High Cognitive Minds

I remember being asked "what, do you think you're smarter than your teacher?" in an attempt to make me comply or conform or behave somehow.

I realized a couple of months ago that, with some distinct exceptions, I probably was. I know without a doubt that I'm far smarter than most of the professors I've come across at the local community college.

The lesson should be that smarts don't automatically confer authority, but how do you teach that to a nine-year-old kid?

Being a complete introvert helped me keep my mouth shut most of the time. But when I took some community college courses and realized that I knew more than a couple of the instructors who were supposedly teaching me, that pushed toward the decision that I didn't really need a college education.

For a nine-year-old, some education in psychology, which I mentioned in an earlier post, would help in understanding the role of ego in relation to authority.

i had that exact problem in junior year of high school. was sitting in chemistry class, teacher was telling the students something that i knew was outdated and not exactly true. (she was teaching the niels-bohr theory of the atom's structure, that there was a completely spherical nucleus, then concentric rings on which electrons travelled...) i raised my hand and asked her, "if i actually looked inside an atom, is that what it would look like?" she could not give me an answer, it was like, here a student was asking a question about what she was teaching that wasn't straight out of the textbook, and she had no idea to respond. i brought up recent advances in quantum mechanics which'd shed new light on the structure of the atom. i asked her how the niels-bohr theory of the atom compared with other competing theories. i wasn't doing this to question her authority, i was honestly interested.

it was at this point that she told me to just accept what i told her and not ask questions. i looked at her, not understanding, floored by what she was telling me. i sat back, said alright, and from that point on was incapable of mustering any respect for the educational system i was put in. too many moments where any individuality of the student is squashed, and the emphasis is on parroting rote lines devoid of understanding, falling in line.

Wouldn't it be nice if teachers didn't let their egos get in the way? What's wrong with admitting that you're just not up to date and would welcome hearing from a student who has a strong interest in a subject?

Hello Catana,
the more I read your articles the more I'm convinced that you'll tremendously enjoy reading Marvin Minsky's "The Society of the Mind", if you've not already did.

Society of Mind is one of those books I've always meant to read. Maybe some day I'll actually get around to it. But thanks for the reminder -- I just put it near the top of my reading list.

Whetting your appetite, I quote from 18.8 "Mathematics made hard": "In real life, our minds must always tolerate beliefs that later turn out to be wrong. It's also bad the way we let teachers shape our children's mathematics into slender, shaky tower chains instead of robust cross-connected webs. A chain can break at any link..."

We can use mathematics as a metaphor for learning in general, though for me it was literally years of struggle and frustration. Little did I know that I was incapable of learning rules without context. Most of "education" is nothing more than "do step A, then step B..." Why? Don't ask. What does it mean? Don't ask. Just do it.

The expectation that teachers keep students in line is the reason I am not a teacher. For three months, I was an instructor of a business training course. Fortunately I was not watched closely by the management because I failed to enforce penalties for not completing homework and deviated from the canned curriculum when I thought it was irrelevant. Requiring adults to do homework exercises seemed degrading. The curriculum was outdated, as it concentrated on retail businesses when the majority of the students planned to start service businesses.

Have you seen the Beyond School blog? (http://beyond-school.org/) There are some interesting views and ideas there.

Thanks so much for the link to Beyond School. How could I have missed that? Of course, the internet is full of nooks and crannies where treasures are hiding. What a find! Lots of reading ahead.

Homework, even for adults, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it should be relevant, and advance understanding.

My husband was first a high school teacher, then a community college instructor. He was a wonderful teacher, the kind who would probably be fired today for refusal to stick to the curriculum guidelines. If you can find a situation where you're free to teach in whatever way works for the students, it can be a great career, but that seems less and less possible these days.