Without knowledge the world is a grey place. We see a plant as just a plant with a stem and green leaves. We see a cloud as something that is above us. There is no sense of wonder. Our world is a normal, boring sort of place.
It is only with more knowledge that our world regains its colour, its magic. Suddenly a plant is a wondrous living creature, with roots capable of crushing stone in their relentless search for water and nutrients and with leaves that are little powerhouses that use the energy from the sun to turn nutrients that we cannot absorb into food that we depend on. Without this food we could not survive. Everything revolves around them. Through this knowledge we have regained wonder.
A cloud is sheer magic with water vapour hitting invisible dust particles high up in the air and becoming liquid water around them. They rise and fall in the cloud, collecting more droplets as they move, until finally they are heavy enough to escape the cloud and fall to earth, providing essential water to plants, animals and humans. You can read the history and nature of a cloud by its appearance. An anvil head on a grey, toweringly high cloud means you may have a thunderstorm about to happen; feather shaped clouds mean wind at high altitudes. A cloud shaped like a lentil has just been pushed up a hill and mountain before escaping over the top.
The phrase ‘Dreaming the earth’ comes from Visnu, who dreams the world into existence. I feel that children dream their own world into existence, with all its colour and wonder, by learning and by experiencing. They are born in a basic world, but each bit of knowledge, each Ah, that is how it works! moment adds colour to that world. For this to be effective, teaching should be fun and promote the excitement of science and maths as tools to make our world richer.
Teaching should not involve lots and lots of bookwork, but rather a combination of information, practical experiments and art and craft to make the connections between what children already know and the new information. These sessions should be full of fun and noise and activity. When the weather is good the sessions should be held out of doors, if at all possible, to make the connection with nature stronger.
With tutoring this is harder to achieve because tutoring sessions are by their very nature different. Tutoring involves following a program set by someone else, through textbooks, but even here more areas of the brain than just those concerned with reading and listening should be used. Large pieces of paper can be used to draw diagrams and pictures to show the connections between one subject and another, in a way that linear textbooks cannot provide. Mind mapping is a brilliant tool, not in the structured way that a lot of schools try to teach at the moment, but rather as a way of learning. Mind mapping can help tremendously with studying for exams. Before even starting to do any revision a mind map can be drawn to show everything you already know. This makes it obvious what bits really need to be revised and cuts down on needless reading of material that is already understood.
With maths tutoring and teaching it is essential that the concepts behind the maths are understood. I am aware that the most popular maths tutoring schemes at the moment focus on repetition, repetition and repetition. Obviously repetition is necessary and desirable but it makes no sense if the underlying concepts have not been made clear. A small example is multiplication. I have time and time again come across children that do not understand that multiplication is a form of adding up. Without that concept it is hard to bring across how to calculate areas of triangles, or even rectangles and squares. This then has to be taught by rote learning rather than by understanding. And the problem is perpetuated. No wonder so many people hate maths and feel that they will never understand it. Maths isn’t really difficult; it is made so by early concepts being taught by people that do not really understand them themselves.
Teaching is an art. It may not be understood to be so by most people, but remember your favourite teacher? The one who made every subject interesting…
