Jun 21, 2004
My tertiary education has been a slow and tedious process, spanning in all some 44 years. It was slow because for the first four years I didn’t understand what learning was all about, and because of the fifty or so lecturers who confronted me at one time or another, only about a quarter had a clear idea of what they were trying to do. And of them only a handful had given any thought to how we students were expected to make their new knowledge a part of our sentient selves.
It seems to me that there are three aspects to transmitting information. The first is having a clear idea of what you want to transmit, and I think there were only two or three of my lecturers who fell short in this respect. The second is being able to present it in a form which is intelligible to your particular audience, and to hold their attention while you are doing it. Most of my teachers’ college lecturers and about half of my university lecturers could do that. But the third factor, that of providing the student with a means of incorporating the new knowledge into his existing body of understanding, seems hardly to have come into consideration at all, or if it had, it had come there by chance. One who had thought the matter through, and had consciously set up techniques for doing it, was Professor Percival, the professor of zoology at Canterbury University.
As any author will tell you, you learn by doing, for practice makes perfect. You do not learn much by being told, or by memorising, but you learn by using the information or skills you already have, to try out new thoughts and skills, and to incorporate them into your established capabilities. By these means we refine and extend our body of skill and knowledge. The difficulty is to arrange a formal course of work in such a way that the student gets the opportunity to practice each part of it as the year proceeds. To be sure they give you exercises to do, and examples to work, and they mark them, but in general they don’t check whether you actually used the information you had, or merely regurgitated it.
Professor Percival had thought it all through, or perhaps he had learnt his trade from some other Yorkshireman, who, with clear-sighted practicality like Captain Cook, had evolved the system. The laboratory work came first. We were never lectured on an animal before we had dealt with it in the lab. And in the lab, the animal was the teacher. The demonstrator told us nothing unless we specifically asked for the name of some structure, but only asked us questions, to direct our observation. “What can you see in the little dish of water?” “What movement can you see under the microscope?” “What structures can you see?” “Draw what you see, and describe it to me, so I can tell you the names.” “Where does this nerve lead to? Uncover it carefully and find the structure that it serves.” And so on, through Amoeba, Paramecium, liverfluke, earthworm, cockroach, dogfish, frog and rabbit. In three hour sessions, from 6 pm to 9 pm we made ourselves familiar with their every structure and its function, till we recognised them all like old friends.
In lectures, Prof., as we called him, would appear not in a gown, as the Arts lecturers did, but in a well worn khaki lab coat, for he was a practical man. He would pause to gain attention, plucking his dewlap and gazing severely out the high window towards the back of the lecture theatre, as if he had caught sight of some birds up to no good in the plane trees on Rolleston Avenue.. Then he would smack his lips, and the ghost of a smile would light on them, as some suitable introductory remark occurred to him. “People will tell you,” he might say, “that Zoologists talk nothing but sex…..” Then a long pause. “That is …so!” Then, with the faintest smile, he would launch into an explanation of the nuclear detail of conjugation in Paramecium, or the meiotic origin of the egg and sperm cells in the earthworm or the rabbit. The explanation may have been more technical, and less emotionally arousing than we had anticipated, but he had got our attention. Not that his Friday night lectures were other than entertaining. He could put on a good show, and it would not surprise me to learn that there were in fact students there who had no legitimate interest in zoology. He also made extensive use of the blackboard, (there were no white boards then), to illustrate the matters he was discussing, and if occasion demanded it, he would contort his old lab coat to illustrate the water current through the filter feeding mechanism of Amphioxus , or the mechanism of the wing thrust of a dragonfly. He referred us continually to the structures we had already seen in the lab, and to the principles he had discussed with us in previous lectures.
Some other lecturers could have done as well, but none that I suffered from would as consciously tie our practical observations of the real animal to the principals governing its life mechanisms. For other zoologists I have worked with, labs were simply poorly illustrated lectures, and lectures stood pretty well alone, and distinct from labs.
