Methods of Teaching

I moved to US about 4 years ago. Raised in a “third-world country,” my expectations from a teacher were totally different from those of American students. You don’t interact with teachers per se; they talk and you listen. They tell you 2+2=4 and you are supposed to remember that. You can’t question why it isn’t 5 or 6. Even in high school, the teacher told us to memorize values of sines and cosines at different angles, like sin(0)=0 or cos(0)=1. Nobody ever explained to us why sin(0) is 0 and we never questioned it. That’s how it was supposed to be. That’s the only way we knew how to learn. When I came to US, out of a gazillion other cultural shocks, one of the biggest was the student-teacher interactions. You can call your teachers by their first names! That was pretty much unheard of where I am from. I noticed that instead of shoving everything down your throat, teachers actually “teach” you. You are encouraged to discuss ideas and question why things are the way they are.

Here is a video I stumbled across on the Internet which I thought was really interesting. It is about a teacher and her students debating about a math problem.

Elementary Class Debates Prime Numbers

Now I don’t know if this is how your classroom was in kindergarten or elementary school, but the likelihood of this discussion taking place in my high school would have been about as high as Sarah Palin being the next Queen of England.

Please feel free to share your thoughts!