PH Du30, Duque, Lagmay – Please Learn From Natalie Portman!

You gentlemen, non-teachers all:
You do NOT need classrooms for learning!

In its own webpage, Rappler asks: “What are your thoughts on opening classes in August?”
Contrariwise, Mahar Lagmay, Executive Director of the UP Resilience Institute, advises: Cancel classes until December[1]!

Sorry, but Du30, Duque, Rappler, and Lagmay
are all missing the point – because it’s inside.
It’s inside their heads! And at the tip of their fingers!

Right now, under lockdown, the best way to communicate is digital. So? So, the best way to continue the interrupted education of anyone is? Digital!

First, we have to change the way we teach. I Civil Service Professional teacher will tell you classroom teaching in the Philippines, including US, where we got our education, is essentially the Question & Answer, Q&A, Method. Q&A? Mechanical, not Intellectual. Memorizing, not Thinking.

We have to teach the teachers first!

These digital times are the best way to innovate in teaching, from home to college.
So now, let us learn from a non-teacher, American actress Natalie Portman:

I don’t love studying.
I hate studying.
I like learning.
Learning is beautiful.

She states a fact she has observed not as teacher but as learner. Now, if you are a good teacher, you would have learned by now from what Ms Natalie has said that:

The best way to teach is to teach learning.
The best way to teach is to teach thinking.

That is, we should teach the children how to learn, not how to memorize what we throw at them. Throw away Q&A! Instead, let us cultivate creative thinking as well as critical thinking! (think image from IBM[2])

Winston Churchill says, “Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.”

What Ms Natalie and Sir Winston are saying is that each learner should be taught how to discover for oneself the lesson hidden in a page, a photograph, a situation, or a story.
Now then, the best way I know to teach is not taught in any school of education in the Philippines. The philosophy is the theory of Multiple Intelligences, MI, that Harvard professor Howard Gardner has taught the world. He says each of us has 9 intelligences or smarts (this list from Odioma[3]):

(1)  Bodily kinesthetic (body smart)
(2) Existential (life smart)
(3) Interpersonal (people smart)
(4) Intra-personal (self-smart
(5) Linguistic (word smart)
(6) ocal-mathematical (number/reasoning smart
(7) Musical (sound smart)
(8) Naturalist (nature smart)
(9) Spatial (picture smart).

Why do students study? To get ahead in the world after graduation. But they have to get ahead of themselves first!

And how do you use the MI theory to teach any child, adult or senior? First, cultivate curiosity in everyone and observe which one s/he is most interested in. That points to any of those 9 smarts. That’s what you as the teacher help the learner develop, his/her genius. 

Then each of your students will be like Ms Natalie – loving learning!

So, what’s there not to love in learning?
The teacher!@517





[1]https://cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/4/21/UP-experts-class-suspensions-December-COVID-19.html
[2]https://www.ibm.com/events/think/
[3]https://blog.adioma.com/9-types-of-intelligence-infographic/

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