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Re: Feynman (was pedagogy)



At 10:07 AM 5/12/2004, Hugh Haskell, you wrote:

.... different people learn in different
ways, and we should not be spending all our pedagogical efforts in
looking for the "magic bullet." When I first "discovered" the idea of
helping students by showing them some of the messy processes that
actually occur in problem-solving, I realized that not every student
will gain from this method, and obviously it cannot be the only thing
one does in class, but an occasional dose of it would be useful to
remind students that problem-solving is not a clean, orderly process
that involves just moving from logical step to logical step. I also
need to point out that I used it most in my second-year classes,
where the students were more serious, and were there because they
wanted to be rather than because they had to be.

In any event, we need to realize that there are many learning styles
and many teaching styles, and not everyone does either the same way.
Some learn well from lectures, others need to get down and dirty in
the details. Some will pick up the important points right away, and
others, who in the long run may be just as competent, will only work
them into their world picture slowly. Similarly with teaching. I have
found that personality plays an important role in what any teacher
does well.
///
I'm not saying that research into how to be a more effective teacher
is not valuable. It is. But it sometimes appears to me that everyone
is looking for the one teaching method that will work for all
students, and I don't think such a search is realistic.
////
I look forward to the reactions of the varied personalities resident
on this list.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell

If I could take a chemistry parable, or perhaps an alchemical one:
I can visualize an ancient practitioner hand-wringing that he could
find no universal metal solvent: HCl worked well here, HNO3
worked well there, but sometimes a mix of several acids was needed
to dissolve a fine metal. Then, in the fullness of time, chemists
could describe which solvents worked well with which metals.

It is not enough to say that no one teaching method works well for
all students. That would already be widely accepted, probably.
What would be helpful, is to find for the usual mixture of
students, which mixed regime is found to offer the best
improvement, using the usual objective measures, while not calling
for overwhelming passion, energy and resolve from
the teacher. If this is not attainable by experimental design,
then usable paradigms for broad classes of student:
unmotivated high school, advanced high school, unmotivated college,
etc., etc. might be defined experimentally.



Brian Whatcott Altus OK Eureka!