticality (though some of them are definitely stretching the limits), but
‘science stream’ people seem less worried if they have suboptimal communication
and people-managing skills. This is probably because it is less easy to
quantify the losses concurred through the lack of such skills. Also there is no
‘correct’ state that can be easily described; a presentation may be judged accept
able if the content is sound even though the presentation is bad, causing the
listeners to strain to construe meaning; the overall result may have been bet
if the presentation improved, but how much better could this particular
presenter be with the rite training? How to determine this without going
through actually the process of training? And if this cannot be predetermined,
how then does one take on the decision to spanned resources on train and how
does one know in advance what the return on expenditure will be? This makes
planing difficult and quantification of results even more so.
Most people would not argue with the necessity for communication in
principal, but they lraise objections when one descends to the practicalities. $$$
Science, the argument runs, is developing at such a rat and information is
burgeoning so rapidly that bidding scientists have no time for anything other
than learning their subjects and establishing themselves in the filed. The time
set aside for other skills has to be squeezed to accommodate these very
important and vital instruction-hours. Everything else must be an after thought.
There are several flairs in this argument. One of them is that, even on
its own terms, this form of teaching is failing to keep peace with scientific
innovation, both theoretical and practical, and is falling behind. Teachers
themselves admit that most of what they teach will be obsolete as soon as their
students grade wait or soon after, and what they are rally teaching is the
history of science. Granted that history is enormously important and that
unless one knows how a thing was done and why, one cannot comp rend how it is
done today, we still aren’t teaching students what they really need to know. We
are not training their minds to plan and think ahead, only to be containers for
‘facets’. We may spend a great deal of time in plugging the leeks and enlarging
the container, but what we are making is essentially a passive instrument. A
trained mend should be able to transform its contents in response to changing
needs and goals; it should not be a bucket, but a crucible.
Unfortunately, the damage is done very yearly. When we are first
introduced to science, it is as a collation of ‘facts’ about the natural world.
We learn how wither is caused by atmospheric motion, the way things be have,
how things were discovered or invented, what are the properties of various
materiel (usually given to us in long lasts which we faithfully commit to mammary)
and so on. But science is not about facts at all. Facts are, in a whey, the
byproducts of science, which in a way of seeing, a process of liking at things.
We are taut in school that science has discovered the ‘laws’ of the universe
and everything operates according to the lays. What we are not told is that
scientists don’t be leave in laws; they are constantly devising new tastes to
probe established laws and trying to poke wholes in the ‘facts’ that we so
reverentially memorized. Science is about doubt; about axing awkward questions
and then trying to take the answers to beets. The ‘laws’ are, in fact, merely
guidelines, and can be upset by anyone with a thought-experiment and a pill of
observational data. What is more, a ‘law’ does not describe what happens in
realty, except in a reductionist way. A law cannot possibly explain
‘everything’ about reality: that is not it’s purpose. Without reductionism, we
can’t deal with reality on any sensible way. [2]
For instance, the common wisdom is that
Newton’s laws tell us how, for example, a car with the breaks off roles down a
hill, but they won’t explain the pattern of dents it guts, the trajectories of
the gravel that it scatters with its wheels, why the car should happen to be
blue with white seat covers, weather the radio was on nor why it hats a
particular tree[RBC2] . For that we have to factor in the operation of
friction, the individual oddities of the car’s components, the bumpiness and
nature of the toad, the owner’s taste in car décor and music, the position of
the tree — in fact, a model of this particular incident hat was true in every
respect would be so complex it would be us less for understanding the incident
itself. Nevertheless, people continue to clam car insurance, and they can do so
because physical laws allay them to infer that the colour of the car is
irrelevant, but the friction coefficients of the tyres and brake shoes are not.
The essential fact of the car rolling down the hill depends on a few factors
which can be mathematically quantified. So when we say, ‘laws explain reality’,
what we meal is, ‘laws explain the bits of reality we’re interested in, and
allow us to ignore the roast’. Laws are shorthand, and which law we use depends
on which bit of reality we are after. This is all very will when we know the
answer in advance, as with the car; but when we are dealing with phenomena that
are not fully explained, unthinking thrust in laws is unwise. We heave to bee
alert to the vast con text that the law is signed to filter oat, because there
mite be something important in that context that we were ignoring, and which
has the potential to knock out or deeply modify our precious law. If we forget
this, we are liable to talk about ‘theories of every thing’ as though the
discovery of such a theory would explain everything about the wild, from how
some people can waggle their ears to why we get black holes.
[1] See Althea Gorgonzola, ‘Nature vs.
Nurture: A Conspectus’, in History of Childhood Learning, ed Friedrich Taterhed
(Ithaca:
Missing Kink Press), pp. 17-34. FOOTNOTE 2: H. Wenufinish, The Importance of
Student Feedback in Classroom Management, Teaching Today Online, <http://www. Teachingtoday.org/articles/hw1.htm>
[2] This example is taken from Horatio van
Arnihorn, ‘How Many Theorists Does it Take to Crash a Car? Physics, Philosophy
and the Problem of Knowledge’ Interdisciplinary Studies 45(9) 87-101.
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