Syllabus: Where More Becomes the Enemy of Learning

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“The view that everything of importance can be thoughtfully learnt by the 12^th grade – notice that I didn’t say ‘taught’ – is a delusion.” Well-known educator Grant Wiggins wrote that in 1989, long before Google brought knowledge to our fingertips. Today when Artificial Intelligence can give us almost any information and create information the way we want it, our education system still insists on filling the minds of our students with ‘knowledge’ and information. Ours is a very outdated education system.

Let me start with Syllabus today.

There is an overload of knowledge and information in our school curriculum. It is not just about the length of the syllabus: it is more about the crowding of concepts. Too many concepts bombard the students every day in school. On one and the same day, a grade 9 student encounters polynomials and their zeros in their math class, followed by equations of motion in physics, followed by solutions and colloids in chemistry… That’s just three periods. There are five more to go!

And there are many chapters in each subject, irrespective of the class. Have you ever noticed a class 5 student going to school in India? Their schoolbag is so heavy that their backs are stooped. The school student today is like a beast of burden, carrying a heavy load of books to school and back home. The burden of knowledge!

A lot of knowledge need not necessarily mean a lot of thinking. And that’s the crux of the problem. Are teachers given time to teach or are they driven to manage time? Are ideas given time to sink into young minds or does the class just rush past them?

Portion completed. That’s the most relieving phrase I have heard in schools throughout my teaching career. I’m speaking about higher classes. Portion completed doesn’t mean comprehension achieved. Tests are carried out too – to reward recall, not the higher objectives mentioned in the last post. There’s no time to consider the higher objectives. Teaching is done, tests are conducted, the result is good. This creates an illusion of learning where everyone – teacher, student, school – moves forward, but little moves inward.

What is achieved in schools is ‘surface learning.’ Call it fragmented knowledge, if you wish. Ideas that don’t talk to each other. [We’ll be dealing with interdisciplinary teaching later – how one subject can/should complement another.] In the mind of a class 9 student cited above, there is no link between polynomials, Newtonian motion, and colloids, though he has written a lot of notes on them in the last three periods of 40 minutes each.

Children stop asking why because they are not given the time to ask even what does this mean?

I mentioned polynomials and their zeros above. Let me go back to that topic for a moment. [By the way, I taught math for 8 years before I switched to English and that’s one reason for my love affair with math. Another is that math is the queen of science, or as a popular Malayalam movie says, “Mathematics is the pulse of the cosmos.”]

p(x) = x – 3 is a simple polynomial.

Its zero is 3, because if x equals 3, p(x) = 0.

But what? What does all that mean to a class 9 student?

Make it meaningful.

Let’s rephrase that polynomial p(x) = x – 3 this way:

A local shopkeeper tells a student:

I’ll give you I unit of pay for every hour you work. But the first 3 units go towards the employment contract and training.

·      x = number of hours worked

·      Pay received = hours worked – 3

Now ask the student how many hours they will work and what they will get in return. There’s relationship emerging which the student will identify easily.

Polynomials are relationships.

If you work only 3 hours, you get zero, nothing, in return.

If you work less than 3 hours, you lose your work (minus one, or minus two, whatever – depending on how you tell the story).

At 3 hours, you don’t lose anything. That’s the break-even point.

So, what exactly became zero here?

Zero is a threshold, the beginning of a profit story, the point where your profit emerges. At this threshold, you begin to win, your graph begins to rise above the X-axis.

 

Do you know why most teachers won’t go into such narratives? There’s no time for all that. They have to complete the portion. Have you seen the size of the textbooks in the higher classes? It’s intimidating. Stories will flee seeing them.

Reduce the content. More content doesn’t mean better education. Less content can help deepen the student’s understanding and inquisitiveness. Students will make their own narratives soon even with the dreaded mathematics.

Understanding what energy is more important than learning ten formulas of kinetic, and potential and what-not energies. Understanding the causes and consequences of any historical event is far more important than knowing royal genealogies. Personal interpretation of a poem matters a world more than the teacher’s interpretation. [Translate this last sentence to religion, and see what that will mean.]

Let the content given in classrooms make sense to the student. Enable them to convert that into some personal narrative which in turn will expand into a cosmic narrative, hopefully.

Optimum content will make learning more meaningful and joyful, and teaching more dignified.

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PS. I have forgotten most of the math I taught at school long ago. Polynomials were my favs and hence I took the above example. I could take the binomial theorem as well. But not calculus, definitely.