【人文科大 教育篇】走捷径

【人文科大 教育篇】走捷径

张一多8500

【编者按】

大部分人真正懂得怎么学习，差不多已经过了学校的学习时期了，再回头追，条件不允许，不免生了遗憾。

读书有没有捷径？我想是有的，听从明师的指点，那才是真正的“走捷径”呢！可是，有多少人能懂这个道理呢？当下教育的一大毛病是：把熟练当天才。但是，正如“画匠”和“画家”的区别，画匠作画是不用太多思考的，画家用于思考的时间是多于作画的。

我不说名师而说明师，是当下“名师”卖狗肉的实在太多，学生遇到“明师”，是缘分，能遵循明师，是福分。学生能有张一多这样的老师，是幸运的。一多有着深厚的教育背景，一多自身的学习经历和取得的成就，是有足够的底气和能力告诉大家：学习是怎么一回事。读者如果能读懂一多的教育理念和思想并遵循之，于己，是收获，于一多，是欣慰。

听君一席话，胜读十年书，静下心来，搞懂为什么，logic game，Yes！

最近我似乎一直在和我的11年级的学生们搏斗。

These days I have to wrestle with my Grade 11 students.

“放慢节奏”， 我三番五次地提醒他们，“没有人在后面追赶你们呀”。 学生们解题时，一个个像小偷似的，带着恐惧的心情，用最快的速度寻找得取所要的东西（答案），然后飞也似地跑离，唯恐有人叫他们停在原地。

“Slow down,” I have to remind them, “nobody is chasing after you.” The way my students doing a math problem is likea little thief - they approach a place (a problem), get what they want (the answer), and then run away from it as fast as possible, terrified if someone would call them back to stop where they are.

Many of them are taking SAT prep classes outside school, working on batches and batches of math problems the content of which they haven’t learned yet. Our

不少学生在校外上SAT补习班，做的很多的数学题都是他们还没有学到的内容。从某种程度上而言，这样的练习把学生们变成生产流水线上的工人。补习班里的模式是疯狂地刷题，用不加思考，而是通过熟记以前做过的类似的题来索取答案。学生们之所以更加喜欢快节奏，是因为他们已经不想对付“之所以然”的问题了。

Many of them are taking SAT prep classes outside school, working on batches and batches of math problems the content of which they haven’t learned yet. Our students are gradually turning into factory workers at assembly lines, putting reasoning on the shelf, turning on the memory machine, and relying on reflexes to retrieve answers to similar problems they have previously practiced. The reason they can’t do it slow is because they don’t want to be bothered with the why questions.

多么遗憾啊！每个数学老师都会同意，每一道习题都会帮助学生理清概念，让学生理解一个解题方法可以或不能奏效，或让学生温故知新，使学生对新学的内容和以前学到的知识建立一个正确的联系。

What a pity! Every math teacher would agree with me that each exercise problem carries the potential of bringing into light the details of a concept, helping learners understand what a procedure can or cannot do, or putting the content in the right perspective with relation to the previously acquired knowledge. It’s supposed to be a logic game.

然而，学生们却没有时间去玩味每一道题，也没有精力去享受挖掘其中奥秘这样的奢侈。家长们花了钱，买到的却是无头无尾的学习和疲惫不堪的孩子。这让我想起了在欧洲遇到的中国游客。

But unfortunately our students don’t give themselves time to play this logic game. Enjoying a problem-solving process seems to be a luxury that they have abandoned. Instead, they remain uninterested in the activity that they spend their time on, and are exhausted. Our students carry the typical syndrome of a nowadays tourist.

搬到上海以前我们居住在西班牙的巴塞罗纳，那时，我们在桂尔公园旁边租了一个小公寓。家离公园的某个大门只有30米的样子。桂尔公园是一座享有盛名的必游景点。的确如此，公园景观震撼，建筑师高迪那宛若童话般的各类作品，展现在园中的各个角落，与园中的自然环境相映成趣。大量的作品以一种特别的方式搭配在一起，每一个作品的细节之美都展露无遗，以致总是让我心生敬畏，感叹于人类惊人的创造力与想象力。下班后的黄昏时分在去饭店晚餐或购物的途中，每次穿过这座公园，从入口到出口，都会成为一次情感升华之旅。

When I lived in Barcelona a few years ago, we had an apartment right next to Parc Guell, just down the street about 30 meters from one of the park’s entrances. Parc Guell is a famous， must-see touristy spot. Rightfully so, it’s an amazing park, containing major works of Gaudi in a fairy-tale style of display in an all-nature setting. The uncommon mix of the massive magnitude of the oeuvres and the minute details exhibited up till the tip of each piece never failed to arouse in me a feeling of awe towards all the creativity and imagination in a human being as well as the incredible capability of human hands, to the point that each passing through it, after work at dusk, from one entrance to another, on the way to dinner or getting groceries, ended up being an emotional event.

