Teacher's Question of the Week
"Einstein", by Irene Rivetti
Q: What can Einstein teach us about how to think and to learn?
A: Einstein said, "I rarely think in words at all", and yet we recognize his achievements in physics as groundbreaking. Is there a connection between creating conceptual models and developing visuo-spatial imagination? Although everyone has the potential to develop the imagination, some have perfected abstract fluid reasoning, supported this conceptual, logical reasoning with abstract visual-spatial images, forms, and seem to synthesize these by a sense of mathematical proportionality.
The following quotes from Einstein and Hadamard, a mathematician, depict in their own words how they thought.
"The words or the language,
as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism
of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought
are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily'
produced and combined...The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual
and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought
for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative
play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will." Albert
Einstein (from The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin, and
requoted in Conceptual Blockbusting, by James L. Adams)
"I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think . . . [and] even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears the moment that I am beginning to think it over . . ." Jacques Hadamard (from The Psychology of Mathematical Invention)
How do you introduce this type of thinking in your lectures and lessons? Have you noticed that students who visualize have better reading comprehension than those who have never learned how to visualize?
Teaching in a multi-modality way ensures that students who strongly prefer a certain modality, as Einstein and Hadamard described, are included in your lesson. Of course, the added advantage to bringing several "learning languages" or "modalities" into the lesson is that you are teaching other students how to use a new mode of thinking, thus activating a pathway to the brain. This can only help learning.