What We Forget to Teach Our Students

Credit: LoveTheWind, istocktphoto.com
Credit: LoveTheWind, istocktphoto.com
An engineer once told me that he needed to teach himself engineering in college. By that he meant that his professors would go through sample problems in lectures, demonstrating solution processes for different examples, but that didn’t teach him the underlying thinking that they were using to analyze problems in order to solve them. He had to extract from those examples the underlying principles that the instructors were using to guide their solutions. In other words, his professors did not teach how an engineer thinks, he had to figure that out himself.

To continue reading, you must be a Teaching Professor Subscriber. Please log in or sign up for full access.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Articles

I have two loves: teaching and learning. Although I love them for different reasons, I’ve been passionate about...
From an early age, I was immersed in the Muslim tradition that taught me to learn from every...
Lately, social media videos have been flooded with discourse and arguments as to what constitutes a man and...
One of the biggest problems with homework is that students who make a mistake or get stuck have...
A childhood friend of mine passed away a few years ago. We worked on the high school yearbook...
Since I began teaching 15 years ago, I’ve noticed more and more students self-disclose aspects of their mental...
Rubrics have been indispensable in education for providing clarity on performance expectations, consistency in grading, and detailed feedback...

Are you signed up for free weekly Teaching Professor updates?

You'll get notified of the newest articles.