Dull teaching kills the joys of learning in High school

David Mungoshi : Shelling the Nuts

In the last few years the outcry against poor ‘O’ Level results has been almost deafening. We can be philosophical about this or we can confront it head-on. I suggest that we look at a few unpleasant truths here. If we raise anyone’s hackles, then let it be. If today I stood in a classroom in some secondary school anywhere in Zimbabwe and uttered the words, “Carthago delenda est,” it is almost certain that some of the erudite boys and girls there would associate the sentence with the band Ade and its extreme music album “Carthago Delenda Est”. And they would say, wow, varikumberi! This teacher is savvy! And therein lies the tragedy. The secondary school classroom has lost its allure and attraction due to the mediocrity that is sometimes evident there.

A Form 1 history episode typical of Mr David Kwidini a teacher of no mean standing and later a Minister of Education in Zimbabwe was a lesson in pedagogy and style. He brought the story back into history in a very lively way, making the class sit on tenterhooks and creating suspense all through the lesson. No-one ever dozed in his lessons.

One day Mr Kwidini was teaching us about the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage and narrated Hannibal Barca’s journey across the Mediterranean and up the Alps with his elephants. We could almost literally see Hannibal with his victorious army crushing city after city in Italy until the Roman Senate found it necessary to debate the situation. During the deliberations, Cato, an orator of renown then uttered the famous “Carthago delenda est” sentiment (Carthage must be destroyed!). This lesson ended with Scipio Africanus outflanking Hannibal and instituting a scorched earth policy that devastated Carthage and ended the war as a contest. Hannibal had to retrace his footsteps back home to defend his country, but was routed at the battle of Zama.

When Mr Kwidini walked out you could have heard a pin drop. We were completely under his spell and history was alive, interesting and relevant. Not even a video could have had that kind of immediacy and intensity. That’s a far cry from today’s history lessons where the dictation of notes is the norm and everybody uses exactly the same words and often makes exactly the same grammatical errors.

My Geography teacher in Form 1 so vividly described how tea-drinking for the Chinese was such an important ritual that to them the English were like infidels for spoiling the pure taste of tea with milk and sugar. To this day, some fifty-one years later, I take my tea black with no sugar or sweetener.

Lesson to learn: how imagination can transform experiences into unforgettable life episodes, even in a classroom. And now willy-nilly, from a health point of view I am benefiting from what was an idiosyncrasy at the time.

Regarding imagination, Albert Einstein is quoted as having said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

How very true Einstein’s words are. People must have thought Leonardo Da Vinci was mad when he did all those sketches of flying machines. And when H.G. Wells wrote “The First Man on the Moon” his story must have sounded like sheer self-indulgence. Everything we take for granted today started as a wild idea in someone’s head. Einstein conceived of scientific ideas and let others do the laboratory work. To him science was also an art. Thus, he loved music and played the piano. When music is playing it is easy to get transported, particularly by music with elevated melodies. You then conjure up relativity, like Einstein.

Regrettably, not too many secondary school teachers are enterprising and/or imaginative, being so plastic in their demeanour and so predictable in their pedagogy: copious chalkboard notes or dictation of the same, monstrous ticks and crosses in pupils’ books, atrocious handwriting and dry, humourless teaching. Enough to make any student want to take the high road to freedom from boredom and tyranny.

In the age of ICTs this wonderful invention makes it easier for those who want a sinecure to survive. I might be lynched for this, but these things are unfortunately true in the majority of cases. Whenever I witness or hear of such lacklustre teaching, the words of the Pink Floyd song start ringing in my mind’s ear:

“Hey teacher leave them kids alone

All in all it’s just another brick in the wall

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”

Any teacher who is this lifeless and clueless is obviously the same as just another brick in the wall. He or she is like the insipid Mr Twemlow in Charles Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend”, a character more or less like the furniture in a room. God help the children that are so blessed.

In the Sciences they get away with murder, often arguing that there is no room for speculation or metaphor as if everything there is an exact science. The standard science teacher is characteristically a distracted “genius” waiting to achieve the Archimedean moment and triumphantly shout “Eureka!” after unravelling a hitherto intractable scientific problem. I had the good fortune to teach at a small secondary school in an obscure mining town with someone quite the exception.

Always diligent, he set up his experiments and tried them out well ahead of his lessons. When everything came together nicely he would shout joyously, “Gumbo, I’ve got! I’ve got it!”

India’s New Dehli airport often had freak accidents with Boeing jets grounded after taking off and colliding with a bird in mid-air. This I found rather too dense for me until I came across a forgotten old English reader in the storeroom. It had an extremely creative and humorous passage/text explaining the principle of hammers in “a playful fun way” that was altogether quite effective. Reader, let me tickle you with the passage now:

The Principle of Hammers

When two objects bang together, each plays the part of a hammer on the other. If you do not look where you are going and bump into a lamp-post, it hits you back with exactly the same force as that with which you strike it. The Hindus have an old proverb which says, “Whether the knife falls on the cucumber or the cucumber on the knife, the result will be the same”.

When a man is silly enough to lean out of a railway-carriage window, it matters little whether he is in a sixty-miles-an-hour express and his head hits a train standing at a siding, or whether he is in the stationary train and his head is hit by the express; the result will be the same — no hat will ever fit his head again!

The huge vulture called the lammergeyer knows all about the principle of hammers. Haunting the precipices of the mountains that stretch from India to Spain, he watches from some lofty crag the animals climbing about the rocks until he sees one in a dangerous place. Then he sweeps down towards it and startles it so much that the poor creature loses its foothold and falls to the bottom of the cliff. The vulture follows and, having gorged himself on the soft parts of his victim, proceeds to break up the bones and devour them. Should a bone be too big for him to break with his beak, he just flies up with it and drops it from a height onto a rock.

The vulture practises the same dodge with any tortoise it finds, and that is how the Greek poet, Aeschylus came to his untimely end. One day he was sitting on the seashore when a lammergeyer up in the sky was looking for a handy “anvil”. Far down below him, the bird saw the shiny bald head of the poet and, mistaking it for a nice white stone, dropped the tortoise upon it. Even the miser who killed the two birds with one stone and then wanted his stone back was not as economical as that lammergeyer which managed to kill a reptile and a man with no stone at all.

Even our stand-up comedians Carl Josh Ncube, Doc Vikela and others might drool at this! A joke to illustrate a principle and a story to book! Without doubt Science can be demystified and made more accessible to every learner and so can every other subject in the secondary school curriculum.

Teachers there must just become more human, more humorous and more enterprising. Perhaps the children might, in future, remember them for something.

David Mungoshi, an applied linguist, is also a qualified primary school teacher, a qualified secondary school teacher and taught for many years in teacher education and at university. He is an award-winning writer and a published poet.