Theory is practical

“Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.“

- Sir William Haley

I’ve always been interested in math education for the main reason that mine worked out so badly.  As a dyslexic child, I had a difficult time reading numbers (still do) and the first six grades seemed to consist almost exclusively of memorizing tables.  Until that was done, no logic! no problem solving for you!  But since it was almost impossible for me to memorize tables, I grew up believing I was “bad at math”. 

Fast-forward a number of decades.

DOF co-author Lucas, who has some serious math chops, told me he’d rather kids spend a lot of class time understanding one problem very deeply than ploughing through a whole page of the same kind of problems.  And yeah, that sounds right.  He translated that to science with ‘more time on theory than lab work’ and, hmm… I wasn’t sure about that.  Lab work is important, I thought.  Wouldn’t you get theory from lab work?  Well not necessarily…

Continued...

Posted by George on 04/26/08 at 01:23 PM
Education • (3) Comments • Link
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