春夏之时，公园里总是充满了熙熙攘攘的游客。中国旅行社的大巴，每天从早晨一直到晚上9点公园关门前一个小时一批一批地载送着睡眼惺忪的游客。

During spring and summer, the park was always crowded with tourists. Giant tourist buses run by Chinese travel agencies would load off armies of listless tourists all day long until an hour before the park closed at 9 pm.

“这是你们第一次来这个公园吗？”，我喜欢用中文与游客们随意攀谈，因为我的西班牙语一般，所以平时不怎么和当地人交谈。“Is this your first time to the Park?” I enjoyed striking casual conversations in Chinese with the tourists as I didn’t get to chat with the locals due to my limited Spanish.

“对，第一次。很好啊，很好。”，一位游客笑着回答道，脸上写满倦意。但他说拍了不少照片，可以心满意足了。我看得出他最希望的是早早地回到酒店，脱掉鞋子，翘起脚来好好地放松一下。

“Yes, first time. It’s nice, it’s nice.” Exhausted, one tourist replied with a smile. He was happy for the photos he had taken. I could tell all he wanted was to get back to the hotel, kick off his shoes, lift up his tired feet and relax.

“明天我们就要动身去法国，游览普罗旺斯，后天去巴黎。”

“Tomorrow we’re leaving for France. We’ll be visiting Provence and then Paris,” he said.

一些游客告诉我他们的旅游套餐不错，九日游五国的行程。

The travel agencies sold nice packages, covering five countries in nine days.

一丝惋惜在我心中油然而生。这些游客不知不觉已经沦为现代旅游企业的牺牲品。这些企业抓住了客户们的弱点，即炫耀之心，使他们花钱，把自己的假期旅行变成用最少的时间，前往最多的旅游景点，拍照；同时情情愿愿地把自己累得半死。正如Daniel Pink在他的新书Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us中写到的： “当人把获取外在奖赏当作唯一的目标时会选择最快捷的路，哪怕那是一条低端的路径。诚然，在我们当下生活中大多数的可笑之闻都与走捷径有关。”

I felt sorry for them. These tourists have fallen into victims of the modern travel business ，who taking advantage of the weak spot of people wanting to impress others or pretending to be better-off than they actually are, have made people willingly pay the money while reducing their vacations to tiresome picture-taking. Just as Daniel Pink put it in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, “The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.”

现在我们再回过来讨论我们的学生。我们不是正在把学生们变成疲惫的游客吗？我们给孩子们购买“好”的学习套餐，培训机构声称为学生提供获得理想效果的捷径，不用经受学习的麻烦而拿高分。这和九日游五国有什么两样呢？

Now, back to my students - Isn’t it true that we have rendered our children exhausted as those tourists? We buy our children “nice” packages that claim to provide them a shortcut to desired result – five countries in nine days – getting a high score without going through the trouble of learning.

但是，这是一条危险的捷径。尽管有些捷径是好的，譬如，当过程是无足轻重的，我们便抄近路，寻找有创意的方式，用更智能的APP，更有效的办法或是更强大的工具去解决问题。然而，跳过学习的过程，只是机械地死记硬背考题的答案是非常危险的捷径，因为教育的本身是一个过程。走这种捷径只会削弱学生的知识结构，挫败他们的自信心，最致命的是，这样的捷径掠夺了学生们发现学习乐趣的机会。没有这一过程，不知道学习乐趣的学生要想在美国的大学里生存，会是非常困难的。

However, this is a dangerous shortcut. Although certain shortcuts are good - when we are destination-focused, when the process carries no value or importance, we seek shortcuts – we find a creative way, a smarter app, a more efficient method or more powerful tool to tackle a task, however, skipping the learning process to simply memorize answers to test questions is a dangerous shortcut because education is all about process. This shortcut not only weakens the student’s knowledge structure, defeats student’s confidence, but most damagingly, it robs the students the opportunity to discover the joy of true learning. Without this process, it is hard for the student to survive college in the US.

