AUSSIE

Blog entry posted November 9th, 2009 by Dale Worsley

In my last post I boasted that I could quell the educator’s purple people eating demon of time. Spend a few seconds with me and we’ll see how it goes. First, the story of Zhongkui, my patron ghost in this endeavor:

Zhongkui was a devoted student who, for whatever reason (anxiety? a disability? a bad night’s sleep? being a global thinker sitting for a literal-minded test, or vice versa?) failed the national examination. Times were different during those years in China – sometime around 700 BCE. When you failed a national exam then, there was no component retesting. Indeed, the shame was so great the only way to save face was to commit suicide, which is what Zhongkui promptly did. The Emperor Xuanzong, knowing what a devoted student Zhongkui had been, overrode the College Board of that era and rescued his honor posthumously by granting him a degree and bestowing upon him the title “Doctor of Zhongnanshan.” To return the favor, the ghost of Zhongkui appeared to Xuanzong in a dream and promised to protect the empire from evil demons. To this day, folks are apt to put statuettes of the large-eyed, bushy-browed, black-robed, sword-wielding, exam-failing scholar outside their homes to protect them from high stakes tests and any other ghosts and goblins that happen to be floating around.

Those of us in modern times who are plagued with insufficient time to cover all that needs covering in our courses have two choices, in my opinion: install the demon queller Zhongkui outside our classroom doors or fuse our altruistic beliefs with the mandates of coverage into ideas big enough to contain both.

Brain research comes to our rescue on this. Human neurons ache for a concept to hang the details on. When they do have such a concept (“The function of history may not be so much to make the past familiar as to make it strange.” “We can find our own place in a poetic tradition.” “Statistics is the organization of data to help understand important things more objectively so we can make better decisions.” “Natural selection provides a good biological explanation of how different species, including human beings, got here.”) they’ll be more than happy to attach any number of facts to it. Picture your clothes without hangers or a rod in the closet. (My daughter’s room is the perfect image of the mess that would be.) Picture ducklings without their mother. Picture your silverware without a drawer. The organizing principles help us keep the facts from piling up, the information from swimming around in circles, the knowledge from clattering about in our brains in a useless and disorderly mess.

Don’t worry. Think big. Put a statue of Zhongkui outside your classroom just in case. And enjoy.