It's All Greek to Me!

I'm currently reading Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!, about the experiences of a Nobel Prize winning physicist.  Last night I read about his teaching experiences at a university in Brazil.  I'll include a LONG excerpt here and then pose a couple of questions for discussion.

When he was done with his teaching at the university, he was asked to deliver a speech to the students, profs, dean, etc.  

Towards the end, he said "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!" 

I can see them stir, thinking, "What?  No science?  This is absolutely crazy!  We have all these classes."

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books.  There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil - why is that?  So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't any children studying Greek.  But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek - even the smaller kids in the elementary schools.  He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?" - and the student can't answer.  Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?"  The student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrrrr-up" - he tells you everything , word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs.  They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds.  Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids 'science' here in Brazil."

. . . Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything. . . . One student who had done well in class stood up and said, "I was educated here in Brazil during the war, when, fortunately, all of the professors had left the university, so I learned everything by reading alone.  Therefore I was not really educated under the Brazilian system."

Observations/Questions 

1) Tests may tell us if students can answer a few questions, but not if they can raise them.  While we as language arts teachers are charged with the responsibility for helping kids learn to read and write, that task isn't simply a matter of teaching decoding and subject-verb agreement.  It is the more important - and more difficult - matter of teaching thoughtful reading, questioning, reasoning (Probst). 

2) We have all dealt with students for whom the A was much more important than the understanding or competence it was supposed to represent.  For the past few years, I've tried to convince our administration that time in the day for SSR (sustained silent reading) would be beneficial.  Students enjoy a self-selected book and read it because it's meaningful, pertinent, challenging, real, etc.  Not because I assigned it to them.  The pressure we teachers and students face to do well on standardized testing has become so intense that our ability to teach and students' ability (and desire) to pursue knowledge and learn how to think critically have taken a back seat.  *How can we meld the demands of our administration, district, state and federal mandates with what we know is best for our students?  Mustn't we build upon our students existing strengths and not search for holes to plug so that they might score "Proficient" on the STAR?

3) The Brazilian student who claimed that he learned because his professor was not there to teach, but by reading alone poses an interesting question.  Can a great book alone serve as a great teacher?  Is a mentor a necessary component in learning from that great book?