When I was young, my father said to me: “Knowledge is power, France is bacon.” For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, “Knowledge is power, France is bacon,” they nodded knowingly. Or someone might say “Knowledge is power” and I’d finish the quote, “France is bacon” and they wouldn’t look at me like I’d said something very odd, but thoughtfully agree. I did ask a teacher what did “Knowledge is power, France is bacon” mean, and got a full 10 minute explanation of the “knowledge is power” bit but nothing on “France is bacon.” When I prompted further explanation by saying “France is bacon?” in a questioning tone, I just got a “yes”. At 12 I didn’t have the confidence to press it further. I just accepted it as something I would never understand. It wasn’t until years later I saw it written down, “Knowledge is power,” Francis Bacon, that the penny dropped.
Anonymous post on Reddit, 2011.
The ease with which such misconceptions can arise is something that all teachers should be aware of. Most likely, you can remember some of your own from childhood. For me, most memorably, it was the phrase “rich as Croesus”, which my mother used to use regularly. As a kid, unsurprisingly, I’d never heard of the ancient Greek king of legendary wealth, so I heard “rich as creases.” For years I wondered what being rich had to do with having creases, or why creases were considered to be the same thing as being rich. I just put it down to one of those weird things that grown-ups say.
It is important to remember that much of what adults say is inherently puzzling to young children. Before we berate them for a lack of intellectual curiosity (why on earth didn’t I just ask … ?), it is important to remind ourselves that pretty much everything that adults say or do can seem puzzling on some level to very young children. It is not, therefore, surprising when they shrug and accept a saying or something that they are told is a truism that makes little obvious sense: nothing makes obvious sense when you’re small.
Further to that, the account of the child who heard “France is bacon” illustrates the anxiety that most children have that they have at best missed something obvious or at worst that they are inherently stupid. You can feel the child’s unease as they anxiously test the waters with the various ways in which they attempt to have the saying explained to them. Even the teacher completely misses the opportunity to correct the misconception, as they clearly did not realise where the misconception lay. This illustrates the tendency that we have as teachers to assume that we already understand what it is that a child needs explaining to them: in this case, the teacher assumed that the child was puzzled as to the underlying message of the saying – in what sense can knowledge bring power? What the teacher actually needed to do was to quiz the child on why they were asking about it – what was puzzling them about the quotation? Had the teacher done so, the misconception would have been identified and rectified.
One of the things that I love about tutoring is the opportunity that the one-to-one setting brings to uncover such misconceptions or gaps in a child’s knowledge. This is partly because of the time and focused attention that it affords, but it is also because of the opportunity that you are offering a child to ask all of those “stupid” questions that they’ve been bottling up for years. Nothing brings me greater joy than a tutee who develops the confidence to interrupt me and demand an explanation for something, or to ask me a question that I did not realise that they needed to ask. That’s when the relationship between the tutor and their student has really developed, when a child gains the confidence to demand the most out of their sessions.
Just recently, I was reminded how careful we need to be when assuming what a child knows. I showed my tutee the translation of a Latin poem by Catullus, which contains the metaphor “my purse is full of cobwebs”. Now I went in with the assumption that the child might need encouragement to grasp the metaphor, as many children do not find these as easy as you might assume. During the discussion, however, I discovered that she did not in fact know what “a purse” was. There was no chance of her understanding the metaphor until that was rectified! It had not previously occurred to me that this might be a word that a 16-year-old might not know: but if your family have always used the word “wallet”, or your parents carry their change in their jeans, or – as is becoming increasingly the norm – they don’t really carry cash at all, then maybe it is simply not a word you have come across. We should never, ever assume.
Misconceptions that arise from mishearings such as “France is bacon” or “rich as creases” also illustrate the essential importance of dual coding. A couple of years ago, I realised that one of my tutees was convinced that the dative case had something to do with numbers. After a couple of minutes of trying to explore where this misconception had come from, I suddenly realised what had happened: his teacher had (quite rightly) taught his class that the dative case was to be translated as “to” or “for”. My tutee, however, had heard “two” or “four”. He heard numbers instead of words, and he had been understandably confused ever since. Yet had the teacher simply written the words “to” and “for” on the board as well as saying them out loud, this misconception would have been avoided. So many people confuse dual coding with the idea of simply putting a nice picture on their handouts, or the ridiculous belief that illustrations are essential for basic vocabulary learning. Not a bit of it. Dual coding is the process of combining words with visual stimulus. It is used to help the brain to grasp a concept without misconceptions: using a visual representation of what you are explaining in written words, or writing down what you are explaining verbally.
Children will always form misconceptions and that fact is nothing to be feared. It does, however, mean that teachers must be particularly alert to them and the methods that are most likely going to help to resolve them, or to prevent them from forming in the first place.
