Understanding. Students frequently confuse understanding with activity. They focus on what to do. We have to tease out the understanding.

 

A student said, “I do not understand anything!”

 

I replied, “What do you not understand?”

 

“Sin, cos, tan, and all that!”

 

“Okay you do not understand the sin. What do you not understand about the sin?”

 

We have to drill down, forcing them to focus on what they do not understand. When they finally get a question, ask them if they can answer the question.

 

The discussion was this: Given a line, find another line perpendicular to the first, through a given point. Instead of writing this objective and showing how to do it, the teacher should challenge the class to find the result, give hints and prod them, as they work together with the teacher to get the solution. The emphasis must be to the class: What’s the problem? Let them solve it!