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18 Dec 2020, 00:32
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Educators should teach facts only after their students have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.
Throughout history, people have been endlessly seeking for more effective methods for imparting knowledge to the next generation. When it comes to the order of teaching, some have suggested that teachers should first ensure that students have grasped the gists, concepts and tendencies about a certain topic before telling them about related factual information. This argument is generally commendable, while it should not be applied universally to all subjects. In the following discussions, laudable points and inapposite scenarios of this opinion would be addressed.
First of all, learning general theories and ideas could help students take in the facts. Without the apprehension of the fundamentals, one might need a great effort to cram in the factual details or even misconstrue some of them. For instance, merely memorising how to calculate the cross product between two three-dimensional vectors is onerous and prone to mistakes due to its complicated forms and signs. If students are aware of the concepts of matrices and take the cross product of vectors as an analogy to calculate the matrix determinant, the tedious steps of calculations will appear much more sensible. Also, miscellaneous equations in physics could also be intimidating to absorb, but they will become much more accessible once people have comprehended the reasonings behind them and some rules of thumb, such as the method of dimensional analysis. Therefore, for many subjects with highly logical systems, learning and understanding the concepts in the first place is really essential.
Also, since factual knowledge is relatively restricted to specific cases, learning them in advance may lead to an incomplete or even biased visualisation of the panoramic view of the topic. For example, when learning about significant revolutions in human history, the motivations, direct and indirect causes, time and place of occurrence of each piece of historical fact would vary intensively, as each revolutionary event is a particular case. Simply remembering the minutia of each of these cases would definitely not help one develop a holistic view towards the general concept of revolutions. Imbuing concrete facts cannot make the student equipped with any historical abilities either, such as being capable of independently analysing any future events, because with only the highly localised details in mind, they cannot trace the more generic and universal tendencies. As a result, it would be more effective if the general aspects and summarised ideas were informed first.
Nevertheless, sometimes learning factual information could otherwise enhance the apprehension to the concepts, since the former one is generally less abstruse and easier to visualise. Teachers usually take specific examples of field observations to help students grasp the rather abstract ecological theories. Moreover, especially for younger learners, concrete facts may intrigue more of their interest. Watching the beautiful blue flame generated during the combustion of hydrogen is obviously more captivating than studying the nature of breaking and reforming chemical bonds and the energetic topics involved. Consequently, from time to time, the educators might also find the more palpable facts promote the absorption of ideas, or they may improve the whole teaching process mutually and have better overall outcomes when presenting simultaneously.
In conclusion, although for many circumstances that incorporate logical theorisation or extensive amounts of specified facts, it is true that learning basic concepts and ideas first would be salutary, the instructors ought to balance the order of teaching appropriately with more comprehensive considerations instead of such a clear-cut decision.