But Percival’s main contribution to education, was that he had thought of a method by which we could make the principles we had heard about, part of our total knowledge, firmly attached to what we already knew. About twice a year he would issue us with a list of twenty or so “study topics” which we could use to focus and direct our comprehension. Such matters as “How come Amoeba is so small?” or “Discuss metamerism in earthworm and in vertebrates”, or “Compare the branchial arches in dogfish, frog and rabbit”, and so on. They were not to be handed in and marked, though the professor was ready to discuss any of them with you if approached. I was fortunate in meeting up with an older and wiser student, who immediately saw the value of these topics, and insisted that we meet up once a week and wrestle with one or two of them, and write our responses down as if we were going to present them to an examiner. After that we would have toast and cocoa. It was an attractive arrangement. Dugald even plucked up courage once, to go and ask the old fellow about a topic concerning the embryonic development of dogfish, frog and mammal. “What do you know about yolk?”, said Prof. And Dugald, who at that moment could think of almost nothing about yolk, said, “Oh! I see. Thanks.” And left it at that. Actually it was a very good clue, for when we looked it up in the texts we found that the difference in the three embryologies is indeed intimately connected with the amount of yolk in their respective eggs.
And that wasn’t all, for it was sometimes said that he made the whole of Canterbury his laboratory, and he would take us on field trips to see the spawning of trout in the Selwyn River, or the efforts of eels to migrate to sea at the appropriate season through the gravel bank that closed Lake Elesmere. In the term vacations he would take a dozen or two of us at a time to Menzies Bay, on Banks Peninsula where he had the use of the Menzies’ shearers’ quarters, and we would spend a week, scouring the creeks and the bush and the foreshore for whatever creatures we could find, and bringing them back to an improvised lab where we could study them with the help of microscopes and a selection of reference books that he had brought over with us.
After we had made dinner and cleaned up, he would raise some mildly philosophical topic of general and current concern, for “discussion”, and would encourage each of us to put forward a point of view or a comment on it. Most of us had been decently brought up to be “seen and not heard”, and it took quite a change of attitude to have to even think of an opinion, much less to express it in public, and to justify it. Nevertheless, it was surprising to see the development of the tongue tied during the course of that week. By the time we came back, we felt that we had suddenly become adults, and had an opinion on everything. Some of us seemed to have even forgotten how to shut up.
On other occasions we would spend the week at the university’s field station at Cass in the Southern Alps, and he would introduce us to the freshwater mussels in Lake Grassmere, or the eels and dragonflies in the creeks, and the mayflies and caddis flies under the stones. As he laid it all out before us from a hillside above the field station, he would say “As the devil said to J.C. ‘All this you can ‘ave, if you do so and so’.” There is a bronze plaque marking the great rock against which we would lean while he pointed out the geological features and the places where we might find various creatures among them.
On some previous expedition he had been leading his students up the Hawden River to the tarns at Walker Pass, where you could look over into the headwaters of the Taramakau which ran out onto the other coast. However one of the girl students had a bad dose of flu, so Prof left the expedition in charge of a junior lecturer, and escorted the “wench” as he referred to her, back to the field station. There he tried his hand at medication, by taking some 95% alcohol, and breaking it down with water to what he reckoned was the strength of a “good brandy”. “I had one myself, and gave the wench three fingers of it in a tumbler. And it did her a power of good. Then I turned in and went to sleep. About 2 am I woke up, sweatin’ like a bull. Me heart was doing about a hundred and fifty. I sat up and it slowed down, and I lay down and it sped up. And I thought ‘I wonder if someone had put some picklin’ in it?’ (Zoologists sometimes enhance the pickling power of alcohol by adding various chemicals, some of which, such as mercuric chloride, are extremely toxic.) “I tossed and turned. I had my speech all worked out for the magistrate. Finally I went back to sleep, and slept like a child till the morning, when I woke up, just like Eve stepping out of Adam’s side”. That was a bit hard to imagine, for he was a big built fellow, balding and with a prominent nose, but we got the idea.
I was working in Samoa when Prof turned sixty, and someone wrote and asked me if I would write something for a commemorative book they were planning to give him. I was still rather lacking in confidence then and couldn’t see that the work I was doing on control of coconut beetles and banana weevils and taro pests was sufficiently sophisticated for such a project. But I think now that I should have taken up the offer, for my work was really a matter of applying the principles of ecology to the lives of various pests of plants and of stored products such as copra and cocoa beans. I think Prof would have been interested, for his mind was wide ranging as well as practical, and he might well have smacked his lips and smiled as he read it.
He died the following year, from a heart attack.