Papers are often used to refer to articles that carry out research in various academic fields and describe academic research results. The following is the content of the teaching thesis of philosophical prose. Welcome to read!

Man is a thinking reed, which is a philosophical essay selected by Jiangsu Education Publishing House (compulsory five). This article is selected from The Record of Thoughts by Pascal, a French thinker and writer. This book is a monologue writing, with concise thoughts and full of speculative colors; Rich in content, showing the inner world; Words are meaningful and contain literary significance. The text selected in the textbook is short, abstract and profound, and it jumps from word to word, sometimes giving people the feeling of "sporadic disorder". Therefore, teaching is quite difficult. So that some teachers let students read casually, or simply skip it, euphemistically called "bold choice." So, how should we deal with such philosophical prose? The following author talks about some simple views based on his own teaching practice.

First of all, as a philosophical text

Victor Giraud of France once said: "If the whole French literature can only make me choose one book to stay, I will still choose to leave a record of my thoughts without hesitation. This is a noble specimen of pure French genius." This shows the distance between this article and the students. Speculation, how to guide students to grasp the thinking of the article?

1. grab the title

Although many records in "Random Thoughts" are "thoughts that flashed by chance", the titles of the excerpts in the text were also added by the editors. But after all, this title highlights the duality (or opposites) of human beings, namely, fragility and greatness, or universality and particularity. So it became a famous saying similar to "I think, therefore I am" (Descartes). Then, grasping a sentence, other methods should be more suitable for the teaching of this article. The title is figurative, and "reed grass" is the central word, which shows that people have an almost innate vulnerability. From this "origin", people are no different from other things. But people are "thinking", which highlights the "particularity" of people as people. And this nature forms the greatness of human beings. If you carefully consider the connotation of the topic, you will grasp the key points of the text and play an outline role.

Contact the author

Pure rational words bring great obstacles to students' understanding, and some perceptual materials need to be supplemented. For example, from the perspective of knowing people and discussing the world, the author's experience is convincing:

Pascal's rationalism thought not only comes from abstract theoretical speculation, but also is a real life experience. This philosopher, who died young, spent more than half of his short life at the age of 39 in illness. /kloc-When he was 0/8 years old, he became weak and suffered a stroke in his early twenties. His poor health even kept him unmarried. It is this kind of pain that makes him believe that a person's natural life is no different from a reed grass, so fragile that a drop of water in one breath may be destroyed. On the other hand, Pascal is really a rare genius in the world. Only that he, as the author of thought records, occupies a lofty position in the history of philosophy. Such a fragile body contains such great ideological energy. Isn't Pascal himself "a thinking reed"? I'm afraid there is no more appropriate evaluation of his life than this metaphor.

Thoreau said of Pascal: "Just as he is a great writer, his book is also his own spiritual autobiography." Indeed, from the above passage, we can see that Pascal can be said to be the spokesman of "Man is a thinking reed". He embodies the unity of "fragility and greatness" as a human being. When students use such expanded materials to understand the aphorisms in the text, they will better mobilize their intellectual and perceptual thinking, so as to better understand the connotation of the text.

pave the way

For example, some teachers set up this preview when teaching this article:

Read Zhou's "The nobility of man lies in the soul". Man's nobility lies in his soul, and he was selected as a Chinese textbook for the second grade of junior high school in Jiangsu Education Publishing House. The article begins with Pascal's famous saying "Man is a thinking reed", and there are potential similarities between the two articles. Before class, students make comments in circles on the basis of full reading, and freely talk about their understanding of the argument that "human dignity lies in the soul"

Because this article is difficult to understand, let's read a slightly less difficult article closely related to it and write down my personal reading experience. In this way, students can "warm up" their thinking first, and then reading the text will be easier and more experienced, and the effect will naturally be better.

