A student who once taught came to my office and asked some questions to the current political science teacher, and the teacher's answer was, these questions will not be examined, why do you ask so much, do a few more questions. This is a student who likes politics as a subject and likes to think deeply about some issues. I remember when I first took the politics class of this class, it happened to be this student who said to me: Mr. Liu, what is the use of expanding so much in class?It is better to talk about a few more questions and leave more time for students to memorize more knowledge points. After a semester, the student changed his opinion, adapted to my teaching style, and gradually began to think about some questions that go beyond the exam to connect with his own social and life perceptions, and in the final exam, the student also obtained a good test score.
When I talked to this student's political science teacher later, I specifically asked how the student's political science Xi wasThe teacher said: The political grades are not bad, but I like to drill the horns. In the communication between teachers, we will often hear teachers say that those students like to drill the horns of the bull. When the teacher uses the word "drill the horns" to describe it, it often means that the teacher denies the student's behavior. What kind of questions did the students ask that made the teacher label the students as "digging into the horns"?
I've always wondered what kind of question that student asked the politics teacherIt turned out that the teacher told the students after introducing the basic schools of philosophy in class that materialism is correct and idealism is wrong. The students wondered: if idealism is wrong, why are there so many idealistic philosophers, and many of the great philosophers in history are idealistic philosophers?True philosophy is the essence of the spirit of the times, but is idealistic philosophy the real philosophy?
When a student learns Xi periodic law of chemical elements, when he reads the periodic table at the back of the textbook, a question arises in his mind: Is there an end to the periodic arrangement of chemical elements?If there is an end, where is the end?If there is no end, the half-life is getting shorter and shorter, and there are still conventional chemical elements?When a student asks a question to the chemistry teacher, the teacher should give positive encouragement to the student, who is good at finding problems, but the teacher's answer is: How can you think about these questions, can you solve the problems that the chemist can't answer?Don't think about this kind of question, just calm down and do a few more questions.
An important concept of the new curriculum is to let students take the initiative to Xi, discover problems by themselves, think about problems, and solve problems. In this case, the questions generated by the students themselves will inevitably go beyond the narrowness of the test proposition, and the teaching thinking that is Xi to the test-taking mode can easily stifle the students' interest in exploration, and define this behavior as "drilling the horns" and give it negative. Under the shroud of the test-oriented education ideology and evaluation system, the content of teachers' classroom teaching beyond the scope of the examination is often "not doing their job", and students will naturally become "drilling" when they ask questions that will not be tested in the exam. Only by liking a subject will students take the initiative to think and ask questions that they cannot find answers to in textbooks. The answers to these questions may not directly help students improve their test scores, but they are conducive to cultivating and stimulating students' interest in learning Xi, ultimately allowing students to achieve good results, and even making students love the subject for life, which happens to be the key to becoming outstanding talents in the professional field. The denial of the educational concept of "drilling the horns of the bull" undoubtedly kills children's hope in this regard.
I'm reminded of two math lessons I had more than 100 years ago. The first class is a primary school math class, and in the first math class after the child enters the school, the teacher teaches the child to learn 1+1=2, and a child stands up and says: Why is 1+1 only equal to 2?It can also be equal to 1. The teacher thought it was strange and said to the students: How can 1+1 be equal to 1?The child said: Two candles can be melted into one. As a result, the teacher thought he was deliberately causing trouble and threw him out of the classroom.
In another junior high school math class, a student had doubts about the teacher's saying that two parallel lines would never intersect, and when he saw the two parallel lines that the teacher had drawn on the blackboard, he stood up and asked, "Teacher, will the longer lines intersect?"The teacher had no choice but to extend the parallel lines to the edge of the blackboard. "What about a little longer?The teacher extended the line to the corner. The student said, "What about going on a little longer?"As a result, the student was blasted out of the classroom by the teacher.
In the teacher's educational concept, these two children undoubtedly belong to the type that likes to "drill the horns", so both children were blasted out of the classroom by the teacher. Maybe we think this way of dealing with it is a bit excessive, but the concept is that we agree with the teacher's way of dealing with it: deny, hit or ignore it. When we know how these two children grew up, maybe we will reflect on our own teaching philosophy. The child who thought that 1+1 could equal 1 was Edison, the inventor of the electric light, and the child who doubted that parallel lines did not intersect was Lobachevsky, the founder of non-Euclidean geometry, and in Roche's non-Euclidean geometry, two parallel lines could intersect in a surface. It is in the reflection of the traditional education model, European and American education often does not focus on conclusions and results, but pays attention to the thinking process of students to understand knowledge, and to experience the happy process of learning Xi. Rather than trying to establish a uniform textbook or a single standard answer, many developed countries have instead provided a broad basis for interpretation. Albert Einstein said he feared that when he woke up one morning, the entire edifice of physics would collapse. Skepticism and criticism thrive most broadly on this basis, and people ask many whys not only for what is unknown, but also for everything that is conclusive.
In China, since ancient times, the "dignity of the teacher" is destined to such a pattern: teachers are "preaching, teaching and solving doubts", and in order to be competent in the work of "solving doubts", teachers cannot teach things that are inconclusive and can be discussed, but must give students accurate and unquestionable knowledge, otherwise it is "spreading confusion with confusion". With the introduction of the new curriculum, although students have achieved formal equality in terms of personality and legal status, what teachers teach is still indisputable and unquestionable in the transfer of knowledge. Our teaching is still about first presenting an unquestionable theory and then using that theory to explain the relevant phenomenon. What questions do you have about the unquestionable?If you want to ask, you can only ask yourself, why can't you even understand what has been given the only correct answer by predecessors?Isn't it too stupid?Why be embarrassed?As a result, some good students in the eyes of the teacher are born: they have a very strong understanding and ability, not only do they have no doubts about the content of the lecture, but they also have few problems in understanding these unique, definite, and conclusive things. The students who are able to understand the true meaning of the great pioneers with such difficulty are of course very good and intelligent students. As a result, those children who "drill the horns" are excluded, attacked, and become "outliers" in the minds of teachers, and they are destined to become failures in the test-oriented education evaluation system. Yuan Longping, the father of hybrid rice, recalled his student days and said that the math teacher taught the mantra of "negative negative is positive", and the students completed their homework according to the rules taught by the teacher, and no one raised doubts. Yuan Longping wanted to know why the negative number and the negative number multiplied would get a positive number, and the teacher had no way to answer, just asked him to memorize it. But this spirit of questioning has made Yuan Lao an internationally renowned master of agriculture. Einstein's Collected Works records a passage from Einstein: The problem of time and space is clear to many people, but he has never figured it out. This is by no means stupid, for a person who can study Kant's Approval of Pure Reason at the age of 13, it simply means that he has his own unique view of Newton's view of space-time, which can well explain why it was Einstein and no one else who created the theory of relativity. It is for this reason that many scholars point out that it is more important to ask questions than to solve them. From this, I think of the student who thinks about the rationality of idealism, and the student who looks for the end of the periodic table of chemical elements, whose "drill the horns" actually means their real love and love for the subject, and their spirit of exploration and innovation that is not satisfied with the existing theories. Instead of blaming them, we need to reflect on our own concept of education, and with the call for innovative talents in the era of knowledge economy, it is time for our education to really change.