🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <dhalliwe.726788960@muskwa.ucs.ualberta.ca> userDHAL@mts.ucs.UAlberta.CA (David Halliwell) writes:
>"amy lynn young-leith" <alyoung@kiwi.ucs.indiana.edu> writes:
>
>>Look at how people are taught in our educational system:  "This *is*
>>the right answer.  Remember it and place it on the test.  Those other
>>things that people are trying are just crap.  I don't want to hear
>>about them, because *this* is right."  
>
>   I hope that you just were exposed to a rather poor subset of all
>the possible teachers. In my own courses, I definitely try to avoid
>a situation where students are just expected to "remember facts".

I don't know much about the American educational system.  But I can
imagine where this attitude "remember it and place it on the test"
comes from.  I teach classes where the aim is to get the candidates
to understand a piece of theory.  I dare say that I work myself in a
sweat to explain things as clear as I can.  Problem is that many 
participants (nowadays) seem to have forgotten what they have been
taught the year before.  In calculus classes I spend most of my time
explaining over and over again "high school stuff"  and the fact that
many students have been using calculators for a year or two, has caused 
them to forget the tables of multiplication (well, not all of them, but
when a x b equals something over 40 it's really hard for some students).

What can you do in such a situation?  You are more or less obliged to cover
a fixed amount of material, and you get into trouble when too many students
flunk.  So you demonstrate "how to do the problems", you simplify the exam
questions (to the point where the exam consists of reproducing simplified
versions of the exercises) and you implore the candidates not to embark on
self-invented methods (like providing proofs that are actually isolated 
examples, or showing that something is impossible by the argument "I can't
do it"), but stick to the book.  All in the hope that some will pass.

JWN