I read Mohit's comment on yesterday's post and my own situation came back to me. I would like to believe I have always been a very curious person, had a 'why' for everything, and wasn't afraid to ask the teacher. I have also been in Mohit's shoes on being disliked by other students for this trait. In school I was the teacher's pet, in college the show-off, and at B-school the CP king. Looking back, it is easy to see that classmates saw me as a pain in the neck and my questions as counterproductive to the progress of the session. I also see that my questions were clearly unfair to people who had the issue already sorted in their minds. I was perhaps the catalyst to their zoning out.
This is clearly always going to be an issue in the classroom setup with one teacher and fifty students. With each of these fifty students at different points on the learning curve, any pace the teacher chooses to set, will be too slow for some and too fast for others. Too slow and they get bored. Too difficult and there might be despair. Both of these groups will disengage from the discussion. One answer to this dilemma would be to have smaller and smaller classrooms until we have one teacher per student, like at PhD level instruction. At primary school level too, there is some evidence that smaller classrooms allow the teacher to accord more attention to each student. However, while this approach might be effective, it may not be very efficient. A class size of one is surely sub-optimal on multiple counts. Not only would it become a scheduling nightmare in all cases except perhaps home-schooling, but children would also lose the benefit of social interaction with other kids in a learning environment.
Are we doomed to failure then? There might be a solution. One that was implemented for many years in schools of our parents' time but was disbanded later. When children in my parents generation moved from one academic year to the next, they were re-assigned to different classes or 'divisions'. The best students went to division A followed by the next best to division B and so on. Ostensibly the best teachers or rather, teachers who were better at teaching more advanced stuff were also assigned to division A. This made for a more homogenous group that was comfortable with a faster pace in the classroom. Conversely, of course, the students in division D could be taught at a pace that they were comfortable with.
The Singapore education system takes this one step further. The fastest divisions complete school in 10 years while the slowest divisions are given one extra year to complete the curriculum. Problem solved, one would think. But if this system works, why was it disbanded? That is a discussion for tomorrow.
3 comments:
Isn't the answer in this post itself?
"the best teachers or rather, teachers who were better at teaching more advanced stuff were also assigned to division A"
While the intention may have been to assign the teachers who were better at teaching more advanced stuff, I think it was seen as assigning the best teachers. That never goes down well with the masses.
Most cultures are designed to raise the downtrodden even if it means sacrificing the development of the advanced. This was the case even when physical strength was the measure of 'being advanced' and also today when mental intellect or financial status is the measure.
Whether it's a good thing or not, that's another post!
The system of segregating the "smart" ones out is something the students and parents find unfair. It's like giving up on a student - and parents will never accept that their kid is not "competitive" enough.
I've been thinking about this again of late. True Learning is really about discovering something and assimilating it into your own language. It is the second part that we fail at, because we've taken the idea of failure out of learning altogether. Further, discovery has to be individual. Groupthink promotes laziness of intellect.
I have a bit of an idea of how I'd want to design an ideal school experience, but that's for another time :)
The segregation approach is suboptimal for several reasons- probably why it has been phased out instead of becoming the dominant acceptable method. There is a solution to this conundrum- Trayi's school in Thailand implemented it really well- there were kids across the learning spectrum in the same class including children with special needs. However, even while following the same broad curriculum, the learning level was 'customised' to each child. So kids more advanced were challenged more, and kids with special needs were given additional support. Ofcourse the class sizes need to be small for this appeoach-'the upper limit on class size was 15 kids for 1 teacher plus 1 assistant.
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