This was followed by a Sunday in mid-October. Wang Xile said: "Dad, I haven't been to the wild to roast mutton for a long time, how about we go to six trees to roast mutton when the weather is so good today?"

In the past, I would have taken the initiative to hug my child and give him the greatest encouragement with body language, but today I didn't. I said, "Joy, you don't have mutton at home, if you want to go, go to the market and buy it." ”

"It's simple. Where's the money?" Don't look at my son's milk, but he speaks extremely confidently. Then, following my words, he took the money from my jacket pocket and left.

After a while, Wang Xile came back with a front leg of sheep. said: "Dad, the mutton is seven yuan and five pounds, and I paid the price, and I bought it for seven yuan." This leg is five catties, thirty-five yuan, fifteen yuan for recovery, is there enough meat?"

"Enough. If you cook a pound of meat, you can produce seven taels of meat, and if you roast it, it can be about three taels, which is definitely enough. I said to my son, calculating.

It was almost noon and we left our house and walked into the desert through the desert park. After the training of Wang Xile in the past few years, his will and physical strength have undergone great changes. On the way, he always jumped forward to the end.

At about three o'clock, we arrived at the six trees and saw an old man grazing under the trees. We went to greet him, but the old man only "snorted" and seemed to be not good at words.

We prepare something for the barbecue. While Wang Xile was eating cooked meat, I saw that the old man not far away took out a piece of dry bun and half a bottle of water from the bag he was carrying. The old man bit the steamed bun, and then poured the water little by little on the steamed bun to moisten it, moisten it a little softly, and eat a little. I saw that the old man was very pitiful, and said:

"Wang Xile, go, send two shortbreads and a bottle of drink to the old man. ”

The son ran over as if he were in a race. The old man had probably never received such courtesy, and he repeatedly said, "Good man, good man!" ”

Wang Xile ate almost all the barbecue, and then learned to cut the meat and barbecue for me to eat, at this time I walked to the old man and asked, "How old are you, old man?" Why are you still herding sheep!"

"Seventy-two years old, what can I do if I don't herd sheep, these sheep are the lifeblood of the family!" The old man said with a gloomy expression.

"What about your children, why don't they let them go?"

"Alas, I have no education, and my son went to junior high school to farm in the forest. Since my grandson went to college and had a lot of money, the family's life has been very tight, and I just want to wait for my grandson to finish college. Unexpectedly, my grandson didn't work hard after studying, he couldn't endure hardship, and he had to ride a motorcycle, smoke, and drink all day...... We pastoral people can't do anything, what can we do if we don't herd sheep!"

The old man's words made my heart ache, because the phenomenon of gnawing at the old man he was talking about was not unique. I went back to Wang Xile and said, "Wang Xile, did you hear my conversation with the old man?"

"I hear you. ”

"Do you want your dad to be like this old man when he gets old?"

"I don't want to. Dad, I have faith in myself. ”

Thank God, all these years of hard work, Wang Xile has tasted the taste of confidence. I sat on the sand and ate my son's roasted lamb as if I were sitting in heaven.

It's the end of October. That morning, my wife and I were in the office, and two colleagues, one was Mr. Chen, a math teacher, and the other was a biology teacher, and they asked Wang Xile what time he was writing his homework in the evening. ”

The colleague said in surprise: "Your child still has time to do other things, our children have to write their homework until more than ten o'clock every day, and sometimes they can't finish it at eleven o'clock." ”

When the colleague left, his wife said worriedly: "Husband, the teacher asked Wang Xile to participate in this class, but you didn't let him participate, and you didn't let him participate in that class." Now the teacher is angry, no matter what your son is, the homework of his classmates can't have such a big contrast, besides, Chen Huan's child has always been a good student in the top few since the first grade. ”

"In the afternoon, you go to the elementary school to find out the specific situation, and then, I think of a way to solve the rest of the matter. I said.

