Unfiltered Story #32521

This is a story I heard second hand, from my education tutor in a university, about her experiences teaching in high school. The topic being discussed was about how to make lessons interesting and engaging. Our tutorial group specialises in mathematics.

The tutor was to teach statistical measures to her class. The task she set was to go around to the various drains in the school, and collect the leaves that had fallen into them, so they could be measured and classified. This was a problem the staff had noticed, and the tutor, in setting the task, had hoped that she could help teach her students not just statistics, but also about problem solving and the methods in which it is done.

The learning point of the story can be, and was, summed up in the sentence ‘and that’s when they brought in the branch…’

Apparently, her students had taken her request to ‘collect a certain number of leaves’, and followed it to the letter, rather than the spirit. Although the students swore the branch had fallen under it’s own power, the tutor could recognise the signs that the branch had been pulled off its tree with effort. This was the last time that tutor set a task of this kind.