"Why?" I (rarely) ask myself. I love to learn new things, especially in fields of interest to me. Perhaps I think that the teacher is up there to teach that which he/she deems important and my consternation is relatively trivial and shouldn't take away from the teacher's time to give his/her prepared presentation; after all, I can usually figure out the answer on my own afterward. Perhaps I feel rude asking questions because it implies that the teacher did a poor job of teaching me. Perhaps I believe that there really is such a thing as a "dumb question," and I don't want to ask one. Perhaps I'm more interested in going to lunch.
At any rate, I don't question much, and it would appear my daughter is similar to me in that respect. When I picked up dd9 from school this afternoon, she told me that as part of their study of living systems, they did the first two parts of a "KWL" exercise, in which they asked themselves the following questions:
- "What do I know about living systems?"
- "What do I want to know about them?"
- "What did I learn about them?"
She told me that she didn't have anything she wants to know about living systems. This from a girl who has been independently reading a book on genetics recently and is always picking up nonfiction books about animals for recreational reading. Maybe she was thrown off by the nonspecific topic label of "living systems," or maybe she just doesn't have questions about them at present. I hope her teacher doesn't confuse today's lack of questions with an absence of curiosity.
Inquiry-led learning receives a lot of praise these days, both by some advocates of unschooling and proponents of constructivist school curricula. While inquiry-led learning may work wonderfully for some children, it seems to poorly serve curious non-questioners like my daughter and me.
I also came across KWL recently, and felt somewhat similarly stumped on its "universal" relevance. This adds to my conviction that /any/ educational approach/method/scheme will work for some, stupendously even, fail miserably for others, and because none provides the "magic bullet" for most, will be abandoned when the next "theory" comes along.
ReplyDeleteI should develop this as a blog post... :-) Especially on why, IMHO, there is no way there ever will be such educational "magic bullet" - basically because it goes against Nature.
found your blog a few minutes ago as I was doing due diligence regarding color sequence schemes. You had an entry in 2009 that happens to fit my view exactly - I'll go and answer it now.