The Learning and Teaching Sharing Session "TEACH with Your Own P-E-N" held last Monday was both fun and stimulating. During the session, Ricky and Barbara shared how each of them approached challenging issues in teaching, such as handling students' queries about assumptions of statistical formulas, motivating students of different backgrounds to learn accounting * , etc. I was particularly drawn to the relationship between students' awareness and understanding of assumptions behind the subject matter and higher order learning/ thinking.
On Tuesday, I had a dinner with my former student (whom I had taught a long time ago) and his family. During our conversation, we mentioned casually that offices and schools in Beijing would still be open because they did not have Christmas. His young daughter jumped up and asked: "What? Why is there no Christmas in Beijing?" Obviously a deeply held assumption has been challenged, and the girl was really puzzled, if not upset. And this can be an excellent moment to start telling her about culture, religion (or even politics and business if she were older).
I teach economics, the queen of the social sciences (unanimously agreed by economists and universally disputed by psychologists, sociologists, and other social scientists…) and I find that students either a) hate it or b) love it. For both groups, the most profound learning often takes place when they come round to accept the opposite of what they have always assumed about human behaviour: a) when the first group appreciates the powerful predictive power of the assumption of human rationality and b) when the second group realises the limitations of the very same assumption they have so proudly held.
Wience shared the film "Life of Pi" in Issue 12 of this bulletin. I also find the film very inspiring, and one of the quotes that struck me was:
Adult Pi : "Religion is a house with many rooms."
Writer: "But with no room for doubt?"
Adult Pi: "Oh yes, room on every floor."
Christmas is round the corner, but as professional teachers, we have long accepted that whether the assumption "There is Christmas." holds or not depends on the exam timetable, so let me wish you EITHER
a) Merry Christmas! OR
b) Happy Marking!
*Another issue about assumptions here – whether a teaching method is motivating or not depends on whether the assumptions about the backgrounds of the students behind that method are met in the real classroom.