I was a liberal arts college entrance examination winner in Shaanxi Province, A teacher with 20 years of teaching experience, and I have a 14-year-old daughter, so today I have some of my views on family education from three perspectives in these three capacities.
Why should we learn?
The first motivation to learn is fear, fear is dissatisfaction with the status quo, that is, never do anything.
When I was a child, I often went to the textile factory to play, and I saw a simple textile action that had to be repeated tens of thousands of times a day.
Such a scene made me feel fearful in my heart, and I felt that if I did not study well, I would be a textile worker.
I must not be such a worker, my own heart is full of fear, this fear leads me to study hard, of course, I am not saying that textile workers are not good, but my idea at that time was not to be a textile worker.
The second motivation for learning is desire, and desire is the pursuit of a higher realm, a better life, and what I want to be.
Once my friend and his son came to my house to play, and the father and son quarreled because the child was going to be a cook.
I talked to this kid, and I said that the chefs you've been in contact with around you are also different types, such as the chef of the small restaurant at our door, who is very greasy, and the executive chef of the five-star hotel is more than a foot tall with that hat, which is very handsome.
If you were to become a chef in the future, would you like to be an executive chef at a five-star hotel? Or a chef at a small restaurant?
The child said that of course he wanted to be an executive chef, very face-saving, very respected.
I want to use this example to tell you a truth, in fact, everyone has desires, children also have desires, but sometimes the path of our cultivation and children's desires are not agreed, if agreed, then the child's learning motivation can be stimulated.
The third motivation for learning is interest, which is consensus. Interest is pure affection and affection, and a sense of accomplishment is derived from the process of pursuit.
One of my favorite quotes: McDonald's slogan – I liked it, now translated as like it.
Think about whether it can refer to the process of knowledge and learning, so the purpose of any education or family education is to solve this problem - my child likes it.
What do parents do,
First, identify and protect behaviors that children can transform into interests in learning at any point in time.
Second, what if the child is not interested? We cultivate one out.
Third, we must avoid premature and too deep knowledge content that hurts children's interest in learning.
Fourth, calm and calm parents with firm goals are the key to cultivating the driving force of learning.
What do we learn?
I told a story about my daughter, who was in the eighth grade and had learned a chapter in her history class, called Zheng He going to the West.
I was very excited to see her study Zheng He go to the West, I said I taught her, although many history tests have been tested for 30 years, I still remember very clearly.
Then I communicated with her, in the college entrance examination, Zheng He went to the West in the whole matter of several examination points, what is the first, what is the second, what is the third...
I was very proud at the time, because that's how I studied history.
Then I found out that my daughter's homework was like this, and her teacher did not give her any things to memorize, and then gave her a few reference books, asking them to choose one of the cities or countries or related things that Zheng He had traveled to the West to do research.
The place where I have a special feeling is the place where the yellow marks, and these yellow places are the provenance.
This is our ability to write papers at the tertiary level and learn, because it is necessary to distinguish which ones you quote from others and which are your own.
Is this ability cultivated in our middle and high schools? We don't cultivate, we just let the children mechanically remember that Zheng He went to the West a few times, many years before the West.
In my daughter's teaching, he actually cultivated two abilities for children:
The ability to clarify the relationship between material and opinion.
The ability to gather material, organize material, and form your own opinion.
Although my daughter may not know how many times Zheng He has gone to the West after learning Zheng He. But she learned a method that would be more helpful for her future studies.
I also have a summary of this,
With the development of AI technology and cloud storage, all mechanical memory and mechanical manipulation skills will become useless.
Now you can remember the phone numbers of a few people. But going back ten years, we can remember twenty or thirty people, because machines have rendered our mechanical memories useless.
The mechanical memory skills that are heavily trained in today's teaching will be worthless in the future.
Sometimes I am reflecting on myself that in order to take the college entrance examination, history books, language books, mathematics books, and English books are basically backwards like a stream, and not only are they backwards like a stream, but even I know which page of the following notes is, is that meaningful?
In the face of massive information, accurate retrieval, dialectical thinking, finding out useful things, and forming creativity are the keys.
The species that can survive are not the strongest, nor the smartest, but those who know how to adapt to their environment.
Think about how strong the Jurassic dinosaurs were, why they didn't rule the world all the time, why they became extinct and didn't find a way to adapt to survival.
How do we learn?
There is a model for learning, the first learning is divided into two parts, the first is cognition, the second is reproduction, the left is the five most important abilities in learning, and the right is the important four forms.
First of all, reading ability is really the cornerstone of all learning, children who love to read will not be too bad, generally as long as they are well cultivated, your child can at least go to an undergraduate.
The second is concentration, I once asked the professor of the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China, I asked him how the children in the junior class of the University of Science and Technology are, he said that the so-called children of the junior class, his IQ level is similar to that of ordinary people, or slightly higher than ordinary people.
These children are mainly highly focused, and four children can forget to eat lunch when playing poker in the dormitory. In fact, concentration is very important for us to learn.
If your child loves to read and concentrate, and then resists stress very well, he may become a student of Tsinghua Peking University, and finally, if the child has the ability to be creative, then he must be very helpful to the world.
So how do you think about stress and anxiety?
If the child has a higher level of stress and anxiety, he must be more successful academically.
I'm a person who is very anxious and basically doesn't sleep very well before any big exam, basically before the gaokao, but at the moment of the exam it will be very exciting, dopamine secretion is very strong, and then it will be very good.
Stress and anxiety really aren't bad things, at least not if we look at it from the perspective of learning.
But we know that in fact, family education itself not only refers to solving the problem of learning, but also to solve the problem of a healthy mentality of children.
From this point of view, we should appropriately reduce stress and anxiety for children. But if you look at it from the perspective of learning, if you don't have a certain amount of pressure and anxiety, this thing must not be good to learn.
Albert Einstein said: When everything you learn in school is forgotten, what remains is education.
Is the school teaching Zheng He a few strokes of the West? Does school teach univariate quadratic equations? Is the school teaching three hundred Tang poems?
School is teaching a way of thinking, teaching basic knowledge, the ability to analyze information, and these abilities will accompany the child all the way down the road, will walk very well.