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East vs. West: The Unknown Word
The following is part of a series to examine differences between the East and the West. Particularly based in my experience with and travels to the Eastern world. I apologize in advance for any Western notions that affect or creep in on my analysis.
In any classroom in the West you can expect to see students seated in rows of desk or perhaps if the teacher is daring and unconventional they will be in clusters of desk. The occasional horseshoe style classroom can also be found. But, in general, the students are all seated and quietly listening to the teacher. In the case that a student has a question to ask or something to say we all know that it is proper protocol for the student to raise his/her hand and wait to be called on.
We experience something far different in the East. To begin with, while some learning occurs in classrooms, it is far more effective in the East to learn with your feet in the setting of something that you are learning. It is for this reason that a teacher will take a group of students out into the natural surroundings of what you are learning. If we are learning about a lake, then we will go and sit beside the lake.
The classroom is then wherever this instruction and learning takes place. As students are learning from the teacher, they are certainly not in uniform, neat rows of seats with hands raised. But rather, they will surround the teachers in a more fluid sense and listen to what the teacher will share with them. In the case that a student doesn't understand a word that the teacher used, the student will repeat that word when the teacher has said it. The teacher will then know that word is unfarmiliar to at least one student. The teacher will spend time expounding upon that word so that the class becomes more familiar with it.
In the course of my travels to Israel with Ray Vander Laan (RVL) last June, we had an interesting experience of this Eastern style of learning colliding with our Western ineptitude. As we were "following the rabbi" (learning in a first Century discipleship context) we would repeat words that were unfamiliar to us. If RVL had a feeling that a word would be unfamiliar to the group he would ask us to say it. It would sound something like this, "Say hazak..." We would say, "Hazak", and then RVL would continue to explain what the word meant or how it was used.
It was seemingly one of these occasions that we found ourselves in when we thought RVL was introducing us to the word "Midea".
In reality, RVL said, "Same idea." We had thought he said, "Say 'midea'." Because we were involved in our own learning by repeating the phrase the teacher had said we immediately repeated, "Midea." RVL broke into laughter because he had intended to explain that the item he was talking about was the "same idea" as another.
This kind of learning only occurs when students are involved and I will say that my experience of learning this way is far more memorable than any of the lectures I attended while studying engineering.
