Patient Problem Solvers
I have been a fan of Dan Meyer for about three years. I should say, I’ve been a fan of his blog. As a math teacher, he is constantly challenging both his students and his blog readers to think in new ways. Recently, he did a talk for a TED event. In it, he talked about the need to fundamentally change the way we teach math. He coined a phrase that stuck with me (and others from what I’ve seen on Twitter). He said that we needed to develop our students into “patient problem solvers.”
I totally agree.
So I’ve been thinking of ways to make kids patient problem solvers in language arts. We drill and kill all these rules for spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and more. But I’m afraid kids lose a fundamental truth needed to understand their importance: Why are we doing this?
With text messaging and other forms of quick, concise, truncated communication, kids have lost sight of what makes text messaging work. Even those messages have certain rules. Even abbreviations take on a consistent form in order to be understood. One simply can’t shorten LOL to LL and have anyone understand what it means. By the same token, I still get a kick out of using ROFLMAO with people that have never seen that acronym before. It is total Greek to them until they understand the words behind it.
This led me to wonder about going back to Greek in order to get kids to understand the need for grammar rules. In college, I had three wonderful years of Koine Greek, the derivative of Greek used to write the New Testament. The original Greek texts were written in all capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. I wondered what would happen if I gave kids the note below on the first day of class?
After kids have taken a shot at re-writing the paragraph in a readable form of text, I would want to know the answer to one question: What general rules would you develop to make this and all writing easier to read? I would hope to hear rules about spacing between words, capitalizing only the important words, capitalizing only first letters, adding different punctuation for sentences and questions, and more.
Perhaps by struggling with the why of grammar we could develop patient problem solvers that could correctly use the how of grammar.
What do you think?
Between your ideas about grammar and Dan’s ideas about math, it seems to boil down to letting kids rediscover the rules for themselves. Maybe that’s how education can be rebuilt from the ground up (‘scuse passive voice): the adult world needs to have more patience, to focus less on filling kids with facts and more on letting them take the time to discover what we think they need to know. It does seem like the lessons would be more lasting. Chemistry, for example, seems to be one of the few subjects that uses self-discovery and experiment as a teaching tool.
For grammar specifically, I never got a solid grasp on all the English rules (such as dangling modifiers) until I started learning foreign languages. That’s when it all made sense, but it was less a case of applying rules I knew than of rebuilding my understanding of English rules through their necessary use in other languages. And this from someone who made her living for several years as a textbook copy editor
So it does seem like teaching your kids through your Greek texts is a great place to begin.
Cheers,
Antonia
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