An illusion that only works for half the audience is not very reliable. I see opportunity to [by email] assign reading materials to them and possibly offer to tutor them weekly. When you own the problem it is yours to solve.
One thing that would help is if people like the author in this article looked at this a chance to mentor or tutor students who weren't getting it rather than perpetuating the problem by doing their work for them.
I've been quite curious how to "divide and conquer" the problem by weaponizing the bored genius into teaching the perplexed and lagging. It may save teacher time for teaching the middle group while also teaching the genius what it is to explain something so intuitive to someone who doesn't. But it may backfire ..
This works if you have a small target group which understands it without explanation. Zed writes for the internet. That approach makes him a troll, not a clever teacher.
It's a beautiful idea, it really is...except that I doubt it will ever work in my lifetime. I can't even convince my students at the University to complete assigned readings in preparation for classroom discussions. I can't imagine trying to invert a HS or middle school class (and I've taught those, too).
I was a private tutor for a long time, specializing in kids through young adults with learning disabilities and/or psychiatric disorders. Sort of my Job-2. I had tutored some even as a kid and teen, mostly math. One of the things I came to understand was that communicating many concepts, skills, ideas, whatever required a working model of the recipient's mind. What did they value? How did they understand things? How was their world constructed? For each student had to come a unique approach. This made me often weep for the subtleties which would be lost in mass communication.
Also related to tutoring: quite a lot of people fake "getting it." They'll nod, they'll say "yeah yeah," maybe even parrot back some phrases ... but they don't get it. This is its own unique impediment and it requires, for want of a better term, quizzing. Test the success of the communication. By the time the kids found their way to me, they had already developed a raft of coping mechanisms, mostly counter-productive in the long run, and faked comprehension signals were a large part of it.
These are impediments to just communicating new ideas to a blank slate. Much worse is an audience who already has some other idea in their head, and even in the rare case of some kind of objective measure of validity, you're swimming upstream. Many is the time I had heard the dreaded phrase, "I know you're very smart but ..." The objection was their idea, of course, and only after repeated and crumbling failure would it be discarded. Maybe there was now room for my thing, or maybe not, but I had often lost much passion by that point.
Sometimes I despair of being understood. I soon have to face the music in which I must explain to higher-ups that one of our data source providers will need to supply unique and stable identifiers on their data if we would like to accomplish Project X. I know the questions I will get: what if we just did it without it? If you can't, why shouldn't we get a consultant who will tell us what we want to hear? Have you asked $ThisParty? What if we make up our own identifiers? I will probably have to engineer an exercise to explain the pitfalls, and even then ... you can't tell people anything.
My approach to education requires the students understand the subject and build their own representations. Nudging in the large is not acceptable to me, but it the small perhaps to gain the tools for understanding. Tricking someone into understanding a thing for themselves seems ok.
I've tried tutoring people in academic subjects I know really well. I find myself unable to explain what they're doing wrong because I cannot put myself in their shoes. Try teaching algebra or calculus to someone who doesn't get it, and let me know if your skills really help with that.
If you're a hiring manager who uses these things, you should know that I (try) to train/prepare my students to answer them. I do think there is some utility in watching how people approach an unconventional problem, but don't be too impressed with people that can solve them easily, compared to those who don't do well the first time they see them. I see a huge improvement in the quality of answers of most students, once students know it is a gag and once they've been shown how to estimate things. Most students are constrained by having been in a learning environment that provides them with well-defined boundaries within which to form their answers. IMO failing to perform well with these problems is not always a failing of the student as much as it is their educators.
A possible solution to fix this in schools may be to include questions that cannot be solved by applying tricks blindly. Adding these questions will allow teachers to identify which students are simply using tricks and which students deeply understand the material.
Oh, absolutely. I've spent some time in education as a teacher, tutor, and other things. It's incredibly difficult. Especially with an audience of multiple people. But I'd wager just knowing that this might be a source of difficulty for some people can help. If things just aren't connecting, come at it from a different direction and/or method. But I agree, it's not easy.
Where and when and with whom would you propose teaching people? This is a solvable problem, but you have to justify being ABLE to just do it right the first time.
> leading off with the problems, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers
Sounds good, but how do you get them to grapple? You only turned "tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" to "tell people of a problem they don't have". I don't see how this (alone) will make a difference.
It seems like some authors get over-ambitious about actually teaching the material. But as a reader, often I don't care enough to do the exercises, because I'm just exploring, and I don't know if I'll come back this way again. I haven't made a commitment to actually learn the subject yet. I just want to know the layout of the landscape and I'll come back to it if I actually need to know it.
In particular, I think hardly anyone really needs to know quantum mechanics well enough to do homework?
It seems like before testing effectiveness, you need to determine what subset of your audience shares the goals you assume. Often, it's only going to be a small fraction.
Re: examples vs problem-solving: I found that attempting a problem that was beyond me would prime my mind, so that when I read the solution, my mind would grab it. Like an enzyme. Apart from focusing on the relevant aspect of the material, it also provides motivation, and then satisfaction though tension and release. Something of a drama/sales technique.
[EDIT it also combats that feeling of not having learnt anything in 3 years, by giving contrasting experiences of not-knowing and knowing.
All humans are intelligent; I believe learning is just a matter of paying attention, which requires motivation and confidence. A sense of progress helps both.]
I tried this on a class when I was tutoring at uni, and it seemed to work well. Students were surprisingly interested in the answers to puzzles I put on the board at the start of each tute, even though I didn't refer to them, and several did extremely well in the subject. Unfortunately, I have no comparative data with other tutes, due to "privacy issues", which averages would have overcome. So much for my dept's interest in teaching quality.
I don't feel like that's a show-stopper. With some work, preferably in the first two lectures, you could train them out of the habit, perhaps by reframing it in a way that doesn't offend their habits e.g. ask them to say, "I have solved your challenge" rather than "this is wrong/a lie" which they have a revulsion to.
The problem is that by the time students start being taught them, they've been exposed to years of media and ad messaging influence which undermine them.
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