It is important to learn the logic behind a problem rather than just imitating the steps and 'managing' it.
I’m sure some of you have enjoyed the challenge posed by a difficult puzzle or a particularly difficult climb, or playing an opponent who is just a little better than you. In each of these cases you are pushed to discover a new limit that you hadn’t known, a new level of capability that surprises you. You come out of such experiences tired but glowing, perhaps physically (and mentally) exhausted but with the sense that you’ve just refilled your reservoir of energy.
Now think about the last time you really grappled with a mental challenge. I’m not talking about memorising long paragraphs for a history examination or repeated solving of math problems so that you know the process by heart. I’m talking about getting inside that concept or process in a way that you understand it, so that the knowledge comes from struggling with the problem rather than simply learning how to imitate the steps.
You’ll probably find that even without realising it, we are mostly following the second way of doing things. We’re content to accept a logic that someone gives us and imitate a process rather than getting behind it to understand the logic.
‘Managing’ learning
This method of “getting educated” has been drilled into us, right from when we are told to go by the book with our answers or repeat a poem with a certain cadence or strictly follow a laboratory procedure without being told (and warned not to ask) why.
As a result, we forget that learning by ourselves and in itself can be personally rewarding. Unfortunately, we also find that we can get where we want (and what we want) by “managing” formal education. All it requires is for us to learn the tricks of presenting information in a way that mimics understanding. We look at previous projects to model ours on; we press our teachers to give us “study guides” that can take us carefully through the forest of ideas and facts in a way that we can map the examination perfectly.
So we come out of degree colleges and even research programmes with high grades that actually have nothing to do with our grasp of the field we have supposedly “mastered.” Teachers and so-called mentors are entirely complicit in this process. We’ve effectively encouraged mediocrity in the system by showing that “managing” it gives results that are good enough. After all, we don’t fail anyone or even give bad grades to papers that only show faithful “reproduction” rather than any evidence of understanding the underlying concepts. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference, and so we end up not bothering, most of the time.
Work hard
What has ended up happening is that we never learn what it means to work hard to understand. We study just enough to pass a test, to score decently or enough to take us to the next level; our eye and mind constantly on where it will get us rather than what we are learning. We forget that real learning comes with the struggle to understand, to make the problem ours in a way that the solution is also ours, to try to work it out so that we really get it for ourselves. Games that are too easy bore us after a while, so why is it that we are constantly looking for easy ways out in our education? There is a joy in getting something right after trying hard, just as coming out of a strenuous workout in the gym can be both exhausting and exhilarating. That’s the kind of challenge mountain climbers love, and researchers look forward to. It’s also true that if it is too hard, we get turned off after a point, or we ask for help — and the latter option is always possible in an educational scenario. Of course, all learning cannot be fun or even intellectually exhilarating. Some things are just plain tedious, and there’s no getting away from the repetition that is needed to internalise important facts or learn formulae and procedures by heart so that we can efficiently apply them. But if we’ve worked through the logic that lies behind these procedures, we will most likely be able to apply them not only efficiently, but also creatively.
The writer teaches in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, and is editor of Teacher Plus, www.teacherplus.org. Email: usha.raman@gmail.com
Source : The Hindu | Daily | 25.11.2014
