JANUARY 21 — A new school year recently started. If the status quo persists, a small batch of learners will excel beyond all others, and another (hopefully very) small batch will end up in depression or worse, and practically all students will be stressed out one way or another.
But does it always have to be like this? Is there some way to approach schooling such that a majority of students enjoy their studies and excel at their respective strengths?
I think there is; to this end, we need to understand the convexity-concavity binary.
Convexity is what you see when teenagers start playing Fortnite on Monday and by Thursday they’re almost experts.
It’s what happened when Magnus Carlsen first learnt how to play chess; within a few weeks he was beating his dad and sisters, in a few years he was thrashing grand-masters and even drawing with then world champion Garry Kasparov.
Convexity is how one might describe Yeo Bee Yin’s progress as Minister of Energy, Technology, Science, Climate Change and Environment whereby almost everything she says is worth listening to and all she touches turns to gold.
You can also detect it in the most effective of your colleagues, whereby any given “unit” of effort yields disproportionately high value.
Give these folks a project and you just know they’ll deliver quality within the given timeframe (or even faster).
There is something non-linear happening when individuals perform in a manner which fits convexity.
With time, they inevitably grow stronger.
Despite unforeseen circumstances, they adapt fast, creatively and resourcefully.
My son’s progress with his Rubik’s Cube is nothing short of convex. From solving the 3x3 cube within a minute, he then managed to drop his time to 30 seconds and now he’s trying to breach the 10-second mark. (Me? I could try for 10 years and I wouldn’t be able to do even two sides)
However, I noticed that my son’s progress with Bahasa Melayu is anything but convex! He struggles. He tries hard, but can barely pass. He’s had tuition but the teacher claims he’s slowing her down (!).
Such a situation we may term the opposite of convexity i.e. concavity.
Concavity is what you see when most senior folks are shown a new app (or, similarly, if younger folks are asked to study textbooks): Unusual difficulty and obstacles from the start, followed by slow and discouraging progress, ending with a baseline understanding or even aborting the use of the app entirely.
Concavity is the state of Malaysian traffic (or traffic in most Asean countries) in which solutions are few and far between and long-term progress to eliminate jams are impossible.
Concavity, alas, is also the case with a majority of Malaysian students when it comes to their studies.
They are pushed to excel in as many subjects as possible, pressured to obtain higher and higher grades (at even those areas they suck at) and whatever they achieve it’ll never be enough.
The minority group who are naturally strong in academia have it good during their school years (i.e. they experience convexity) but most within this group then suffer concavity when they join the workforce.
Because — surprise, surprise — in the corporate world, “memorising” textbooks and solve differentiation aren’t exactly treasured skills.
So how do we give our students a school/learning experience characterised by convexity, instead of concavity?
Certainly not be getting them to “try harder”, year after year. Trying harder and getting marginal or negligible results is the very definition of concavity.
Trying “smarter” is one alternative. We must teach our students how to learn. Life-hack their subjects, as they say nowadays.
Another option is to take a strength-based approach to their studies. Get them to focus the bulk of their energy on those 2-3 subjects they are passionate about or have a knack for.
And the other subjects (like BM for my kid?), get them to meet the bare minimum requirements, and move on. Don’t waste time on subjects which stress you out unnecessarily, despite repeated efforts.
In other words, encourage students to excel selectively. Don’t be kiasu and expect virtually every kid to be scholar material.
That’d be like Nicol David spending her time trying to improve her basketball skills. Not smart.
* Alwyn has been working in the education sector for more than one and a half decades. He hopes to introduce the “barbell strategy” (based on the concept of anti-fragility by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) into education as a way of countering the stress and anxiety faced by so many Asian students.
His draft paper, Nurturing The Anti-Fragile Student, can be found here (at ResearchGate, comments and feedback welcomed), and will be presented at a few conferences over the next few months, including TEDx University of Malaya in March.
** This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