此外，SAT （Student Aptitude Test）意为学生能力测试。因此，这项考试不是基于知识的考察，而是重在考察学生的能力，而这些能力正是在学习各种试卷考到的知识点的过程中获取的。

In addition, SAT stands for Student Aptitude Test. Therefore, the test is not about knowledge base, but rather, student’s ability (aptitude), the kind of ability acquired during the learning of the various content knowledge included on the test in a normal, “slow” way.
所以，我要鼓励家长们抵制带孩子们走捷径的念头。令人欣慰的是：
1.事实证明，参加标化考试补习是事倍功半的。所以，家长们应该不要有任何顾虑，节省这笔费用！同时也给孩子一个最宝贵的礼物，那就是他们的时间。
2. 常态下的“慢”教学，不仅是真正帮助学生做好大学准备的唯一方式，而且与学生们获取高分并不相悖。
3．美国有几千所综合性大学和文科类院校提供扎实的大学教育，其中大多数的学校对于愿意追求高等教育的高中毕业生都是易于进入的。因此，所谓的需要在所有的考试中都排在前30%，从而才可以进入大学的信息是误导性的。
So I would encourage our parents to resist the temptation of taking this dangerous shortcut. The comforting news is that:
(i) The shortcut will backfire. So please have the peace of mind to save your money and at the same time, save yourchildren’s time.
(ii) The normal, “slow” way of teaching and learning, which are being practiced in our USHS aswell as many other international schools, is not only the only way to truly prepare students for college, but is not in conflict with students achieving high test scores.
(iii) There are thousands of universities and liberal arts colleges in the US that offer solid college education, and most of them are accessible to a normal high school graduate who has a desire to pursue higher education. Therefore, it is a misleading belief that students need to achieve top 30 percentile on every test in order to find a college to attend.
【作者简介】：张一多，中科大85级00班。上海人。87年赴美国，89年于密执安州Calvin College数学系毕业。94年获得芝加哥大学物理化学博士学位, 美国大学终生教授。目前是天津大学客座教授和上海协和双语学校教学主任。
文章由一多的英文文章翻译成中文文章。（责任编辑 黄振南836）
来源：微信公众号ustcdata

中国人特别是中国家长在教育上走捷径的想法根深蒂固，一代接着一代，要想改变真的很难，所以虽然现在中成为经济第二大国了，要想成为科技创新大国还有很长的路要走。短期内我科还是要倡导出国深造吧，只有出国才能培养创新思维，这就是目前国内创新人才绝大多数都有海外求学或者科研经历的原因。

发现好文一篇。孩子进入科大以后，我也有太多的浮躁，担心他不刷题，担心他不上辅导班不早早接触托福，担心他不知道勤学上进，担心他跟不上大部队……这些浮躁和恐惧，在孩子从小到大的学习经历中我从不曾有过。常常问自己：自诩稍懂教育的我究竟是怎么了？
索性，强忍着不去用自己的浮躁影响孩子，依旧努力的放任孩子按着自己的节奏走自己的路。慢下来，稳下来。想起孩子的班主任老师说的那句话：有时候，走得稳比走得快好。
谢谢杰杰的分享！

坐个沙发，杰版涉足广呀。

大路 发表于 2017-12-10 18:32
坐个沙发，杰版涉足广呀。

只是不挑食，什么都喜欢读一读而已

杰姐姐一直是我们学习的榜样，敬业，好学，博学多才！！

16创+苏-飞飞 发表于 2017-12-14 11:05
杰姐姐一直是我们学习的榜样，敬业，好学，博学多才！！

飞飞目标远大

这是要领着俺们学习英语呢。。。。

紫罗兰 发表于 2017-12-16 13:35
这是要领着俺们学习英语呢。。。。

畅游米国不用翻译了

无止境 发表于 2017-12-18 07:37
中国人特别是中国家长在教育上走捷径的想法根深蒂固，一代接着一代，要想改变真的很难，所以虽然现在中成为 ...

技巧过则无原始创新。有时候中国教育用力过猛了