应试教育，拼的还是基础教育

（杨老师教学笔记）

我向来是基础教育坚定不移的鼓吹者。最近却带着几名学生在SAT和雅思应试教育的路上狂奔。

按照“新东方”成功案例的套路，应试教育必须抓题型，找规律，捕捉关键词，建模板，背范文。

一旦走进应试教育的迷宫，才发现“新东方”那些金科玉律失灵了！就像移动手机进入地下停车场，信号全没，一片空白。

在SAT和雅思的重头戏――阅读部分，归根结底拼的只有一个环节：透彻理解。

因为这两项考试的选材，都不是中学生通俗读物，而是专业性颇强的社科政经学术性文章，或是具有一定历史地位的著名演讲词或辩论记录。

例如，雅思阅读有一篇讲巧合事件的概率，涉及到复杂的数学运算：

Unlikely things happen extremely frequently. Last Saturday, I bought a lottery ticket using the random lucky-dip process and got the numbers 2, 12, 15, 25, 32 and 47, and when  the lottery was drawn, one of the six numbers was 15. Amazing? No, you say. The  probability of twelve particular numbers coming up is one in 200 trillion — the same chance  as flipping a coin 48 times and it coming up heads every time. Yet because the two sets of  figures are mostly different, we aren't impressed by the low probability of their occurrence.

Even rather remarkable events can be unsurprising. Take the 2010 story in the British  media about the Allali family, whose third child Sami was born on the same date — 7 October as her older brother Adam (aged three) and sister Najla (aged five). The Daily  Mail newspaper said this was a 1 in 48,000,000 event —a number obtained by multiplying  three 1 in 365 events together. This number is misleading for two reasons. first, it is wrong: this would be the chance of all three children being born on a pre-specified date of 7 October (and also makes the rather strong assumption of random birth dates, and hence conceptions, throughout the year). Since the first child, Najla, set the date, she does not feature as part of the coincidence, and so the appropriate calculation is 1/365 x 1/365, which is a 1 in 133,000 chance. This is not terribly exciting, as there are  1, 000, 000 families with three children under 18 in the UK, and so we would expect around seven other  examples to exist at any time. This also means there are about 167,000 third children born each year, and so we would expect the event to be reported roughly annually, This duly happens, and the Daily Mail wrote the same story about the MacKriell family in 2008 (but this time getting the odds right).

姑且先不去看问题是什么？光是理解这里面涉及的数学概念，就已经足够令人抓狂了。如果自己看得似懂非懂，以己昏昏去令人昭昭，是绝对不可能的任务！

因此，我一再告诫学生，不要试图根据问题里面出现的所谓关键词回去原文段落里找答案，因为这些出题者往往很狡猾地做了手脚，在两者之间用同义词/词组/句子偷梁换柱，让学生在关键词左右徘徊不定，而忽略了经过变动的词/词组/句子。

所以，即使是在做应试教育，我不鼓励拼命刷题，而是让学生透彻理解每一篇文章究竟是在讲什么。例如，当你透彻理解了美国历史上废奴运动，妇女争取投票权运动，黑人民权运动的来龙去脉和抗争的关键问题，你做起SAT美国历史部分的阅读题就得心应手很多。

理解万岁！