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When reading this, I vividly remembered the introduction to the first class I had with Paul. From what I recall, he surprised some of the students by saying that this course would be different from others in the approach used, that we would be working together as a group to learn new things and that the grade we received would not be at all as important as what we actually learned while there. That probably was not the full scope of the message from that first day, but it’s the general impression I walked away with when the class was over. Although I’ve had a hard time envisioning how to conduct an upper level or intro class intended for majors in a similar manner, I would like to see it done.

I agree with what Rebecca said in her post… In a class with many people taking the course to complete a requirement for medical or graduate school (or just about any intro-level class needed in order to take more interesting ones) there is a strong emphasis on test scores, memorization and overloading on practice problems. These things are more of a hurdle to get over rather than a chance to learn something new and interesting. I came to dislike these classes because the implied point of them wasn’t to have fun or to learn through one’s mistakes; the point was always to get as many questions right as possible and jump through this hoop in order to jump through the next hoop.

Classes like these are more of a weeding process than anything else, a sort of elimination round to determine if one deserves to major in a certain field. Perhaps I’m getting off topic but this brings up my concern that so many intro classes, even outside of the sciences, seem to be designed to entail more work than necessary in order to scare off potential majors so that only the best stay. I very much disapprove of this approach. I think that intro classes should be especially interesting and engaging instead of being a long torture session of “spit back the information we want if you hope to pass.” I think that having a more hands-on approach would attract students best suited to the subject in question, as it would give them a more realistic understanding of how problem-solving in that field usually plays out and would let students see that an active role in learning better prepares one for the real world than test taking does. If the subject doesn’t suit the student, he or she will drop it at his or her own discretion. Students should not be shoehorned out so early on, though.

All of this talk of college courses doesn’t indicate that I think the methods mentioned in the article should not be implemented in elementary and secondary schools. In fact, I think that children and pre-teens would get the most out of such an arrangement. I do think that a lot of people, especially girls, are turned off to math and science because of the detached and mechanistic way in which they are presented. Even though the alternative methods and others like them require more effort on the part of the instructor and there is a chance that the students will react badly, the rewards seem worth it. I just think that it is important to use a variety of methods, since it is almost guaranteed that one kid in a class will dislike a particular approach.

Personally, I am a bit wary of the project-based learning method. My own experiences with them have been quite messy and I loathed them as a kid, as even then I was more theoretically than practically inclined. Also, I think that asking children to solve a problem without any guidance is a horrible idea. Some of my teachers used this approach and it did not work in our classroom. At least half of the kids grew frustrated and gave up, letting the other children do the work for them. I think that many kids need a word of advice or some constructive criticism to keep them going on the right track.

The just-in-time teaching method stood out to me as a very good concept. Unless a teacher asks her students what they think about a certain topic before dumping a ton of new material on them she will not know on which parts to focus and how to best help the students understand the material. I also think the questioning serves as a good introduction and makes the students think and become interested in learning more. Also, I think that many students pass their classes because they can give acceptable answers to specific questions, not because they have a decent general understanding or a good grounding in the subject. Many of them pass even though they have huge misconceptions in certain areas, especially with how certain parts of the material relate to other parts in the bigger picture.

Which brings me to my next point… The article did not address this but I think that a general background to the field being studied and an explanation as to why the students are going to study certain aspects of it and how those parts relate to other parts should be given at the start of every course, if not every lesson. What I found most confusing and frustrating in school was the lack of explanation as to why certain things that we spent so much time on were important and many students expressed the same feeling. It wasn’t until I started to take more advanced courses and read about certain things on my own that I started to make connections and saw why some seemingly stupid concepts were pounded into our brains early on. Pre-calculus or trigonometry students will not see why triangles or graphing functions are so important until they take a calculus course or learn more about the subject on their own… But not every pre-calculus student goes on to learn more. Many, if not most, avoid taking calculus in and after high school because they thought the subject seemed so pointless and difficult to understand. This can easily be said of other subjects and the message is still the same: unless the teacher gives the subject real meaning and shows why this subject is worthwhile students will probably miss the point of it all and give up on the subject after they have fulfilled their requirements. Perhaps that last part is the greatest hurdle we have in making the education system more effective: taking the focus off of grades and requirements and putting it on the subject material and the problem-solving/analyzing processes themselves.