Love Letters from Mars

I sat open-mouthed watching Carte Blanche recently as the programme gave the run down on ‘Curiosity’, the aptly named buggy which was scheduled to land the following day on Mars. This compact car-sized biochemistry lab has been travelling for the past seven months through approximately 150 million miles of space – a journey which would take the average jetliner 17 years of non-stop flying to achieve.

I am informed that messages to Curiosity take an average of 12.8 minutes one way. This means that scientists on earth had to foresee any eventuality or disaster 25 minutes before it happened. As an erstwhile Latin teacher, I was incredulous. How seriously bright do these scientists have to be? Who invents a machine like this?

For two years, Curiosity is going to send test soil samples, take photographs and wheel itself around Gale Crater.  All information gleaned will be sent back  millions of miles to the eagerly waiting NASA scientists in California.

During a recent assembly, I reminded the boys of the remark made by Archbishop Tutu to them last term when he challenged the school that somewhere in our ranks there could be a Nobel Prize Winner.  As I was speaking to the assembly, I wondered whether there was also  among these 840 boys, someone who would one day say – as did one of the scientists interviewed on the Carte Blanche show -  that space exploration was something he had wanted to do ‘since he was a boy’?   Was there someone in the hall who would one day help with space exploration?  Create a new app for a tablet?  Discover a workable cure for cancer?  Devise an alternative form of safe and clean power? Design an innovative bridge?

I left the hall with shoulders proud.  What an awesome, inspiring and exciting vocation teaching is! A teacher somewhere had enthused a pupil to aspire to aspire to become that NASA scientist whom we saw on Carte Blanche.  How many boys in our classes, unbeknown to us, are similarly being stimulated and enthused to make a difference to our planet and to our communities?

As educators, in the truest sense of the word, we bear the responsibility of stimulating curiosity (with a small ‘c’!), of stirring inquisitiveness, of arousing passion.  Above all, the good teacher must create uncertainty in every lesson he/she presents.  There is more than one interpretation to a poem; more than one version to an event in History; more than one way to solve a Maths or Science problem.  Our pupils must be taught to challenge prevailing beliefs and ideas. Unchallenged dogma brought the world National Socialism, Apartheid, religious schisms.

I went back to some of the comments which pupils had written in their  recent appraisals of their teachers last term – some of which I have commented on in a previous Blog ‘To Sir with Love’.

‘He is not fair,’ commented a Grade 11 boy. ‘He is making us self-study.’

‘He gives us no notes,’ complained a Grade 10 pupil. ‘I find myself making my own notes.  I might as well not attend his class.’

One Grade 11 pupil was insistent that he needed a teacher who ‘would just give us the work so that we don’t have to think….’

A new Grade 8 boy grumbled that he did not like high school as his teacher persisted in explaining the work after they did homework rather than before.

‘I really don’t enjoy him,’ protested another Grade 8 about his teacher. ‘He keeps on making us read books.’

It is probably not what the boys intended, but to my mind they are describing outstanding teachers!

A recent letter from a parent after the June exams showed that we still have coaching of adults to do as well.  ‘My son hasn’t been given the same notes as another class,’ he reproached me.  I sniffed the possibility of a conspiracy theory at work among the Grade 11 history teachers where some boys were being encouraged to think and lesser lights merely spoon-fed….

Perhaps it is time for my Latin background to come to the fore:

The word education is derived from two Latin words : ‘e’ meaning ‘out of’ and ‘duco’  meaning ‘to lead’.  The responsibility of teachers is to ‘lead’ knowledge ‘out of’ the students - not merely fill them with information.  I once read a comment somewhere that true education was ‘lighting a fire, not filling a pail.’

‘Filling pails’ was surely what mass education was doing in Victorian times.

Are we being fair on our children if this is all we are doing in 2012? We are now 12% of the way through the 21st Century and we have to be careful that we are not stuck in 20th Century thinking – which it seems some boys in their comments above would love.  Those of us aware of the ways of boys, know that most of them would like nothing more than to take the easy route.   It is our role as adults to show them that Emerson’s  ‘road less travelled’ is actually preparing them better to be citizens ready for the real challenges of this 21st Century.

Tablets of the 19^th Century
 and the 21^st Century

The buzz word these days is the ‘flip classroom’.  What was previously done in classrooms in the past, we must now encourage our pupils to do at home – which now becomes an extention of the classroom.  ‘I did all my homework at school, Mom!’ must be a refrain discouraged in our homes today.   Homework in our 21st Century school must be where the day’s work and discussions are reviewed, where reading and research is conducted and where our pupils come to class on the next day ready to question, query, discuss and argue.

In a recent email to me by Jeff Fearon, past Chairman of the Board of Governors and currently lecturing to Science students at UCT while researching his PhD, he said:

We run extra classes on Saturday mornings for physics students who are battling with the work here at UCT. But there is no indication that this leads to any noticeable improvement. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that a false sense has been created that learning is taking place. What is actually happening is that students are just sitting there watching the tutors and lecturers solve more problems on the board... which is something they have already seen in lectures.

Until the student turns off the music, switches off the TV, puts the cell phone aside and in a moment of deep thought asks himself, "What does this equation actually say?" "What does this sentence really mean?" "Why does this event relate to that one?"... no progress is made.

At school, teachers often give explanations in class.  But often, even better work is happening outside the classroom.  For a number of years our Academic Committee have organised Bridging the Gap  sessions where senior academic pupils are at hand after school to give  assistance in any subject.   I was thrilled this year when two of our Prefects, Niall Marinus and Samir Daniels, organised Matric afternoon sessions where matric boys discussed academic issues among themselves  and helped one another in problem areas.

Now THAT is true education in the classical tradition of the ancient Greek Philosophers!

At a recent speech to Principals and Chairs of Governing Bodies in Cape Town, Penny Vinjevold, Superintendent General of Education in the Western Cape finished her address by saying, ‘ What good will it do a pupil if he finishes off his school career as a first team rugby player, but cannot write a love letter?’

That was probably not the fire to which I was alluding earlier on ….  but her point is taken nevertheless. What a wonderful legacy we current educational leaders would leave if our pupils departed our school gates after twelve years of schooling fully literate, numerate, emotionally mature, inquisitive and passionate young adults.

Maybe one of the Wynberg 2012 pupils will one day write a love letter back from Mars – from a space station he had helped to conceive.