In the afternoon, my wife hurried to the elementary school, and after two classes she came back happily. She said: "Husband, my son is very good, and the teachers of all subjects praise him. Regarding the problem of homework, the main reason is that after the fourth grade, the child becomes more procrastinated than before, and it is difficult to manage. And Wang Xile is just the opposite, he didn't write anything well before, but now it's good to write quickly. The teacher especially talked about your son's mouth, there have been several debates in the class, and he will soon become a man in the world, no matter whether he is justified or not, there is always something to say. ”

The ability to speak has always been an important aspect of my child's self-confidence. I think that in such a serious test-taking environment, few parents will regard the cultivation of speaking ability as more important than textbook learning at such a young age. I said, "Man is an animal of feelings, and emotional communication always precedes intellectual exchange, and this is how human history has come about. The same is true in real life, and people with a high level of speaking also have a lot of space to deal with all aspects of things, in short, it will be of great help to the child's all-round development in the future. Having said that, it is inevitable that Wang Xile's homework will go from slow to fast. ”

"Why?" asked the wife, puzzled.

"I have my own view of children's learning: from a distance, children's learning must serve a direction, a culture, and a spirit. From Wang Xile's composition, it can be seen that he is generating a spiritual sprout of compassion for the warmth and coldness of the world. When viewed from a closer perspective, children's learning must respect human physiology. The brain is the place where the results of learning are stored, and it is the nervous system that plays a role, so studying the causal relationship of children's learning from the neurological aspect is the most essential research, which is much stronger than studying teaching skills.

Affected by heredity, people are born with a corresponding nervous system, these functional systems are not difficult to learn book knowledge, the key problem is that the brain is controlled by the heart, for example, some high school students in middle school now have a very good brain but do not want to learn, and parents are forced to learn It is not very useful. Just like the situation you just said: before the third grade of primary school, children are very manageable, and their test scores are generally very high, but in the fourth grade, some good students begin to write homework slowly and tread on the phenomenon, in fact, this is the manifestation of the heart qi beginning to act on the brain. If the cultivation of heart qi is not good, it will be boring to study in high school, so saying that some children are good at everything when they are young is not his own behavior, but an illusion forced by parents and teachers. From a physiological point of view: the nervous system is fatigued, and the exam-oriented education always ignores these, and in order to learn endlessly encroaches on time, consciously or unconsciously violates the taboo of crossing the line, so that the child's nervous system is in chronic fatigue for a long time, preventing intellectual development. ”

"Husband, what you said seems to make some sense, but I still don't understand, can you be specific?"

"We can simplify the brain into a circle, the largest motor nervous system and the emotional nervous system start from the center and traverse the outer whole territory of the circle, while the small nervous systems such as language, logic, mathematics, competitive sports, music, and art are protected by the motor and emotional nervous system in different positions in the middle of the circle. In test-oriented educational activities, the development of motor and emotional nervous system functions is often neglected. When we talk about motor nerves, we often think that they are the kind of abilities in sports competitions, which is completely wrong. An athlete's athletic ability is governed by specialized athletic nerves, which are another small nerve. The motor nerve that crosses the central region is mainly the comprehensive ability to command the limbs of the human body, and it plays a decisive role in how people understand real things. The affective nervous system is interdependent with the motor nervous system, it also traverses the central area of the brain, and the activity of the human limbs can have a huge impact on the emotional nerve, but it has a certain lag. It's like an earthen heater burning in a home, the fire burns in the hearth, and the radiator at the far end will slowly heat up after 20 or 30 minutes. The stove here is like the motor nerves of the human body, and the radiator is like the emotional nerves, and only when these two nerves are heated together can the furniture and artwork in the home make people feel appreciative. And those furniture and artworks are like small neurons such as language and logic distributed on both sides of the human brain. Over time, the various nerves of the brain will be synthesized into one function, and people will believe in what is in their brain. At this time, if the fire of the stove is high, the heating temperature is high and the home is full of life, which is like an active person being liked, the essence of which is that his brain nerve development is balanced, and the person is harmonious, and what is done will be cooperative, which is the physiological basis for my education of children.

