Op Ed: How to Think

Have you ever had a favorite teacher? I mean because of teaching ability, not because of a hot body or a complete lack of standards and challenges. I mean a teacher that you really respected and learned from so much that he became your “favorite” [I’m just going to use “he” to simplify the whole s/he grammar dilemma]. I have had a lot of favorites at FGCU. My favorite teachers tend to have some kind of quality that other teachers don’t have. Somehow they relay information better than other teachers. It’s some kind of technique or method that makes me just “get” it.

That’s genuine learning. A teacher should facilitate the learning process and make someone learn, not memorize. Strapping students to chairs and knowledge-boarding them relentlessly, demanding that they accept the teachings into their hearts until they collapse, weeping… Well I don’t know what school you all went to, but mine was kinda like that. It was not stimulating in the least. If a child did not develop A.D.D. from six or eight hours of memorization five days a week for twelve years or so, that would actually be pretty astonishing to me.

What’s the point in memorizing data? We basically become walking hard drives, just holding information and moving it from one place to another. Having no clue how or why the info was created, all a hard drive does is store data. Students are often the victims of this hard drive treatment, and it inhibits their ability to solve problems and to “think outside the box.” They don’t do that; they’re not taught to. “This is the answer” is how they are generally taught, not “this is how to discover the answer.” Learning never happens, only memorization.

How many people are called the “go-to guy” in an office? Probably just one. That’s probably why he’s called the go-to guy, but that’s exactly my point. There is generally only one go-to guy. He’s the one who can figure out answers, and we all go to him because we can’t figure out the answers. He says “this is the answer,” and we carry his answers around to other people and repeat “this is the answer.”

The world is way too complicated to completely depend on experts’ answers, and it’s constantly changing and becoming even more complex. The stresses of modern life in an evolving world demand a more problem-solving, learning-capable mind, which can’t be developed simply through memorization.

My favorite teachers are the ones that unlock the ability to problem solve. Rather than teaching what to think, they teach how to think. Teaching a person how to think is comparable to the old saying about teaching a man to fish. Teaching a man how to think enables him to better understand situations and allows him to “feed” himself forever. Teaching through memorization is comparable to supplying the man with fish continuously. He is always full even though he never learns to fish; he always has answers even though he never learns to think.

A growing majority of us are never taught how to fish, and it’s because of the way that public education classes are taught. Large class sizes make it more difficult to invoke thought in every student, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try. In my experience, most professors here at FGCU use teaching styles that are progressive and at least try to teach how to think (some more than others). I consider most of the professors I have had at FGCU to be favorites.

We have a good collection of professors who incorporate critical thinking and discussion into class, and a lot of students just aren’t used to that. This isn’t really too surprising, since we don’t do that in the public education system. We did memorization. Memorization works. It passes tests. It gets good grades, but it doesn’t develop any real mental capacity for learning or problem-solving. Memorization is temporary. Learning is permanent. The most important thing that a student learns from a teacher is how to think, not what to think.