Happy Birthday Albert Einstein, a son of the Danube and a teacher with a feel for process

Albert Einstein on his bike

Albert Einstein on his bike

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”

Albert Einstein

One of the most famous children of the Danube was born today in Ulm, Germany on March 14th 1879.

 

Ulm in Germany, birthplace of Albert Einstein

Ulm in Germany, birthplace of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein, a son of the Danube

I have travelled through Ulm many times by train and by car on the way to and from Bavaria and Belgrade, but have never stopped off there.

Albert as a Jewish boy

Where Albert Einstein was born March 14th 1979

Where Albert Einstein was born on March 14th 1879, click on it to see it in detail

Einstein’s parents were nominally of the Jewish faith, but they didn’t send Albert to a Jewish school and he ended up being the only Jewish pupil in a Catholic school.  Maybe he had similar feelings to me when I went to a little Catholic school in Birmingham where I was one of a handful of Church of England children amongst  mostly Irish Catholics. The first girl I fell in love with, at the age of 5, was a girl called Josephine Murphy who was a Catholic. We engaged in a strange ritual every morning, the significance of which I only became aware of later.  Every morning there were two separate morning assemblies; one for the Church of England children and one for the Catholics.  I wrote a poem about it many years later.

There were six of us

Sitting round that fireplace

While Josephine Murphy and everybody else

Were in the big hall

Every morning, every week day, every week

We would be here and they would be there

I asked my Mummy why they were there

And we were here

She said, “they’re Catholics”

To which I replied, “and some of them are Roman Catholics”

I asked my Mummy if one day I could be a Roman Catholic

And be in that big hall

With Josephine Murphy

Einstein the schoolboy

Albert Einstein’s experience of his first school, as described by his biographer Philip Frank, was not a positive one.

“On the whole Einstein felt that school was not very different from his conception of barracks, a place where everyone was subject to the power of an organization that exercised a mechanical pressure on the individual, leaving no area open within which he might carry on some activity suited to his nature. The students were required to learn mechanically the material presented to them, and the main emphasis was placed on the inculcation of obedience and discipline. The pupils were required to stand at attention when addressed by the teacher and were not supposed to speak unless asked a question. Independent questions addressed by students to the teacher and informal conversations between them were rare.”

Einstein as a dyslexic learner?

Albert Einstein in his sandals by the sea

Albert Einstein in his sandals by the sea

Even when Albert was nine years old and in the highest grade of elementary school, he still lacked fluency of speech, and everything he said was expressed only after thorough consideration and reflection.”

In hindsight, although it was not recognized then, this lack of fluency of speech may have been down to dyslexia, although this is now contested.

“Einstein showed language impairments at a very young age. His speech was severely delayed. He only began to talk at the age of three, and had trouble with language throughout elementary school.

During a parent’s meeting, the Headmaster apparently told Einstein’s parents that he did not have the ability to be a successful professional and recommended that Einstein attend a trade school. In fact, it is claimed that some teachers thought he was borderline retarded, a claim that seems hard to substantiate in the light of his further development.

Young Albert did not listen to them. Instead, he moved to a different type of school. This school de-emphasized rote memorization. Unlike his old school, they stressed creative thinking and hands-on learning. Young Albert’s academic performance improved dramatically.”

Regardless of whether Einstein was dyslexic or not, in the Applied Linguistics department at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest , my former department, there is some excellent work being done on dyslexic learners and learners with learning difficulties in general by Kontra Edit, Kormos Judit, Sarkadi Ágnes, Csizér Kata and Sáfár Anna.Check out the website if you are interested which is both in Hungarian and in English, scroll down for the English version.

http://esely.elte.hu/publikaciok.shtml

Einstein the teacher

Was Einstein a good teacher? Did he like teaching? According to his biographer Philipp Frank he was a friendly teacher and unlike many professors lacked any kind of academic vanity. Unlike many professors, he did not seek a reflection of his own personality and ideas in his students. He also seemed aware of taking into account different students with different backgrounds in choosing how he presented his work:

einsteinblackboard

“When Einstein had thought out a problem, he always found it necessary to present it so that it would be comprehensible to people accustomed to different modes of thought and with different educational backgrounds. He liked to formulate his ideas for mathematicians, for experimental physicists, for philosophers, and even for people without much scientific training if they were at all inclined to think independently.

Make things simple

Make things simple

He tried to reduce every subject to its simplest logical form.”

Einstein and a  process approach to teaching

From a teaching point of view Einstein was clearly unhappy with “downloading a pre-planned syllabus” and enjoyed working with both what happened to emerge from his head and what emerged from the students in the lecture hall.

“It was irksome for him to give regular lectures. To do so requires that the material for an entire course shall be so well organised and arranged that it can be presented interestingly throughout the year…There are teachers especially in German universities, who have arranged their time so precisely that their time is so occupied that they have no place for the unforseen, for an idea not directly connected with science or the teaching profession, for reflection, or for conversation with an unexpected visitor…He did not like grounding out information for the students but preferred to give abundantly of what interested him and concerned him. For this he put the emphasis on his present field of interest.”

In the period that Einstein was active as a professor, one of his students came to him and said: “The questions of this year’s exam are the same as last years!  “True” Einstein said, “but this year all the answers are different.”

