Translator: Queenie Lee Reviewer: ARLES Fanny
Let's start with a pretest.
(Laughter)
A few common questions in mathematics and science.
136 divided by 17
Anyone?
Don't worry, division's always difficult.
Let's go on to geometry.
When angles totaling 360° come together, at one point,
what kind of surface is formed?
Convex? Planar? Or hyperbolic?
All mathematics is a little bit complicated,
but these are common questions, alright?
Let's go to science.
Production of salt can occur through what processes?
We've got distillation, crystallization, evaporation.
These things are kind of running together in your mind,
I can see it, but it's okay.
But these are common questions, every curriculum has got them.
Last one: Separating a mixture of particulate solids,
like particles, can be carried out due to what properties?
We've got density, capacity.
So do these questions seem a little abstract?
A little out of context, perhaps?
Well, you're not alone.
There's millions of students around the world
stuck on just these kind of questions.
But let me tell you something else about these questions.
Grandma knows the answer.
Grandma, right here in Timor-Leste, never been to the school,
never opened a book,
she knows the answers to these questions and many, many more.
Let me show you how she knows and how I know she knows.
Grandma inTimor-Leste here, she weaves palm leaves into baskets.
One of the very common baskets she weaves is the mamafatin.
It's a very useful basket; it's also used in some ceremonies in Timor.
And so the mamafatin has got pattern around the edge,
and the pattern repeats itself.
And it's built into these vertical strips going around the side of the basket.
And the vertical strips come from the base strips.
You can see that the strip coming across the top there,
it comes down and splits into two,
and that's what makes the pattern around the outside.
This particular basket's got strips going in three directions
for a total of 68 strips,
and when they go up the side, they split into 136 strips,
and that's what you've got to make your pattern.
And in this basket here, that you can see,
there're 17 different patterns,
and so you've got eight strips per pattern.
If Grandma doesn't know that, the basket's not going to turn out right.
So she must know it.
She also makes lafatik basket, another very common basket.
Every household in Timor has got this basket,
and it's made entirely of these tiny diamonds called rhombuses.
You may remember that a rhombus can be decomposed into two triangles.
Here, we've got equilateral triangles, each with a 60° angle.
And if you put six of them together,
you get a six-pointed star - that's 6 times 60; that's 360°,
that's making the flat planar bottom of the basket.
But we don't want the basket just to be flat,
we want it to come up at the side.
So you can see there's a lot of six-pointed stars there,
but there's also five-pointed stars
in the corner,
right where the basket turns up, there's five-pointed stars,
that's a convex surface.
That’s what you need to make the side of your basket.
You can see Grandma's weaving; I caught it on film.
There's your five-pointed star, right there.
Then there's also seven-pointed stars on the other side of the basket.
That's more than 360°; it's a hyperbolic surface.
It comes out; it's a flaring surface,
and that's what you need to make the basket turn out right.
So Grandma knows that stuff; she has to.
(Laughter)
Grandma also knows that the dirt near the ocean is loaded with salt.
That sometimes the high tide comes up, and it soaks the dirt.
And if you take some of that dirt and put it in a structure like this,
and wash it with sea water, and collect the water at the bottom,
and put it through two or three times, it becomes very salty.
And then you take it into the shed and dump it into this tray,
and you boil it, you can watch right there -
the water evaporate and the salt crystallize.
And then you've got some nice sea salt to sell for a little bit of money.
Finally, we're back to the lafatik.
Every grandma knows that you can use this to winnow rice,
to separate the rice whole from the rice grain.
And when you fling up like that,
the rice grain, which has a high density and a low surface area,
falls first into the basket.
When you move the basket,
and the skin of the rice, the whole, with a high surface area and a low-density
falls slower onto the ground, and you've got clean rice.
So what can we conclude from all this?
We can conclude that Grandma's smart.
That's absolutely true,
but I didn't come here to tell you that; you should have known that already!
What I came here to say is if we were smart,
we'd start thinking about how Grandma learned all that stuff.
This is a woman with no formal education, never been on YouTube,
but she knows all this really valuable stuff.
And I've talked to a lot of grandmas here in Timor-Leste,
and I never fail to ask them where they learned what they know,
and they never fail to look at me like I'm a little bit stupid.
Because the answer's always the same.
She learned from her mom, from her aunts
and from her Grandma.
And all that learning and teaching happen in every specific, very unique way.
Let’s look at it.
Grandma's pedagogy.
First and foremost, Grandma's pedagogy is hands-on.
She will not be lecturing at the chalkboard.
She'll start teaching you how to build that basket
when you've got the leaves in your hands.
It's inquiry based.
Grandma doesn't have time to teach you anything
that you could figure out for yourself.
And she knows that you'll learn it better that way, anyway.
It's contextualized.
Everything she teaches is in the context of the basic needs of everyday life.
It's student centered.
You better believe she needs you to learn that stuff.
She's going to continue teaching it until you've got it.
It's problem based.
We need rice. We need salt. We need baskets,
How can we use science and mathematics to get these things?
It's integrated.