In my opinion, the way children are educated is not conducive to future development, excessive test-taking also means that too much attention is paid to the development of the small nervous system, the knowledge learned will inevitably lack passion, and the things accepted will inevitably go to rigidity and superficiality, the child will not only not benefit from learning, but also will prevent his cognition of life, and finally make the child become a paranoid person with poor brain nerve function.

The reason is that the people cultivated by quality education in the modern West are particularly strong in social competition, and they have occupied more than 80 percent of the earth's interests, and in fact this is the competition between different varieties of people trained by different educations, so in order to do a good job in quality education, teachers must first have the intelligence to respond to the society, so that they can distinguish the difference between examination-oriented education and quality education. It is not that as long as there are more singing and dancing activities, it is to engage in quality education.

Examination-oriented education emphasizes the importance of curriculum and pedagogy, emphasizes classroom order and teaching methods that encourage students to study hard, requires teachers to be experts in their subjects and role models for ethical behavior, and must establish a grade standard that teachers and students aspire to. Exam-oriented education has a clear utilitarian orientation. Since childhood, a student can only receive the favor of others from the score, and the love he gets can only revolve around the benefit of the score. This utilitarianism fundamentally determines that after a student becomes a member of society, his love will often only be revealed among his family, clans, classmates, and colleagues, and he only cares about his own interests or the interests of a small group, and is prone to creating opportunists, who are eager to benefit from the benefits provided by society, but do not care about returns. Although trial education can also cultivate individual high-tech talents, it cannot cultivate people who can be trusted by society as a whole, and the few respects that trial teachers get from others is not because their behavior sets an example for others, but only to help a few people pass the examination through repeated knowledge training, and that's all, which may also be the reason why the Chinese are scattered.

Quality education emphasizes the development of educational methods according to the natural interests of students, the recognition of the need for flexible application of pedagogies and classroom organization due to the fact that students have different motivations, learning abilities and learning styles, the teacher is not seen as a lecturer as an organizer of student learning, and it is also necessary to integrate teaching materials from different subjects into something meaningful for students' life experience. Quality education emphasizes that people are educated in order to seek truth or improve the quality of life, and education requires learners to master the skills to improve their lives, as well as to accumulate the courage, courage, integrity and honesty to improve society. Quality education does not focus on the morality of a small circle, but makes every educated person understand that building a fair society is a major matter related to the life and death of everyone. And people are not born with the wisdom of survival, what they lack is the pure quality of society, which is also the reason why the West has become strong in the past thousand years.

The terrible thing about test-oriented education is that the educated only have the personality of others, and cannot produce their own personality. This kind of education is often extremely demanding on people, such as China's "Code of Conduct for Middle School Students" and "Code of Conduct for Middle School Students", even Confucius is far from being able to do it, and we directly use the beauty of human nature that needs to be accumulated from generation to generation as the standard for evaluating children and teenagers, so that no matter how hard our students try, they always see the gap, always get criticism, and the aura is getting less and less. When students grow up, when they face their children, it is easy for them to use the nagging criticism and forcible management inherited from school teachers as a magic weapon for educating their children in the future.

The crux of the matter is: this kind of education is no matter how small, and the terrible thing is that children must provide clues to themselves in the process of growing up, and their own progress becomes dependent on the evaluation of others, although the specific life goals will change as they grow older, but for success, when they are recognized by others, they are effective, and they have irrepressible anxiety about failure. Such a person, no matter how old he is, is always like a child in temperament, and his behavior is self-willed and coping with the situation. In the face of the competition of life, this kind of person will often have a distorted perception of self-behavior, either overconfidence or no self-confidence, unable to carry out fruitful work, and his life energy is mainly used to protect his untrue self, and finally make it possible to suffer from neurosis for a long time.

