Science and Language

From the time I started teaching English in school, I’ve been hearing complaints from science teachers and also a few mathematics teachers that their students got poor grades in the final exams because of their students’ limited knowledge of English. I usually don’t take such complaints seriously. I take them as convenient excuses, the normal human tendency to pass the blame on to somebody else for one’s own inefficiency.

In the first place, my students score excellent grades in English which means their knowledge of English is good enough as far as the Education Board’s standards are concerned. Secondly, I started my career as a maths and science teacher and got brilliant results from my students whose knowledge of English was not particularly great.

Those who know mathematics well will also know that mathematics is a language by itself, a language that has almost nothing to do with the normal human languages like English or Chinese or whatever. Mathematics is the language of abstract and logical thinking. It uses its own specific terminology and diction. And even grammar. Simple mathematical terms like sine theta, integration, bell curve, angle bisector… won’t mean anything to a person on the street who is dealing successfully with normal human affairs. The very kind of thinking that higher levels of mathematics require are not human, so to say.

Let me give you an example of mathematical language just to show you that an English teacher has nothing to do with it. 

This is the quadratic formula that every high school student knows. The student’s English teacher may not know it at all. The English teacher is not expected to know the quadratic formula, let alone the far more complex formulae and equations of the higher classes.

If a student doesn’t do well in maths, the maths teacher should check her own teaching skills and methods.

The same goes for science. Physics is conceptual subject, as abstract as mathematics and more jargon-filled too. When a physics teacher speaks about momentum, she means something quite different from what the poet means. The poet will speak about the momentum of your headfirst dive into darkness and the physics teacher may not understand that. The physics teacher will speak about ‘mass in motion’ and the English teacher may be left wondering what that is.

I’m giving the most elementary examples. At the higher levels – senior secondary, for instance – the differences become complex and highly accentuated. And at still higher levels, the normal human language becomes irrelevant!

We speak about multi-disciplinary approaches to teaching today. Indeed, all subjects are related with one another. But the relationships are not linguistic, they are conceptual and notional. They help us to see certain underlying connections in our day-to-day realities. It doesn’t mean at all that the chemistry teacher can rely on the English teacher to clarify how elements combine to form compounds that have no qualities of the elements.

Since I mentioned chemistry, let me end this with a chemical equation which will mean nothing to an English teacher. 

In the end, when the exam results come, it is better for the concerned teachers to sit and check themselves, their teaching strategies and methodologies. Instead of blaming the English teachers.