These were all badly badly mistaught subjects. To me, and my personal learning journey through the goddamn education system, at any rate.
Take Chinese. I found myself rather amused by yet another new revamping of the Chinese education system (headlines today.) It’s about time, one part of me says, and the other part says, why the hell did I miss out on this, why was I so misunderstood for what, 15+ years?
It’s known that you pick up languages most easily as an impressionable child. Children have a natural knack for it. Adult learning is harder. Apparently when I was young, I used to gabble to my grandmother in Cantonese fluently. To fix this, my parents spoke to me in English. Always English. To each other, maybe they would use a mix of Cantonese and English. I read English books from the age of 2.
Is it any wonder that I end up totally fluent in English, capable of understanding basic conversational Cantonese (but I get lost trying to follow a HK TV show) and entirely flounderingly helpless in Chinese?
My primary school education consisted of script-writing and studying strokes. (I thought it was pretty cool, actually.) I think I won an award for neatest script somewhen in my Tao Nan years because it was kinda fun to pay a lot of attention to the funky writing/drawing. Basic conversational ability in Chinese was ASSUMED.
Well, duh, I couldn’t say a word in Chinese oral. At least without painful stuttering that would cause the teacher to wince visibly, and flinching every time I mangled a word (did I mention my tone-deaf mom who can’t pronounce tones tried to tutor me in Chinese?)
Coupled with a mom-influenced perfectionistic desire to be ‘leet’ (no mistakes, ever!) and a chronic introverted shyness that took maturity to overcome (‘needs to speak up more in class,’ ‘needs to participate more actively’ showed up on my report card for years :P), this was a fast track to associate Hell and Torment with the Chinese subject.
Oh, and what did we study in the Chinese textbook? Some stuffy fuddy duddy Confucianist moral tales about “long long ago, in a distant village/ancient province of China…”
And it got exponentially worse as the years went by, since the foundations were assumed to have been absorbed. (Mine were always teetering like a house of cards. Best case scenario too.)
*sighs* I dunno that the new modern way of teaching Chinese is the right way to go. I don’t think it would have personally cured my subculture minority problem.
Sidetrek: Funny story, someone used the word “lifestyle venue” recently in a conversation and I had to go try and find out the meaning of the word. It apparently involves things like going clubbing, pubbing, food and drink, shopping, mall-walking, sports and other such mainstream pursuits. *blinks in polite puzzled bemusement, hiding incomprehension*
But hey, it’s gotta be better for the majority since it becomes more relevant… so good on them for revising the Chinese syllabus.
For my weirdass left-handed American-trash cyberculture self, I think the only thing I learned from my torturous Chinese education were things like: how to face being a complete failure, how to realize that different people had strengths/weaknesses in different areas, how to vaguely comprehend audio Chinese for basic survival, how to pretend invisibility and deafness in class, and how patently borked the Singapore education system is where university entrance is predicated on passing the mother tongue language.
Fuck ‘em. Helloooo California.
It’s kinda ironic, but when I was in Berkeley, I admit to peeking at the “Learn Chinese” textbooks and going, wow, I wish I had a course like that. One that actually, you know, used the tongue I understood (ENGLISH) to teach me the other (completely alien) language with a bridging method.
That’s one of the things I still cannot comprehend about the way they teach languages here, it’s a complete immersion style (even in German class). Hello, throwing people into the deep end might maybe help 90% of the population to learn how to swim fast. What about the 10% you just -drowned- from pure panic?
I found a Learn Mandarin podcast recently that was very cool. Learn at your own pace, it used English to teach, structured in bite-sized chunks and so on. If I had the time (it’s November, there is no –time-!), I would be listening to it pretty often. Cos it’s relevant to me. And self-motivation is a far better way to learn.
Mebbe I would have been more inspired by studying the Tao Te Ching. Or ancient Chinese inventions. There were some really interesting bits of Chinese history – wars, the Great Wall, etc. Ironic that I learned most of them from the Discovery Channel and other English media. Ah well.
Mathematics. Another little pet peeve of mine. Taught with no relevancy to real life. I know I stopped listening at about the quadratic equations stage. Let alone sin and cosine. After that it was just Ten-Year-Series focused exam-strategy based on memory work, recognition of the type of problem, equation plugging and calculator punching.