The value of quality education is that it enables people to develop self-consciousness and generate self-power with great variables through life practice. A person with an ego will ignore the hopes of his friends, only obey his inner beliefs, and as long as he achieves what he thinks is the goal, he will be successful, and he will only have a temporary sense of fault for failure. The self-perceived person has an objective understanding of the external world, and his activities are generally planned according to a longer period of time, and he can take the initiative to abide by the decisions made, and he can also adhere to the schedule and plan, and he can make choices that are conducive to the long-term plan from the things he can choose, and he will not be overturned by his own internal desires, and he can also resist the pressure of the social environment at that time, and introduce himself into activities that are beneficial to society according to the path he chooses.

Prevention is better than cure. In the initial stage of quality education, the main responsibility is not to learn knowledge, but to make children understand the common sense of society, once the child reaches the age of 12 and is still unreasonable, it means that the most intelligent teacher cannot turn him into a wise man. At this time, the teacher should adopt a gentle education method for such students, and excessive teaching will make them appear extreme, produce crimes, and make good intentions cause great disasters. Like the case where a student in our school used a knife, it was all caused by the teacher's heart being too strong and angering the naughty student, and what is the use of you forcing this kind of student to death in terms of learning.

Therefore, it is a high art to preserve certain imperfections in educational activities, which can make the educational process interesting and lively, and make people feel that anything can happen. Everyone has an innate desire to learn from life, and this nature can only be fulfilled by those who are empathetic and inspiring. And such a teacher must be academically authoritative. Once the academic spirit of the teacher is suppressed in the educational activities, the educational activities will naturally wander around in the misunderstandings. Let me give you an example of the development of mathematics education, and you will be able to understand what I want to express in terms of the theoretical aspects mentioned above.

It is self-evident that mathematics plays an important role in the development of things to a high level. Mathematics education is an applied field that derives its internal from mathematics and computer science and statistics in the recent and late periods, its methods from education, and its theories from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology. There are relatively few people in society who are mainly engaged in mathematics-related work, and there are three main categories: 1. Primary and secondary school mathematics teachers, 2. University mathematics teachers, and 3. A small number of mathematics researchers. Although primary and secondary mathematics educators make up 95% of mathematics practitioners, they are generally inactive in mathematics education outside of their own work. For example, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are recognized as the strongest and most active countries in mathematics education in the world, with only about 10% of their teachers belonging to local, state, or provincial organizations, and less than 5% belonging to national or international groups. Since the vast majority of mathematicians are not interested in mathematics itself, and most of them are reluctant to participate in mathematics-related activities, the leadership of mathematics education is impatiently entrusted to university faculty and a very small number of mathematics researchers in universities.

Half a century ago, almost all mathematics taught in secondary schools was big math in the 1800s. Mathematics educators are concerned with the content – what to teach, the curriculum – how to organize the syllabus, and the method – how best to teach the content of the syllabus to students. Some of these aspects overlap. The pace of pedagogical reform has been small or little has changed. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union's first artificial Earth satellite, Mate-1, was successfully launched, marking the loss of the crown of scientific leadership for the West. In the 50 years that followed, there was a profound reform of mathematics education, which was different from the field of pedagogy. It affects almost all countries of the world. New mathematics is mainly an attempt by university mathematics researchers who have made the least contribution to mathematics education, but who want to "raise mathematics education to the level of the 20th century". The United States has provided enormous government funding for such activities, while the United Kingdom has provided funding from private foundations, but the results have been dire. This activity introduces new topics such as sets, non-decimal counting, vectors and matrices, probability theory and mathematical statistics, and formal logic to primary and secondary schools, and promotes such education in the lower grades. For example, students begin to learn algebraic solutions to word problems in elementary school (write "Xiaohu has five more bullets than Xiaoming, and they have a total of nine bullets" as T=M+5 and T+M=9). A major step was also taken to focus the algorithm's attention on more general principled concepts such as "for any a there is a•1=a" as an explanation for why many specific mathematical tricks are not problematic to use.

