Comment by hackerfake
6 years ago
> 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.
You can tell people a problem that they would realistically run into in the near future. Built it up in a way that they can actually see they having trouble due to the problem.
To flip that around, if you cannot make them grapple with the problem, you’re not actually teaching them. You could coerce/persuade them to follow the process and hope they get it soon enough, but you might likely be flushing all that effort down the toilet, from a long term perspective (if they don’t grapple with the problem soon enough before they forget about the process). For the really important few processes, you could try to encode them into rituals.
That's too powerful an objection; you haven't proved that I'm wrong, you've proved education in general is impossible for certain people who take certain attitudes towards it, if they refuse to engage at all.
I'm going to surprise you and just agree. Some problems don't have solutions. That doesn't mean that the people who are willing to engage and will grapple with the problem won't find my way a lot more effective.