The school bell rings, and all the kids scuffle into their seats and take out their homework.
“Johnathan, what did you get for question 1?” the teacher asks.
Johnathan responds with “36”.
“Unfortunately, you are incorrect, the right answer is 49.” The teacher goes on and on about how Johnathan got it incorrect, but she never really explains to us how this works or how to think about those kinds of questions.
Next period, Science, kids take out their homework, and get ready for class.
The teacher asks, “Ethan, what did you get for question 5 on the homework?”
“The white bunnies would survive better than the brown bunnies in this environment,” Ethan responds.
“Why, why would the white bunnies survive better than the brown bunnies?” asks the teacher, “The correct answer would be that the white bunnies would survive better than the brown bunnies because they blend into their environment much better than the brown ones. This makes brown bunnies much easier to be found by predators.”
A student raises his hand and asks, “Isn’t that just what Ethan said but with the addition of evidence? Also, how did you come to this conclusion? Did you run an experiment or did you analyze data? Please, instead of telling us the answer, help us learn and let us do the work. Isn’t that something a student should be doing?”
This one student just raised his hand, not to give the right answer, but to ask the teacher how to learn. Because the truth is most teachers only teach us what the answer is, and instead of telling us how to think and formulate a reason, they just tell us what to do. He and many others never let us learn how to think.