Schools is not the end point of reading and effective
comprehension practice for students, for which strategies for understanding
different expository text in different genres would be essential in future
employment in various social sectors. I was recently reminded of an ancient
proverb in Mandarin back China:
授之以鱼，不如授之以渔。
(shou zhi yi yu, buru shou zhi yi yu。, trans., it would be
better teach a man how to fish than to give him a fish.)
While pronouncing exactly the same in Mandarin, 鱼（yu, trans., fish）and 渔(yu, trans., the action of fishing, and/or knowledge and skills to
fish) differ a lot in the meaning. Linking back to the literature, the answer
of recalling questions to a text after reading along with the text it self is鱼(fish), which only tells
students what’s the main idea of this passage, while how to read, namely,
reading with skills and strategies is渔(the action of fishing,
and/or knowledge and skills to fish). When an individual has to read a text
about basketball without having a say in text decision, s/he would lose the
desire, eagerness and motivation to read the text, esp., when s/he is an indoor
person without any passion in basketball (When a person has to have salmon
without having a chance to decide what type of fish s/he would like to have,
s/he would not desire, eager and motivated to have the fish.) .
1 comment:
When I was in primary school, my teacher taught us the proverb "授之以鱼，不如授之以渔".After more than a decade when I read it again, I think of the English term "soft power" and "smart power".
When we are learning, it's more important for us to learn the skill of learning and the logic of the knowledge, which is the "渔".The ability to master the learning skills and know deeply about the logic of the knowledge will open doors for us to reproduce knowledge by ourselves.
Soft power and smart power are usually used in political field, but I want to transfer these two political terms into describing a good learning ability. Soft and smart is the individual who can master what he/she can learned flexibly and creatively, because he/she has learned how to fish (渔).
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