The vast majority of mathematics teachers are forced to abandon the old and useful teaching methods in the face of new mathematics content and curriculum that they are not very familiar with, and turn to an applied teaching structure that is not inspiring and detached from the meaning of real life. Thus, although students are still introduced to the distributive property a•(b+c)=a•b+a•c in algebra lessons, it is difficult for students to fully understand the practical value of distributive properties, as in 33×23, 0.5+0.8, (a+b), or at a higher level, by linking together another basic operation of addition and multiplication. By the late '60s and '70s, the United States and Canada, faced with an unprecedented number of students who were tired of school and serious emotional problems, felt that the new education was very destructive to the growth of students, and they quickly called on math teachers to stop using the name "new math". There are basically two ways to return to the new mathematics: the first is to return to the direction of basic training, directly delete the relatively new curriculum, and completely return to the scope of the curriculum that most students in the 30s can understand and receive, and the second is the general movement of psychological research from the development of the mathematics curriculum and only for students who take mathematics as electives.

After the painful lessons of the new mathematics education, European and American countries now adopt more credit systems for the evaluation of students, and students choose the importance of the subjects according to their own characteristics, so as to reduce the occurrence of unnecessary learning situations from the system, so that they can strive for more credits in the subjects they can understand, and strive to meet the total credit requirements. Teachers teach in-depth instruction only for students with research ability, bringing them into the classroom, or working in small groups, or with individual students. This change in educational thinking is a blessing for most of the human careers, because more than 95% of the world's occupations do not need too abstract mathematical thinking to solve problems, it only needs simple arithmetic closely related to social sciences and natural sciences to solve life problems.

Here, I would like to make a point to note that in recent years, our various media magazines have been constantly promoting how good Chinese students do in mathematics compared to foreign students, which is complete nonsense. Compared with foreign students, Chinese students have good math scores, mainly because the ninety-nine multiplication formula has made great contributions, but it is an arithmetic category and does not belong to the mathematics level. Real mathematics is a slow climb from the steps of multivariate equations, exponential calculations, solid geometry, calculus, etc., and if you compare Tsinghua University and Peking University with Harvard Massachusetts, the mathematical achievements of Chinese universities are far, far behind. ”

"Husband, your grand speech is very exciting, but no one will believe it, now everything is only focused on the scores, the key class, the sharp knife class have been snatched into a pot of porridge, who will pay attention to what nerve function, harmonious development, fatigue recovery and other things that have nothing to do with learning. ”

"What a grand statement, I just stated the facts that happened in other countries in the last half century or so, but, no matter what others do, I have always believed that the study of human development from the nerve is the most essential research, and only according to the size of the area occupied by each nerve group in the brain and the distance from life in the order of education, can we essentially build a good sense of three views, in the future, when the child grows up, there is no progress, no matter whether the academic performance is high or low, he will definitely be like a tiger will prey on itself when it is strong, and a bird will fly on its own when its wings are full。 ”

"In the past, you didn't care much about your child's studies, but now he is in charge of it himself. I used to worry about my child's learning, but you have a lot of ideas when you fix the doll. ”

This is all the wisdom of the predecessors, and I just use it flexibly according to the actual situation through reading. ”

"Husband, what you said was difficult to accept at the time, but there will always be a good result after a while. Wang Xile's progress made their teachers puzzled, and felt that that kind of progress should happen to children who studied hard. ”

"The kind of thinking that only works hard and doesn't do it skillfully is terrible. Many students have been transferred away from our middle school this semester, and some parents feel that the school the tighter they grasp, the better the school, so military management has become a symbol of the highest civilization in modern Chinese schools. However, I think that China is now in a whirlpool of 'spending money to buy education', as if only by going to key schools with high fees can we solve the problem of children not studying and be admitted to first-class universities." Having said that, there have been some students who have transferred out over the years, but the question is how many students have good results?"

