I had been a teacher for many years and found most of my time and work consisted of explaining events and the mechanisms of how the world worked.  The basic material I had to work with were teenagers in high school whose main preoccupations were not what I was teaching but the growth they were going through accompanied by hormonal distractions.   I found that I could apply the philosophy of reductionism to teaching concepts and mechanisms by simplifying and clarifying the information so it could be more readily understood.

Reductionism in this kind of exercise usually involves the elimination of much of the content to get to the basics.  Even so, it was a struggle to get acceptance using a common language between the teacher and the taught.

For me, reductionism meant to simplify and clarify.  It was helpful, at least for me to visualize and then to figure out a way to create word pictures with the aid of real artifacts to make connections from the past to the present.  I think this worked well and all good teaching eventually is pared down to this level of working – at least with those vast numbers of students who are pretty smart but not school smart.  The problem with school is that we spend too much time on schooling children and “breaking” them – somewhat like breaking horses – to accept the harness of scholarship and spelling and punctuation and being able to speak a simple correct English sentence.  Except, of course, if you are trying to get them to think in a foreign language – I get lost there for no matter how much they tried to teach me Spanish, French and German I never got beyond sounding good when I read things in those languages.

I envy multi-lingual speakers.  I have heard people who switch off between two languages without a hitch and I find this fascinating.  Of course, the second language is spoken too fast and I have found, like in my teaching through reductionism, that going slow makes for better understanding.  Have you ever had the experience in some classroom when someone speaks up much later in the lesson and says, “Oh, now I get it”?  You can only smile and realize that that one was really trying but was not as swift as the others.  Then, too, there are the quiet ones -who never open their mouths and you never know if even through the most stringent simplification if they caught on to what you were teaching.

Reductionism does not work in classes with bright students who are way ahead of the teacher and are acting out their boredom or are working on their own problems in which they are more interested than in what you are teaching.