From this I think that we can conclude that he would have liked and appreciated the ideas of a  process syllabus, as outlined here in this excellent account of critical curriculum design rooted in the ideas of Lawrence Stenhouse and developed later, in ELT,  by Mike Breen of Lancaster University.

one of the best accounts of a process syllabus in action

one of the best accounts of a process syllabus in action

Knowing more about Albert Einstein’s life and how he worked as a teacher gives valuable insights into understanding one of the greatest thinkers in human history, the life and times of when he lived and why we often only know the ideas associated with famous thinkers and not much about the people themselves.

Remembering birthdays is a good way of beginning lessons, especially if you can get students, in turn, to make short two minute presentations on somebody whose birthday it is.  Making connections with both people and places is one way of developing students’ intelligence and making knowledge memorable.

Reasons for writing about Einstein today

1)  It’s Einstein’s birthday.

2) Einstein was born on the Danube and this blog is called “Classrooms on the Danube”.

3) Einstein was a teacher and this blog about teaching.

4) It is also about making the familiar strange and finding new angles on old topics. Nearly everybody knows of Einstein but what he was like as a pupil and a teacher and where he was born is less known.

Which is the most famous tongue in the world?

Which is the most famous tongue in the world? Einstein’s?

5) Most of us know the famous picture of Einstein with his tongue out but why not  showing  more unusual pictures of Einstein riding a bike or in a pair of shorts and sandals by a lake?

6) Why not project or print out pictures of Einstein in his shorts and sandals and riding a bike, get students to describe them in and then, based on the pictures, get them to speculate as much as they can on what kind of person he might  have been before revealing his name.

Or is this tongue more famous?

Or is this tongue more famous?

7) Finally, depending on the level of your group, divide the class into Einsteins and interviewers of Einstein. Give them a few minutes to work together. The Einsteins can discuss what kind of person Einstein was, based on selected extracts of this text and any other knowledge the students have and the interviewers can work on which questions they would like to ask Einstein. The groundwork has then been done to carry out the interviews in pairs…potentially far more engaging than just answering comprehension questions.

 

Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric visited Mileva's parents in the Serbian city of Novi Sad in 1905, 1907, and 1913. Albert Einstein and family visited Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in 1905.

Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić visited Mileva’s parents in the Serbian city of Novi Sad in 1905, 1907, and 1913. Albert Einstein and family visited Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in 1905.

One final intriguing Danube connection is that Einstein’s first wife and contributor to his work on relativity, Mileva Marić, lived and went to school on the Danube in Novi Sad, now a part of Serbia.

 

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3 thoughts on “Happy Birthday Albert Einstein, a son of the Danube and a teacher with a feel for process

  1. Dear Mark, I’d love to 🙂 Drop me a line at anne.hodgson at t minus online dot de when you’re ready.
    How inspiring: “The questions of this year’s exam are the same as last years!” “True, but this year all the answers are different.” Now, that will sail me through the day. Have a lovely one!
    Anne

  2. Robert Gradauer from Austria has just reminded me in an email of Bob Dylan’s celebration of Einstein in his song “On Desolation Row” Thanks for that Robert!

    Albert Einstein, Rock Star

    He made science cool, turned bad hair good—and there’s that tongue photo.

    by Thomas Levenson

    Bob Dylan came up with one way to remember Albert Einstein:

    “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
    With his memories in a trunk
    Passed this way an hour ago
    With his friend, a jealous monk
    He looked so immaculately frightful
    As he bummed a cigarette
    Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
    And reciting the alphabet
    You would not think to look at him
    But he was famous long ago
    For playing the electric violin
    On Desolation Row”

    This is the pure distillate of celebrity. Dylan’s folk-rock vision of “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood” is one in which the original man has disappeared into a symbolic fog where more or less any meaning may be found. Nowadays, such content-less fame has become common, though there aren’t many out there who match Einstein for resonance. But when he first exploded into public view, there were no precedents.

    No scientist before or since has so completely transcended the role of expert to become a universal emblem of reason.
    It is possible to fix almost to the day the moment when Einstein became an icon.

    Why him, why then, why still?

    Partly it was just that Einstein happened to photograph well. He had always been appealing, even seductive, in the photos from his younger days. By 1919 he had become someone whom the camera loved. Einstein joked about it, describing himself for his young cousin, Elizabeth Ney, as a fellow with a “pale face, long hair, and a tiny start of a paunch. In addition an awkward gait, and a cigar in the mouth….But crooked legs and warts he does not have and so is quite handsome….”
    Photographers caught that wit as well as the gravitas. It helped that he was astonishingly willing to play along. No one made him ride that bicycle or stick out his tongue straight into the barrel of an oncoming lens.

    Why such lasting appeal?

    Einstein always represented something more—an aspiration that extended far beyond himself. At the core of the Einstein phenomenon lies his connection to a time when the whole idea of human reason seemed a grim joke in the wake of the so-called Great War. The hold he still has on popular imagination derives from that moment when Albert Einstein—the patron saint of reason, all-knowing, unknowable—smoothed balm on the terrible wounds of the 20th century.

  3. There is no evidence that Einstein was dyslexic, nor that he was backward as a child. A letter from his mother to her mother when he was seven years old tells that he was top of his class: “Yesterday Albert got his grades, and once again he was ranked first, and got a splendid report.” (Letter, 1 August 1886). At age 13 he read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. There is no evidence that his teachers thought he was borderline retarded, nor that they suggested he should go to a trade school.

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