She won't be teaching physics over here,
biology over here and mathematics over here.
It's all integrated together, as well as into daily life.
Sustainable.
She teaches in a way that can be maintained year after year,
generation after generation.
It's also evidence based.
She needs the product; she needs the final evidence that you learned it.
That's the whole reason we're doing the education.
So there it is, Grandma's pedagogy.
I'm impressed.
And I think we can take this genius and put it to work in schools.
Here in Timor-Leste,
which is a newly independent nation, recovering from a violent occupation.
I've been part of some truly encouraging work
to get Grandma into the formal curriculum.
And when people see what we're doing,
they often raise all the additional benefits of this sort of teaching.
They'll say that students will gain pride for their own culture;
they'll learn to value their traditions;
they'll elevate the status of their elders
and they'll gain self-confidence.
And I agree, that stuff is absolutely critical,
especially in a nation recovering from colonialism like Timor-Leste.
And still, the primary reason
that I think we need to get Grandma's pedagogy into the curriculum
is because it's effective.
As a teacher, with a goal of helping students learn,
I'd give anything to be as effective as Grandma.
Let me show you some of the things we've been doing.
When I was teaching physics at the National University,
I began working with groups of students
who were interested in Grandma's knowledge.
And we put together over 100 activities that Grandma would be familiar with,
put them into an encyclopedia:
Science and Mathematics in our Everyday Lives.
And we distributed this to all the schools in the nation
as a teacher resource.
Around that book, came together a group of teachers
and we call ourselves SESIM.
We continue to develop activities and curriculum elements
to be used in the schools.
And together with the support of the Vice Minister for Basic Education,
Ms. Dulce Soares,
we've gotten many, many of these activities
into the Official National Curriculum,
and now we've trained hundreds of teachers
on how to do them, how to carry them out in the schools.
Here's some of the manuals we've created,
and here's some examples.
When we teach about plants, germination and things growing in soil,
we refer to the school garden.
You'll hear more about that next from Mr. Ego Lemos.
And you can actually do a lot of good hard science,
growing things under different conditions just like Grandma does in her field.
These three plants are grown under conditions of full daylight,
shade and darkness.
Can you tell which is which?
I'm not going to tell you.
We teach algebra, equations, formulas with basic home economics.
You're going to the market,
you're going buy a certain number of things at a certain price,
you're going to pay the car, how much to go back and forth?
You've got algebra.
We make geometry, figures,
we study angles with the sticks made from a broom.
Actually one time, we were teaching - training on this activity,
and we'd done all the different kinds of triangles
and all the different parallelograms,
and a teacher raise their hand and said: "What about the Pythagorean Theorem?"
And we said, "Alright, let's do it!"
We made a triangle with one side of three and one side of four,
and we measured the hypotenuse,
and we calculated it all out with the formula,
and the answers came out exactly the same.
And the teachers gave us a standing ovation.
They were so impressed.
And I think the reason is that that broom made by Grandma,
had been there the whole time.
All those years they were trying to teach this:
abstract, not abstract, but this concept.
And now they saw the connection, and they could use that.
You could also make a compass from two sticks and a pencil,
some rubber bands.
These teachers are studying Boyle's Law -
relation between pressure and volume inside of a traditional Timorese blowgun.
Here's a low-level mathematics course for, I think, second grade,
they actually weave strips together,
and they calculate its area and its perimeter.
They can actually make
a bar graph on the little map that they make.
Don't tell anybody, but kids love this!
They love this kind of education!
It’s like playing!
And in fact, we found a lot of mathematics and science
in the traditional games and toys, here in Timor-Leste.
This one is this fabulously rich mathematical game, [Aimanolin].
They fling a little stick,
and then they measure the distance that stick goes
with three different units of measure,
and put their scores together to get their total.
It's incredible.
So these are just a few examples of what we're done
in the National Curriculum here in Timor-Leste.
It's worth knowing that the group SESIM,
is a majority Timorese, and that makes sense
because after all, it was us foreigners
who brought the classroom and the chalkboard to Timor,
together with the stultifying,
impenetrable
and blindingly ineffective pedagogy that often goes with it.
Grandma's been doing fine with her pedagogy here all along.
So what I'm saying is not something new;
it's as old as the hills.
The new thing I'm suggesting is that it needn’t stay in the hills
under the tree with Grandma,
but can be applied in every classroom, in every curriculum,
so that every student can benefit from its spectacular success rate.
Basically, if you're going to teach something, don't start here.
Go with Grandma!
Bring her right into the classroom, like we've done here.
And of course I’m referring to the collective Grandma,
representing generations of ancestors
who've passed on their knowledge in the best way they knew how.
And I'm not suggesting we stop with Grandma.
Grandma's the starting point, the "ponto de partida."
She's the springboard to all knowledge, concrete and abstract.
She's the link between our experience and the academic canon.
Vicente dos Reis, also known as Sahe, was a great educator in Timor-Leste.
Unfortunately, he was killed in the early years of the occupation.
But he lived with the philosophy that "practice is the criterion for the truth."
I think that's true,
and I think he probably got that from his Grandma.