One of the things a lecturer or writer should learn early enough is that it’s hardly possible to communicate anything in words or ideas that the listener or reader doesn’t already know and understand.
When I was a university sophomore long, long ago, my vivacious English III professor must have learned this with great consternation when she quizzed me: “Mr. Carillo, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Grandeur of God,’ what does this line mean?
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed. It wasn’t a tough question so I replied confidently: “Exactly what it says, ma’am. God’s glory would shine brightly like aluminum foil shaken in sunlight, and would splatter like oil if you try to crush it.”
She cut me down impatiently: “A very simplistic view, Mr. Carillo. Isn’t there anything in that head of yours that tells you that God’s glory is like the sun in the day and the black darkness at night?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh, my goodness, from what province did you come from, Mr. Carillo?”
It was worse in Chemistry II. My sixtyish professor would quietly walk to the front of the classroom like a sleepwalker, fix her gaze to the back end of the ceiling, then start mumbling her lectures this way: “The oxidation number is equivalent to the valence but with a sign that expresses the nature of the charge of the species in question when formed from the neutral atom. Thus, chlorine in hydrochloric acid has the oxidation number -1, hypochlorous acid has a +1. The oxidation number of chlorine in chloric acid (HClO3) is in turn +5...”
This she’d do nonstop, crossly waving off any question until she had finished 45 minutes later. She always gave me the feeling that her audience were distinguished chemists at the Royal Academy of Science in London, which we in class definitely weren’t. In my case, I was then a country bumpkin whose only science was that: (a) a pinch of sodium dropped onto water creates a teeny-weeny flash to form a precipitate called “sodium hydroxide,” and (b) a little windmill in a vacuum glass case rotates when its blades are exposed to sunlight.
In retrospect, I can see now that my English professor and Chemistry professor were both hidebound practitioners of what’s known in linguistics as the “transport view of language”—that language is simply a passive vehicle for conveying information from source to receiver; that is, “the medium is the language.”
Modern communication theory, however, holds this opposite view—that the listener or reader is as active as the lecturer or writer in giving meaning to the content of the message. Thus, if you knew nothing of Hopkins or his poems, your English professor could twist Hopkins whichever way she wanted and you wouldn’t even know what she was up to. You likewise wouldn’t know what “oxidation number” and “valence” meant unless your Chemistry teacher had first made them completely clear to you. With university professors allowed to foist the “sink or swim” method on their students, however, not a few justify their ineffective teaching by cavalierly pre-announcing that they normally pass, say, “no more than 25 percent of the class.”
But in science as in literature, few things are self-evident and self-explanatory; many are even counterintuitive. This is why we need real, patient, and enthusiastic teachers of these subjects. using words and symbols that are already in the learners’ minds. Teachers shouldn’t force on students only their own interpretations or abstruse chemical or mathematical constructs but judiciously use analogy and metaphor to make new ideas easier to grasp.
Instead of foisting fear of them, they should be more focused in making their students like—if not love—English, science, and mathematics. They should abandon shallow teaching and academic posturing and make an honest-to-goodness effort to help students learn and think on their own.
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This is a slight abridgement of a 676-word essay the author wrote for his “English Plain and Simple” column in 2003 that later formed part of his book Give Your English the Winning Edge
, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.This essay, 2125th of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the November 17, 2022 digital edition of The Manila Times
, ©2022 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay online in The Manila Times:
The language of science and literature(Next week:
The perils of sweeping generalizations) November 24, 2022
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
