This old sea story… must be one of the very first of these fancy aphorism thingies that I came across in my teaching career or maybe before, and it’s probably one of the most profound because it’s stuck with me ever since…
Give a man a fish
and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish and you feed
him for a lifetime.[symple_spacing size=”10″] ~ Maimonides (🐦 Tweet Me!)
◀ Click HERE for a BIGGER Version! ▶
…and I don’t think it’s a red herring! To put it in simpler terms, so that even I can understand, it’s all well and good to offer someone some food when they are hungry. But a few hours after they’ve eaten that food they’ll be just as hungry as before and just as needy and helpless.
Rather we’re suggesting showing someone how to help themselves, so that they are self-sufficient going forward and don’t need anyone’s help or charity any more. It’s a basic life skill, or should be.
In purely teaching terms, this means giving learners the techniques and tools to allow them to learn and understand anything more quickly and more easily. They’ll then carry this valuable competence with them throughout their lives, long after their teachers have faded into the chalk clouds of oblivion.
It sounds so obvious that it’s almost not worth mentioning. Teach students how to actually learn properly before expecting them to effectively learn anything else. Manifest common sense. Yet this is exactly what we… don’t do in most educational situations, at least not very well or without conviction.
Teachers are traditionally seen as experts in their subjects – maths, science, literature, history – and often the very human side to teaching – the personal bit that actually helps students learn best – is misunderstood, minimised or simply ignored.
That’s why Rainbow English School supports ‘learning-to-learn’ principles as an essential part of the knowledge acquisition process. It helps you learn stuff better!
We help students make useful connections between the (huge amount of) stuff they already know and the new stuff coming in. This opens wide the doorway of our imaginations to let in (or out) original ideas like there’s no tomorrow.
Each one of us has a unique set of constantly shifting and growing ‘stuff’ in our heads, in the form of acquired knowledge and experience and inexplicable hunches and intuition and personality traits and preferences. When our brains are given free rein to be creative, albeit in a guided manner, more often than not, wonderful things happen.
~ Sab Will
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Notes on ‘SCRIBBLISMS Fishy Tales’
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Scribblisms is where we have fun sharing and thinking about some great learning quotes from down the years. Feel free to join in the discussion – the more the merrier.
Rainbow English School is a non-profit educational organisation based in France. We aim to improve the level of English and the effectiveness of teaching in general. We work with teachers and educational organisations to help them adapt and personalise their teaching methods.
Our method and approach is based on the latest scientific research into how we best memorise, recall and usefully apply k
nowledge. We provide innovative tools and techniques which people can immediately use in their current learning or teaching situation. And we have fun doing it!
© 2016 Rainbow English School / Sab Will