Relate lessons to actual life

By Iwan Pranoto

BANDUNG (JP): A common problem our children are having in school is that they cannot integrate the materials they learn. They are not able to relate one to the other. The materials given in a lesson about language, for example, do not seem to have any relation with mathematics, and vice versa. And this problem continues all the way up to university level.

Worse still, a belief is growing that the materials learned in school have nothing to do with actual life. As a matter of fact, it is common for students in the mathematics classes of elementary and secondary schools to ask when they will be using the given materials.

For them, mathematics is seen as an abstract thing. The other subject materials are not completely satisfying either and the students ask similar questions.

Unfortunately, many schoolteachers will answer with they will need them later, without any effort to address the actual question of the student's. Perhaps, the teachers also add: "Please, do not ask those questions again."

Most causes of this are deeply rooted. They seem embedded in the education system we have now. One well-known cause of it is the fact that our curriculum is so overwhelmingly rich. Because they do not have enough time to think, it forces students to memorize things, instead of learning them. If our students use this surface approach to their study, they will not reach the state where they are challenged to reason actively, let alone put the materials into bigger pictures. This fact clearly contributes to our students' failure to integrate the lesson materials.

Besides the students' difficulty in integrating the lesson materials, they also show a weakness in problem-solving capabilities. This weakness can be observed from children in elementary schools to adult students in universities. They are taught to do most things by rote and are therefore bound to have trouble when their tasks require problem-solving strategies and reasoning.

They are alienated to strategies that involve a trial and error approach, pattern recognition, problem formulation, etc. They are not used to thinking of the problem as an entire entity. They are used to solving problems only that have been formulated by the teachers. So they are not accustomed to formulating problems. They do not have the opportunity to learn how to read and understand the actual problems either. Moreover, they have never learned how to extract important information from the problems.

Students' lack of experiences in problem-solving assignments are also likely to make them very weak in reasoning.

Almost all Indonesian third-year schoolchildren can compute the answer of 21 times 15. However, what if we were to pose the question differently, as in "if 20 times 15 is 300, what is 21 times 15?" Next, we should ask the students how they came to their answer. It is unlikely that the students could answer and explain the last question.

This difficulty is caused by the alienation of reasoning activities from mathematics learned in school. It becomes an abstract subject full of weird symbols, unquestionable rote skills and memorized formula. This situation also happens in other subjects.

Now, do we have to wait for the curriculum to be fixed before we address this issue? Of course, we cannot wait until a new curriculum is released, because by merely waiting for it we are not providing the highest quality education process we can offer to our students. Therefore, we have to start fixing it now.

The next question is whether we can provide the opportunity for our schoolchildren to integrate the lesson materials they are learning now. Yes, we can provide it. It can be done, and in fact it requires very little money.

An idea that may provide the above opportunity is to design a lesson plan for a classroom activity which teachers can apply to the level of their own classes. The lesson plan would mainly consist of selecting an article from a newspaper to draw activities from for in-classroom use. For example, an article explaining the fluctuation of the rate of rupiah against the U.S. dollar.

A suggested activity would be to instruct the students to graph the rupiah's fluctuation over a period of time. Following that, students could be asked to explain when and why the line on the graph ascended or descended. We could also ask students to compare the price of one kilogram of rice in U.S. dollars, from one year ago to now. Ask the students to explain the meaning of its changes. The students should be left to find the answers themselves. This situation is exactly the state inquiry-oriented manner that students need to become critical and active thinkers.

In the above activities, the students would learn mathematics. They would experience what an ascending or descending graph means, and would also learn comparative economics at the same time. This is an exact example of a lesson plan which promotes the integration of subject materials needed by our schoolchildren.

By doing so, the students would also see lesson materials as something relevant to their life. We would have nurtured them to transform their question from "When are we going to need them?" to "Where else can we use them?"

The only handicap is the availability of quality articles in our newspapers. At this moment, it is very hard to find an article in the Indonesian language that could be utilized in the classroom. Of course, that is not the case with articles in English. We already know that many articles of The Jakarta Post have been used in English teaching, especially in training centers.

It would be a great challenge for Indonesian newspapers to provide quality articles which could do the same. It would mean the articles should be written in proper Indonesian language and show rigorous reasoning. The articles should also enrich readers with new vocabulary and insights. Besides all that, the articles should be interesting.

It is time the community of mass media contributed to education. If we do not provide quality education to our children now, in the next decade Indonesian newspapers will be read by passive readers only. This will force media people to produce garbage information, since nobody would be able to read articles with deep analysis.

The writer is a math teacher living in Bandung.