Visitors to Jurong Bird Park should not miss the Bird Show, starring Amigo, the multi-lingual parrot. Amigo is able to belt out catchy songs in English, Mandarin and Malay! If you are unable to make the trip, watch this video clip to see Amigo in action (first song starts at 1.34 min).
Isn’t Amigo smart? For a bird, yes definitely! If Amigo were a human, not so. The bar is set much higher for us humans! The bird trainer at Jurong Bird Park has spent countless hours to make Amigo rote learn the songs. Amigo merely parrot (pardon the pun) the words without any understanding of their meanings.
The first song in the video is a popular Mandarin song (lyrics on the right) about a guest visiting the family to see Dad. Unfortunately Dad is not in. Nevertheless the guest is being invited into the house to have tea. What would happen if we make a minor tweak to the song lyrics, say, by replacing “Dad” with “Mom”? Amigo would be floored and won’t know how to sing it unless we make him undergo a new cycle of rote learning!
Does rote learning still have a place in the 21st education landscape? For certain content heavy subjects that require the students to memorize tons of stuff, maybe? For primary level education, maybe? For tertiary and university level, no! For conceptual subjects such as Physics, never!
From our experience coaching pre-university Physics, students who rote learn Physics, memorize formulas and brute force the 10-year-series (or even the 20-, 30-year-series) questions, have never succeeded in acing the subject. Our Physics coaching emphasizes on mastery of concepts via hands-on demos and application of concepts to solve higher-order thinking questions.
Here are some of our other unique value propositions: coaching is on-demand basis, there is no lock-in period, no advanced fees payment and payment only upon service delivery. Our aim is to coach our clients to be self confident and independent learners in Physics ASAP. We are not a tuition center and definitely not a hot-housing school. We don’t tutor, we coach.
The tuition industry is worth a SGD 1 billion a year in Singapore. Tuition has become a commodity. What students and parents need to be aware of is this – a truly beneficial program should not have to tie down the students for months and years.
It is never too early to start equipping students with the right skills and knowledge for the 21st Century Economy. The first thing to do is to ditch rote learning as we believe that the rote-learn teaching approach and any sort of hot-housing have no place in the 21st Century marketplace. With the advent of robots and AI, rote learning jobs will be relegated to the dustbins of history in the not too distant future. So, why continue taking lessons at tuition centers that focus on rote learning and hot-housing? Why not put your money and precious time to better use than to flush them down the drain?
Students should, instead, focus on gaining a 100% grasp of the concepts, appreciating the concepts and applying the right concepts to tackle problems, especially those which require out-of-the-box thinking. If you would like to be equipped to learn smarter, leverage on the best known learning practices from the corporate world and achieve better outcome for Physics, please get in touch with us at physics@integratedots.com or contact us here.
One of our clients recently commented in jest when we set a high bar of an “A” grade for him to shoot for in the upcoming JC2 mid year Physics exam.
He jested: “If I get an A, I don’t need you any more.”
Our reply: “That’s exactly what we want! We want you to become independent of us and be confident to fly solo in Physics!”