Books, Fish, Bonnie, etc.

This morning I was reading an article ("Teaching and the Expanding Knowledge" by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1964) for an education class I'm taking. IT WAS SO GOOD. And it got me all excited, so I decided to blog about it, lucky you. I was reading this thinking about science education, but it applies to all kinds of teaching in some ways I think.

The first part that got me excited were these two passages about textbooks and cramming knowledge into our heads:

"There is a widely spread misconception about the nature of books which contain knowledge It is thought that such books are something the contents of which have to be crammed into our heads. I think the opposite is closer to the truth. Books are there to keep the knowledge in while we use

our heads for something better. Books may also be a better place for such knowledge. In my own head any book-knowledge has a half-life of a few weeks. So I leave knowledge, for safekeeping,

to books and libraries and go fishing, sometimes for fish sometimes for new knowledge."

"I do not want to be misunderstood - I do not depreciate knowledge, and I have worked long and hard to know something of all fields of science related to biology. Without this I could do no research. But I have retained only what I need for an understanding, an intuitive grasp, and in order

to know in which book to find what. This was fun, and we must have fun, or else our work is no good."

I especially loved the line about "us[ing] our heads for something better." Education is so much more than memorizing facts (or memorizing our textbooks). It's all about connecting those facts, finding meaning in them, and using them. I can think of lots of experiences when I was taught facts but not taught how to use them. I also loved the part about knowing in which book to find what. I feel like further I advance in my education, the better I get at recognizing what is important to know off the top of my head  and what I can leave in wikipedia to be accessed in the 2 seconds it takes me to google it.

This next section really resonated to me because I love the idea of life-long learning and schools teaching use HOW to learn rather than just teaching us STUFF. It's totally the whole teach a man to fish versus feeding him for a day kind of thing. I also think the last line is a perfect description of a really great teacher:

"My next remark is about time relations. The time spent in school is relatively short compared -to the time thereafter. I am stressing this because it is widely thought that everything we have to know to do our job well we have to learn in school. This is wrong because, during the long time which

follows school, we are apt to forget, anyway, what we have learned there, while we have ample time for study. ln fact, most of us have to learn all our lives, and it was with gray hair that I took up the study of quantum mechanics, myself. So what the school has to do, in the first place is to

make us learn how to learn, to whet our appetites for knowledge, to teach us the delight of doing a job well and the excitement of creativity, to teach us to love what we do, and to help us to find what we love to do."

That last line immediately made me think of my piano teacher, Bonnie Winterton. She is amazing. I really think I owe a lot of who I am to what she taught me for the 7 years I took lessons from her. She taught me a lot more than how to play the piano. She taught me to love music, to love teaching, to love people, and to love life. My lessons were 45 minutes long, and I really think we would spend at least 10 of those minutes talking about life. I want to be that kind of teacher when I grow up.