"None but geometers may enter"
This was written boldly atop the entrance to Plato's Academy in Athens. I'll tell you the significance of this in a while.
Many people think Science is a tall order for them, in fact, insurmountable. Their notions may be due to teacher's incompetence. Science isn't difficult (okay parts like Modern Physics may be too abstract) and do Science on a daily basis. A child who wants to learn how the lightbulb turns on can go like this:
Observation - after the light switch is flicked or pressed, the light turns on.
Hypothesis - the switch is responsible for the light turning on.
So he watches successive flicks or presses and with the gathering evidence, concludes that his hypothesis was valid, at which point it turns into a theory and a standard then. Look at your life and see how many times you do this, the underlying concept. You most assuredly do this, this is how Science is, basically. If only it was treated as such and not deified like it is in schools.
Now, the quote; I mentioned it because education in general may be simplified if we incorporate the use of learning styles. There are three recognized learning styles (there are others which I think are valid but aren't well-accepted in scholarly environment), visuospatial, verbal and kinesthetic. I am a visuospatial thinker and learner primarily and a verbal one closely secondarily. That then, fits me into Plato's bracket of geometers. When I was taught addition, it didn't make sense to me until Abacus was brought for me to visualize the adding process. A number meant squat to me. To date, a deluge of numbers annoys me, I hated the binomial theorem in Secondary School and still do. However, I loved the probability theory which had to do with manipulations that really didn't need numbers. The binomial theorem is translatable to spatial terms but can you do that in school? The fact that there's even a 'formula' is annoying. If you connect my mind to a PC and observe how I think, you would see dots, lines and all sorts of plane and 3D figures. Alas! I am a geometer!
In our classroom environments, we alienate different learning styles, different thoughts or ideas (nice that the blog is subtitled 'freethinking', innit?) and make students less capable than they are. Such alienation dampens confidence, reduces esteem, and by such reduction in belief, the student denigrates himself so that he cannot engage his normal processes (e.g. learning style) and do well as he is wired. Or, he denigrates himself and himself comes to believe that "he is no good" so that he becomes a bad student. This mode of operation of class affects too many of our students and makes us wonder how many geniuses are truck-pushers, mates and so forth, just because of an unaccommodating atmosphere. After all, it is just "what has worked" for us that becomes the standard. It doesn't make the different thought wrong, it doesn't.
If learning styles are more engaged, I believe our education would improve, and so would Scientific education. Scientific education would also improve if we just had more patient and humble teachers who would take their time to explain to students, to not think the students dumb and to make them know of the derivations to quell their misunderstandings. There is a particular line of thought that led to any given bit of information and it doesn't make any deviating thought wrong, it is what it is: deviant.
This was written boldly atop the entrance to Plato's Academy in Athens. I'll tell you the significance of this in a while.
Many people think Science is a tall order for them, in fact, insurmountable. Their notions may be due to teacher's incompetence. Science isn't difficult (okay parts like Modern Physics may be too abstract) and do Science on a daily basis. A child who wants to learn how the lightbulb turns on can go like this:
Observation - after the light switch is flicked or pressed, the light turns on.
Hypothesis - the switch is responsible for the light turning on.
So he watches successive flicks or presses and with the gathering evidence, concludes that his hypothesis was valid, at which point it turns into a theory and a standard then. Look at your life and see how many times you do this, the underlying concept. You most assuredly do this, this is how Science is, basically. If only it was treated as such and not deified like it is in schools.
Now, the quote; I mentioned it because education in general may be simplified if we incorporate the use of learning styles. There are three recognized learning styles (there are others which I think are valid but aren't well-accepted in scholarly environment), visuospatial, verbal and kinesthetic. I am a visuospatial thinker and learner primarily and a verbal one closely secondarily. That then, fits me into Plato's bracket of geometers. When I was taught addition, it didn't make sense to me until Abacus was brought for me to visualize the adding process. A number meant squat to me. To date, a deluge of numbers annoys me, I hated the binomial theorem in Secondary School and still do. However, I loved the probability theory which had to do with manipulations that really didn't need numbers. The binomial theorem is translatable to spatial terms but can you do that in school? The fact that there's even a 'formula' is annoying. If you connect my mind to a PC and observe how I think, you would see dots, lines and all sorts of plane and 3D figures. Alas! I am a geometer!
In our classroom environments, we alienate different learning styles, different thoughts or ideas (nice that the blog is subtitled 'freethinking', innit?) and make students less capable than they are. Such alienation dampens confidence, reduces esteem, and by such reduction in belief, the student denigrates himself so that he cannot engage his normal processes (e.g. learning style) and do well as he is wired. Or, he denigrates himself and himself comes to believe that "he is no good" so that he becomes a bad student. This mode of operation of class affects too many of our students and makes us wonder how many geniuses are truck-pushers, mates and so forth, just because of an unaccommodating atmosphere. After all, it is just "what has worked" for us that becomes the standard. It doesn't make the different thought wrong, it doesn't.
If learning styles are more engaged, I believe our education would improve, and so would Scientific education. Scientific education would also improve if we just had more patient and humble teachers who would take their time to explain to students, to not think the students dumb and to make them know of the derivations to quell their misunderstandings. There is a particular line of thought that led to any given bit of information and it doesn't make any deviating thought wrong, it is what it is: deviant.
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