I still don’t think I’m ever going to recognize or understand the complexities of certain abstract graphs, even with physics real-world examples helping me, but I’m willing to try now and then. And ever so often, I tell myself, I really must learn statistics the proper way and understand it. It makes crystal clear sense for the duration of a good lesson with a good teacher, and for the five minutes after, and then it just fogs up again and I go…awww.
And so, in my usual roundabout long-winded story fashion, we finally come to geography.
I especially mourn the failure of geography to inspire me.
I can excuse away Chinese for being a language skill, just like I can excuse away anything musical or artistic as me not being very good at it naturally. (This ‘natural talent’ thing is not really true though. More ‘interest’ and ‘practice’ related. I have a knack for 3D art, and from there I’ve learned color mixing concepts and so on. And in rare spare times, I realize I’m not that cruddy at computer art or even drawn art if I was willing to put in extreme amounts of time into it – like say, the extreme time I am choosing to throw into writing and Nanowrimo instead of art.)
I can excuse away mathematics as being too abstract for my brain to wrap around. Same as certain high level lofty subjects like philosophy. Just no interest in it too. Ditto things like sports, fishing and photography. I can maybe admire bits of it as a spectator, but I don’t have no passion for them.
But geography. Ah, geography. Isn’t it earth sciences? Isn’t it the study of societies? An interesting mix of cultural anthropology and physical science and biology? Of maps? These are all things that do fascinate me.
These are all things that are completely –relevant- to me. If I want to write stories, fantastical ones, especially – I world build, I draw maps, and it would be nice to actually understand the real world concepts behind them.
I never travelled in my youth, but even then, if I had photographs of cool geographical features, it should be marvellous to behold. Awe-inspiring. Fun. Now we even have Google Earth, so that we can stare at anything we wanted in the comfort of our own homes.
But you tell me the word “geography,” and I immediately wince and go “eeew.”
I blame the teacher. I really do. This is a case of not managing to study on despite the teacher.
I used to like social studies as a primary school kid. And isn’t that just a mix of history and human geography?
I have a crystal clear image of secondary school geography. An OHP screen. Black text on yellow background. Textbook diagrams. The world’s most monotonous teacher (I forget her name, for obvious unmemorable reasons) droning on to herself, describing what could be read for ourselves.
I don’t think the geography text helped. I remember falling asleep on the bed with it on my chest. I woke with a crushing pain near my heart. Story of my experience with geography.
I distinctly remember the choice that lead me to choosing history over geog.
1) OMG, I’m going to face Ms. Completely Boring for two more years? And I have a choice to say, NO, THANK YOU?
2) Hang on, I wrote equal page lengths for this history and geog essay questions. And for each point I mentioned, I got one mark in the history paper. This geog paper gave me half mark each point, and expected me to regurgitate the whole textbook process of
Kinda sad in retrospect, when I look at it now. We were so exam-focused we couldn’t even concentrate on the content properly.
In History, at least the text was readable, and there was an in-built narrative structure in the chronological context. People (or at least, I) need story structures to wrap their minds around something.
And I mourn the loss of such a chance in learning geography. I can envision a beautiful educational structure that I think would have worked on anyone with an interest in writing and/or fantasy stories. (And doesn’t the whole world these days dig the Lord of the Rings?)
Imagine a term-long project. To create your own Lord of the Rings quest across a fantastical landscape. Talk about interdisciplinary.
First, you need to draw the map, of course. Could teach some art (hand-drawn, or computer-based.) Outline some continents. Wouldn’t it be a great time to discuss shorelines and plate tectonics and latitude and longtitude? Then sketch some plates.
Plate tectonics = oh yea, mountains, of course. Draw mountains where they would be.
Discussing world biomes leads you to populate the place with different kinds of vegetation. Rivers and other water bodies is self explanatory too.
One could search the web for pictures of different examples of special landmarks (mountains, waterfalls, cool rivers or forest clearings) and have them as scenes/waystations in your final project – story or presentation. Seeing provokes curiosity, wouldn’t you want to know how the heck the Grand Canyon formed…
Even human populations and social dynamics and towns could be discussed in terms of making little countries / fantasy races / and so on.
I think it would be an incredible adventure. (And Learning Journey ™ too!)
Mumbles, grumbles. Personal DecAdventureWriMo?
*slaps self* Ok, enuff procrastinating and thinking of other projects to start. 8000 words behind still. On the bright side, the news on the nanowrimo website appears to indicate that being 5-days-behind is perfectly normal and average. :(
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