Rote Learning: Helpful or Harmful to a Students Education Lori McWilliam Pickert, an author of a book on methods for teaching children, once stated, “To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.” Provided that the student truly wants to learn and understand, the quote emphasizes a whole new process of learning that may be introduced into the education system if it hasn’t already. Connecting to another profound author, Francine Prose, who made a statement that, “Education after all is a process intended to produce a product”(174), Lori McWilliam Pickert seems to understand
…show more content…
The statistics lead to the questioning of what the curriculum might be doing incorrectly to gain such a discrediting number, which may be explained in Floyd Norris’ article crediting Mr Schleicher for stating “students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.” As exemplified through the source, rote learning is an inappropriate method of educating young minds, it only establishes an ability to recall memorized facts along with good study skills. Therefore, the appropriate method is allowing the young learner to go through the process of discovering ideas on their own, with the slight push of their teacher in the right direction; when a student figures something out on their own, there is much more of a rewarding virtue than if the teacher were to simply give them the answer with formulas to use for every problem. Stepping back into my shoes with high school physics, if a problem is not understood, extra steps are taken such as drawing the picture to both visualize and think logically what methods could be used to solve instead of memorizing formulas that only work for certain situations. With this being said, the overall process that teachers are taking to educate is simply not working to elevate the students to their full potential, although several different strategies are being taken by both students and teachers to correct the
The statistics lead to the questioning of what the curriculum might be doing incorrectly to gain such a discrediting number, which may be explained in Floyd Norris’ article crediting Mr Schleicher for stating “students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.” As exemplified through the source, rote learning is an inappropriate method of educating young minds, it only establishes an ability to recall memorized facts along with good study skills. Therefore, the appropriate method is allowing the young learner to go through the process of discovering ideas on their own, with the slight push of their teacher in the right direction; when a student figures something out on their own, there is much more of a rewarding virtue than if the teacher were to simply give them the answer with formulas to use for every problem. Stepping back into my shoes with high school physics, if a problem is not understood, extra steps are taken such as drawing the picture to both visualize and think logically what methods could be used to solve instead of memorizing formulas that only work for certain situations. With this being said, the overall process that teachers are taking to educate is simply not working to elevate the students to their full potential, although several different strategies are being taken by both students and teachers to correct the