At the Rulang Primary School, a 2,100-student public elementary school specializing in robotics teaching, teachers looked at me somewhat puzzled when I asked whether letting a 7-year-old child know that she is the worse of her class isn’t putting too much pressure on her too early in life.

“No,” school principal Cheryl Lim shrugged. “We rank them in a way to tell them that this is their ranking at this point in time, and that they can do better next year. It’s not to tell them that they are the worst in their class.’‘

~ Quoted from “Singapore’s obsession holds lessons for us all”, Miami Herald

No, the above example is not what I would like to see in Singapore schools. I would love to see instead teachers and principals doing something a little differently. In Guy Claxton’s book, “What’s the Point of School?”, he suggested that teachers should be seen by students to be engaged in their own learning in their subject areas. He provided some examples.

Learning the bagpipes

Claxton tells the story of a school principal, Peter Mountstephen, in Bath, England. At the start of the school year, Peter would stand in front of the school assembly and try to play a new musical instrument he has never played before. In a previous year, he tried to play the bagpipes, and after that he made an awful din trying to play the violin. Amidst titters from the students, he then publicly commits himself to learning the instrument in that one year. He then talks about the “learning muscles” that he would have to employ to to learn the new instrument. He talks about the need for perseverance, the commitment to practise, courage to ask for help and other learning muscles. After that, every once in a while he would show everyone the progress that he is making on his violin. He will also talk about the problems that he is encountering.

Peter doesn’t just stop there. He would make it a point to meet the students of the school. He would ask them what they think would be difficult for them in that particular school term and also discuss what they can do to try and overcome them together with the class teachers.

Claxton also suggested, for example, that an English language teacher puts up his drafts of his own poems for students to see his progress with them. A science teacher may for example, keep an experiment of his own going in one corner of the lab and keep his students informed maybe even involved in his experiments. A design teacher may wish to showcase his efforts to solve a problem. A PE teacher may want to show his students his attempt to learn a new skill.

Just imagine a school with staff with such an attitude. What do you think was Peter trying to do? How will children in such a school regard learning? What do you think the learning environment will be like in such a school?

“In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours.”

- John Lennon

I have just read a book called “The Outliers: the story of success” (click cover on the right), written by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is a study of success. The writer tries to zero on the factors that leads to success. One of these factors is what he calls the “10,000-hour rule”. In his book, he quoted neurologist, Daniel Levitin, who said:

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being world-class expert – in anything…In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.”

Levitin was again quoted to say:

“…no one has yet to found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

The Beatles, perhaps, the greatest band the world has ever seen, paid their dues in the strip clubs where they played for hours on end. John Lennon described this in an interview:

“We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Pete Best, who was the Beatles drummer at the time, was quoted as saying:

“We played seven nights a week (emphasis mine). At first we played almost non-stop till twelve-thirty, when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till two most mornings.”

The last word perhaps about the effect of their time in Hamburg is from Phil Norman who wrote their biography, “Shout!” He wrote:

“They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back….They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

What about Bill Gates? He started doing real-time programming since he was an eight-grader back in 1968. Gates said this about that period:

“It was my obsession… I skipped athletics. I went up there (Information Services Inc.) at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.”

By the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates had been programming non-stop for seven years. As Gladwell puts it, “He was way past ten thousand hours.” We all know who Bill Gates is today.

What about Singapore schools? We make our students sit quietly for hours for much of the school year. We discourage them from asking too much or being curious for most of their time in school. We also teach them to wait for notes and answers. We also trained them to work for individual success. We drill them fully for the examinations for hours. We do these for at least ten years until they are sixteen.

We all know how well our students do in examinations and international surveys like TIMSS!

But, with the ten thousand hours spent on such things, will the Singapore student be able to acquire the soft skills required for life? Will they be creative problem-solvers? Will they be able to learn independently? I believe we know the answers to these questions.

Seems like Marshall McLuhan is right. “The medium is the message”. But at least we have something in common with the Beatles and Bill Gates.

Today’s schools are blessed with connections to the outside world. Where at one time, the only connection a school had was perhaps the telephone in the administration office, today students and teachers can even have access to the internet to connect with the world. Yet, schools today, especially in Singapore, are perhaps one of the most disconnected places to be.

The disconnection stems not from the lack of physical infrastructure. It is actually, in spite of the availability of good communications infrastructure. Much of the disconnection is of a human nature. At the intellectual level, the “learning” that takes place is often devoid of connections with true deep understanding. Superficial knowledge is the norm as that is what is required for the written examinations.

The disconnection in school is especially true with regards to the meaning of the school experience itself. School by definition should be a place where learning takes place. But what is the meaning of the learning that takes place for the students themselves. One is reminded of this funny graphic below:

While funny, yet if we are to look at it seriously, how many of our students in our schools understand the full meaning of it? How many of them understand the real meaning of the equations that they have been asked to solve? Here, I do not mean just their being able to solve the equations because the equations can be solved merely through knowing the mechanical routine. What do they really mean for these students? Students routinely solve equations and other problems in school without understanding the meaning of what they have learned (except that they are needed to do well in the high stakes written examinations)? Little attempt is made at meaning-making. This disconnectedness is not limited to just Math.

Is it a surprise then that many students do not “connect” with the “learning” that goes on in the schools. Often we say many of these students chose to disconnect and begin to become “problem” students but the reality is that perhaps little is done in schools to make that connection for the students. The students’ decision not to participate in the “learning” in school is precipitated by the teachers not making great effort to make that connection for them. Far too often they are told that they need to “learn” so they can get a “good job”. Very uninspiring isn’t it?

For the teachers, the disconnection is from their own traditional role as curriculum directors and developers. Teachers too find little meaning about what being a teacher entails. Some (many?) live the lie that they are preparing their young charges for the workplace but then again as I have indicated in my other posts, this is far from true as the skills taught and pushed for in schools today is rarely consistent with what the employers want.

So what we have in schools today is a disconnect that is all too often unnoticed or ignored. Yet today, we want our schools to be connected to the world through the internet when perhaps the most important connections should be within the more intimate confines of the schools themselves.