LETTER: The strategy of teaching
Regarding Bill Hanlon’s Jan. 26 commentary “Learning by the numbers”: A teacher certainly needs to know the words to sing the song, as Mr. Hanlon says in reference to teacher qualifications. Perhaps what is needed is a song book.
In the 30 years I taught working men and women, the one truth is that a learning strategy serves the learner better than sparkling memory. Certainly some learners need advanced knowledge for academics. However, for those learners who need tools to support job skills, the need is application on the job more than a path to future abstractions. A builder does not need to know Pythagoras to apply Pythagoras using the 3-4-5 trick. A jet mechanic does not need to know the dynamics of Bernoulli’s principle to successfully maintain a jet engine. He does need to be able to follow procedures in best practices manuals. It is not enough to do your best. You have to know what to do and how to do it and then do your best.
Teaching is hard. It will tax any qualified person’s resolve. What teachers need to know is which learning strategy works and how to apply it. To expand on Mr. Hanlon’s analogy, they need a hymn book.
