Apr 2, 2003
I’ve been reading Prof Bill Oliver’s autobiography, “Looking for the Phoenix”. He offers the opinion that one of the main functions of a university is to provide an environment where students can learn from one another. He might of added that they need an environment where they can teach themselves, and that they should be offered some guidance in the techniques for doing so. For if they don’t learn to teach themselves, and to enjoy doing it, it is my opinion that their university years will have been a waste of time.
My own education, up to the age of 22, consisted almost entirely of memorising things; of memorising the alphabet, multiplication and addition tables, weights and measures, pounds shillings and pence, names, places and dates, spelling, rules of grammar, and later mathematical formulae and laws of physics and chemistry. Of course we learnt to read, and from that we could get some understanding of a world, largely abstract, somewhere beyond our time and place, and I’m not saying the memorising wasn’t useful, but we learnt very little about other techniques of learning.
Perhaps in those pre-decimal days, a good deal of rote learning was essential. But one of our teachers in the seventh form even urged us to read our physics notes for half and hour each night, until we knew them by heart. And he was one of the better ones. It was he, though his subject was physics not english, who taught us the rudiments of assembling and arranging the material to write an essay. Most gave us no advice on any such technique of learning. Just “learn it, and do as you’re told!”
Doing things is one way of learning. Some of the boys in my class could make their own simple radio sets, but it was not on account of anything they learned at school. Our practical work in physics consisted of blindly trying to repeat procedures that some clever person had found interesting a century before. No wonder at the age of 22, I was horrified at the thought of becoming a teacher.
However, by then I had memorised and regurgitated enough to qualify for a teacher’s certificate, and I had even managed to add something to my education along the way.
In english at Teachers’ College we were required to read “Doctor’s Dilemma” by George Bernard Shaw. I was so intrigued by this old fellow impudently exposing theconventional wisdom to the light of reason, that I read, in the succeeding years, everything of his I could lay hands on. I still find his observations illuminating.
Likewise, in natural history, (called “nature study” then), we learned that nature is its own teacher if only you will have the patience to look at it carefully and persistently. By way of example we were required to make a study of some creature of our own choosing. Having in those days a taste for the dramatic, I chose to do a study of the katipo spider, our only lethal native animal. I got sympathetic help from Dr Ray Forster at the Canterbury Museum, (later director of the Otago Museum), who lent me a useful summary of the subject by one Arthur Parrot. From it I found to my delight, that katipos were reasonably common in the marram grass at the back of New Brighton beach, a fact which could also be turned to advantage when I and my girlfriend of the time were seeking seclusion among the dunes.
Furthermore, one of my fellow students had devised a display case made out of two steel cake tins and a length of acetate sheet, so I was able to set up a small katipo colony for closer study at the College. The lecturer in charge of the course, Barry Blackmore, was also a bit of a romantic, and was impressed by this exhibit. So when at the end of the course, I was still desperate to avoid the prospect of any actual teaching, I applied to do a specialist course in Nature Study the following year, and lo and behold, I got accepted.
The course was a good one, consisting largely of practical techniques for discovering, observing and exhibiting plant and animal material so that kids could observe it and teach themselves. We too taught ourselves, with observation and the help of the available books. We learnt quite a lot about the natural world which we had previously passed over.
As part of the course, we were also obliged to enrol for Professor Percival’s Zoology course at the university. I don’t know whether I realised it at the time but his approach had a lot in common with the method we were using in Nature Study. Practical work and field work were the basis of it. The animal and its environment were the teachers, and the teaching staff were mainly there to ask questions which you were to answer by referring to the animal or its surroundings. You would be given something almost invisible in a dish of water, told to put it under a microscope, and then answer questions: “How does it move? , “What does it eat?”, “What is it made of?”, “What else can you see in it?” Now draw it, and put labels on the drawing. (The lecturer was prepared to give you the names of structures if you could describe them). It was almost as if you were the first person on earth to see the thing, (you were forbidden to bring a textbook with you), and you learned from your own experience, not by copying what someone else had already done before you.
The larger animals were supplied pickled or frozen, or recently killed, so you could only deduce their method of movement or feeding by studying their fins, legs, or mouths. But you could dismantle them and find what connected to what, again as if you were the first person on earth to do it. You don’t need to memorise things that you teach yourself. They stay with you anyway.
In lectures we were told about these animals and structures we were already familiar with from the lab., making sense of them in relation to similar animals and to their environment. But even then, you weren’t expected to memorise the information. At the beginning of each term you were given a list of questions, to which you were expected to work out answers. No one marked them, unless you asked them to. The learning was in composing the answers, with the help of whatever books you could find in the library. Of course you could copy whole paragraphs out of books if you wanted to, but it wouldn’t do you any good, because the questions weren’t worded that way.
You can learn a lot too, from your fellow students, if you can get them to stay with the subject of study, rather than wander into a discourse on life’s more pressing problems.
I was fortunate that one of the people doing the Nature Study course was an ex-navy fellow, rather older than me, who had already done a BA in english. He suggested that we get together once a week and work through the list of study topics. I couldn’t see that this was going to take up too much of my time, for it seemed to me that questions such as “How come Amoeba is so small?”, or “Compare nutrition in Euglena and Paramecium”. could be answered in one breath if they could be answered at all. But no! Dugald had an analytical mind, and a background in english expression, and insisted that we tease the subject apart until we could compose an introductory paragraph that would pretty well summarise the essentials that we had to say on the subject. Furthermore it had to be in flowing, if not timeless, prose, so that it was easy to hold it in your mind until exam time.
Next, you took the summary apart, and wrote an explanatory paragraph about each item, and you finished up with a final paragraph, drawing attention to the more significant points you had made. And then you were ready to put it away.
And that’s how I learnt to learn, from my surroundings, my fellow students, from books, and even from my teachers, or at least a few of them. They are good techniques for dealing with almost any subject, and if this essay departs from the proper structure, it’s only because my abilities have deteriorated with the passing years.