Contact yourself

For a recorded text like The Record of Thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to select some key sentences, such as "All our dignity lies in our thoughts", and ask students to start a paragraph with this as the core. This can not only internalize the philosophy in the text into students' own gains, but also train students' language expression ability. Therefore, for philosophical texts, this way of "writing to promote reading" is more suitable for students. It will "force" students to think deeply consciously, and they have to expand their thinking as much as possible and "find" corresponding examples to explain them in their reading or life. This process not only trains students' ability to accept and understand input information, but also promotes their ability to express and interpret output information. Of course, the former should be given priority to.

Second, as an excerpt from the text.

1. Understand the meaning of the article from the perspective of the whole article and even the whole book.

This is the reading order from the whole to the part. For example, to teach this article, students should first understand the whole book:

Pascal's ideological theory is reflected in his ideological record, which is different from Descartes' rationalism. On the one hand, it inherits and develops the tradition of rationalism and criticizes everything with rationality. On the other hand, under the leading idea that all truth must be presented in the form of contradiction, it points out the internal contradictions and boundaries of reason itself, and investigates the so-called human nature, the world and the world with his unique method of revealing contradictions. There are some factors of dialectical thought and a layer of pessimistic agnosticism.

After reading the above passage, it will be easier and more profound to understand the sentences in some texts. For example, there is a sentence in the article: "How great an idea is because of its nature! How humble the thought is because of its shortcomings! " These two sentences are both contradictory and organically unified. It not only embodies the contradictory side of thought itself, but also embodies its dialectical side.

2. Highlight the core meaning of the extracted text.

Although it is excerpted from the text, it is impossible and unnecessary to cover everything in our teaching. Excerpts will still have a relatively independent and complete meaning, and we can't "generalize by one side" or "see the trees but not the forest". For example, excerpts from textbooks ("Man is a Thinking Reed") mainly include people's ideological content and greatness. Therefore, teachers should mainly define the teaching content as such ideological exchange and guidance. Like: "Let people respect their values. Let him love himself because he has a beautiful nature ... let him love himself: he has the ability to know the truth and feel happy. "

Thirdly, as a translated text.

The translated works will always bring a certain "gap". Because this is a contradiction brought by translation itself. Literal translation brings "defamiliarization" to the language, while free translation sometimes fails to convey the author's thoughts to the maximum extent. Although all textbooks are authoritative translations, there are still some differences between foreign philosophical papers and philosophical papers written directly in their mother tongue. But generally speaking, since the author pays more attention to conveying the author's thoughts when translating texts (especially philosophical texts), teachers should not take language interest as the main teaching content. Of course, this is not a complete disregard for language. The purpose of only paying attention to language is to better understand and comprehend the ideas that the author wants to express, without discussing the text in detail from the aspect of language application, that is to say, dealing with language "is not the kind of rigorous consideration of words and sentences." Some teachers treat this kind of text no different from the classic mother tongue text, clinging to the choice of individual words and the expression of individual sentences. It should be said that the determination of the focus is biased.

Of course, as a foreign philosophical essay, the difficulty of understanding is still different. This is related to many factors, such as the abstraction of the thought expressed in the text itself and the distance between this thought and the reader himself. For example, "Man is a Thinking Weed" and Russell's "Why I Live" in the same unit of the textbook of Soviet Education Edition are still different in understanding difficulty. The latter is closer to our world outlook, outlook on life and the values of students' formal education. The main difference is the cultural difference between the east and the west on the same problem. For example, some students will find it difficult to understand the author's attitude towards love. Teachers can give more guidance and explanation in this respect.

References:

1. Analysis of Xu's "Man is a Thinking Reed Grass", Chinese (Compulsory 5) Teaching Reference Book, Jiangsu Education Press.

2. Liu Yan comments on Pascal's "Man is a thinking reed", Language Construction, No.9, 2005.

3. Teaching Design of Liu Danni's "Man is a Thinking Reed", China Architecture,No. 1 1, 2008.

4. He Zhaowu's classic seven-day talk, Peking University Publishing House.

5. Xu Minnan's reflection on three kinds of text teaching-also on the teaching of "a drop of tears for a drop of water", middle school Chinese teaching reference: High School Edition (Xi 'an),No. 1/2, 20 1 1.