"Less! Going around, the more money is getting more and more, and most of the children are not the same as the people who are learning from the side. ”

"There is a big, big problem here, which is related to the success or failure of the entire education system, especially in terms of family education, but my intuition does not tell me where the problem is, but there is a phenomenon that seems to be the transformation from the 'patriarchal system' in the past to the 'child system' in the present. ”

"What is a 'child's system?'

"'Child system' is what I said, there is no definition, that is, everything related to children in the family always depends on the opinions of children. I'll tell you one thing and you'll understand. One time I was drinking, and a friend's child changed schools. I asked him why he transferred his child, and he said that the school here was not as good as the school outside. We were afraid that the child would complain in the future, so we transferred it to him. I said that children don't study well when they are around their parents, can they learn on their own? My friend said that anyway, the adults are doing their best, and the children will not be able to complain about the adults in the future. ”

"Husband, I've seen a lot of what you've said. ”

"That's what I mean by 'child-based.'" Fluctuations in the child's learning indicate that he is experiencing developmental problems, and the family lacks the ability to solve the child's growthal problems. Constantly changing schools is just an evasion of parents' educational responsibilities, and in the end they can only respond to the phrase 'pity the hearts of parents in the world'. ”

"Alas!" The wife sighed.

"Over the years, I have more students who are both literate and martial. Some teachers said: If so-and-so students devote their training time to studying, they will get better results in the college entrance examination. I sometimes ask the students who were ranked higher than him why they didn't devote all their time to studying, and why they didn't take the college entrance examination to their classmates from these sports teams. In fact, the secret of the students of the sports team who won the top spot in the college entrance examination is that they have the responsibility and the will to concentrate on their work. ”

"Concentration, concentration is so important?"

"Yes. Concentration is a mental force that maximizes development. ”

"Wang Xile's concentration ability is the worst, he will do this and that. ”

"You're wrong. Through years of training, Wang Xile has a little ability to concentrate. Wang Xile will do this and that for a while, and he will change hands after he has done one thing. For children who do not have the ability to concentrate, concentration is a draining thing, it is easy to fatigue the brain nerves, and often do not want to do it, this habit is enough to make all hopes disappointed, is a taboo in life. Although the problem of children's homework is very serious in the past few years, I have resisted the pressure and always adhered to the direction of developing children's self-ability, and after four years, the child's brain nerve function began to change from weak to strong, and doing things began to be reassuring. ”

"Wang Xile really makes people feel reassured. ”

"This is just the beginning of progress. His concentration, once it becomes a quality, will progress more comprehensively. Of course, I still say the same thing, it takes time and patience. ”

"The child will definitely improve. ”

The wife has never had such confidence in her son.

On the first week of early November, the school held a parent-teacher conference after the mid-term exams as usual. In the afternoon, my wife came back from a parent-teacher conference, happy and worried. She said:

"Wang Xile scored 97 points in mathematics and was the third in the grade, and 95 in Chinese was also very good, but his English was too bad, so he scored 68 points, which was the lowest in the whole grade. If you let your child listen and read by himself for a while a day, I don't think it's really good. ”

"Who says no. The key problem is that English is too far away from our actual life, and there is no other way in our agricultural and pastoral areas except rote memorization, but simple rote memorization is very harmful to people's development, which is the reason why I hesitate. ”

In the evening, Wang Xile was playing games, and I called him over and said, "Xile, I did very well in the midterm exam, but my English is a little worse." Last time at the Silver Lake Hotel, you were the only one who understood the American language, and I don't think your English is at the last level of your grade, but I think you have the ability to learn English well. ”

Wang Xile stood silently in front of me. I said, "You can think about the English thing yourself, let's play your game first." ”

Wang Xile left, and he returned to the computer with his thoughts......