The Socratic method as practiced by Socrates and described by Plato was used with a handful of interlocutors at most and often with only one. The responses were individual not collective.
That's what bothers me about the article. It's about instructing a class, a way of going through motions, not about teaching any individual. What about the third grader who doesn't know Roman numerals? What about the one who can't read "ten"? What about the one who has only eaten a bag of Cheetos in the past 24 hours? Or the kid on the autism spectrum and the one who saw his mother beaten by her boyfriend last night and just about every other night for as long as he can remember?
How does this work when the 11 year old third grader hits Jamison in the back of the head with a book and the quiet girl wants to use the restroom because she is sobbing just like yesterday?
The reality of third grade isn't theoretical. Yeah there are little pods of protected well cared for children. There may even be a sweet spot where none are smart asses and love the call and response and each is equally bright and learns the same way. Just look for the full pony rack by the school front door and the M&M truck backed to the cafeteria loading dock.
The fount of well meaning amateur pedagogy is not the solution to the woes of public education. The lesson of the article is that kids can be incredibly kind and polite to adults.
[Edit: None of which is to say that I think trying to teach the ideas of boolean algebra to 3rd graders isn't a good idea. I'm all for pushing the limits of children's intellect.]
How is any of this relevant or isolated to any particular teaching method?
You're just distracting from the variable by mentioning constants. The method of teaching he sees in his classroom isn't going to stop little Timmy from seeing his mother beaten to a pulp every night, but you mention it anyway because... well, why did you?
>How is any of this relevant or isolated to any particular teaching method?
It's evidence that pretending all the students in a classroom are one person (or a small handful of people) flies in the face of reality and is a bad abstraction that you should not use.
A good teaching method gracefully handles the problem that there are ~30 different individuals with different circumstances who cannot be reasoned about as a collective. The Socratic method is not that, because it engages a handful of people at a time.
This is the wrong place to have that conversation. This is a submission based on the premise that one must teach a group of students, as is the case in any classroom environment such as the one described.
You're arguing with the premise, which is unhelpful. You either accept the premise and engage in this topic, or you disagree with the premise and leave the rest of us alone.
Of course you must teach a group of students. Grandparent is arguing that, because you must teach a diverse group of students, the Socratic method is not the magic bullet one might think, i.e. contradicting the thesis, not the premise, of the article.
I didn't see any place where this method was claimed to be a magic bullet, or even a more common silver bullet. In fact, the author specifically mentioned this:
> When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher
> believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and
> excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The
> three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very
> beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at
> all.
That's a very clear explanation that this method didn't work for every child in the class. In any class there will be children that are difficult to reach. This isn't necessarily an article about that.
Thank you. Correct, the method is not claimed to be foolproof, but just a good method for many students, and it works well in large groups, often even better than with one student at a time, because if someone gets stuck, others have ideas to keep the discussion going.
I talked to a really cool, smart teacher about 2 years ago and I have some murky version of an idea brewing from that chat. She thought about these problems in terms of economics, pedagogy and how it affects the classroom. I am not a teacher but I have been a student so the subject is naturally interesting to me. I also care because I think teaching is a core thing in a society. A lot of other things hang on it.
Some key things that are directly determined by the school system seem to be class size & learning pace. At the same time, children's attention spans and other complicated realities of learning and how it works in kids or not really in tune with the "industry" of teaching on a society wide scale.
Nine year olds in groups of 30 40 or even 20 are a handful when you put them together 6 to 8 hours every day and make them learn reading. Kids only have so much attention span, it varies, but 6 hours is far above the median in practice. A lot of the controversial learning related medication is used primarily to improve a child's ability to make it through a school day. Class size. School hours.
Learning pace is related to class sizes too. The reality is that the number of hours it takes to teach a 9 year old reading or multiplication varies, but it the vast majority of cases classrooms go at a pace much slower than could be achieved by a competent teacher 1-on-1. I don't know what the multiple is but I think it's reasonable to assume it's high. Call that the reference point for efficiency. That means the potential number of hours needed per child are lower, if the learning quality is higher.
Another "economic"issue other than cost and subsequent scarcity of teacher hours is parents' "babysitting" needs. Parents work. You can't work if you need to pick up an eight year old at 11:30 and an eleven year old at 12:45. I have heard interesting ideas here. All sorts of ideas that I don't really have the understanding to evaluate, but they sound interesting. If you don't need the kids to learn math for half the school hours, teachers don't need to be teachers. High schoolers can work at camps, youth clubs. They could also do it in after schools during school hours. They could spend time outside. There are a lot of options. An important note is that these hours are cheaper than classroom hours.
Anyway... technology could play an interesting role. If technology and pedagogy can figure out a formula that gives teachers a lever a lot of the economic problems become more solvable and a lot of new models are possible.
I think public education is completely broken and has gotten worse over the years. Other countries seem to achieve better outcomes for a lot less money. Perhaps they do not have such poor parenting that allows their children to hit others or to sob all day.
The reason for amateur pedagogy is that the professionals have completely screwed it up. Look at the controversy over "no child left behind" or "common core" or "STEM." The experts do not agree on anything, which means the body of knowledge is very weak. I think it is time for amateurs to step in.
>Look at the controversy over "no child left behind" or "common core" or "STEM." The experts do not agree on anything, which means the body of knowledge is very weak. I think it is time for amateurs to step in.<
In the case of Common Core, the amateurs have stepped in, in the form of politicians, parents and media who fail to realize that the standards were developed and agreed upon by a team of professional educators representing nearly every state in the country. Those same amateurs are stoking fear and paranoia with baseless claims about "the federal government deciding what my kid should learn". They even fail to recognize that the CC is not a curriculum.
To be fair, every example of Common Core I've ever seen only succeeded in confusing the hell out of me. I understand that everyone should have the same foundation, but not everyone learns the same way and Common Core seems to gloss that over.
Basically, I think it's gone a little to far by saying "how" something should be taught.
I didn't understand common core. But I have observed it working well for my child. I had the same experience of questioning the content until I saw the results when my child was at a Montessori preschool years earlier. That's how I know I'm an amateur.
I'm a lecturer at a large university -- my class sizes are usually on the order of 75 students. During my office hours, I use this style almost exclusively whereas in my lectures I am much more predicate-based.
I agree with you -- this works spectacularly when you're in a 1-on-1 or 1-on-few setting, but in front of a class it breaks down very quickly.
I used the method in large groups and it has worked well for me, but there are other (psychological) elements you have to employ to make it do that. I have not been able to get it to work well with asynchronous online classes, however, because it is difficult to employ some of those elements and because the response times have too much of a lag to keep the conversation interesting or efficient. That could be overcome if students gave longer, more thorough answers each time, but most of them do not tend to do that, and I have not been able to get them to.
After reading Plato's dialogues I went through a phase of having Socratic dialogues with people instead of arguing with them. I found, as had the Greek citizens 2.5 millennia ago, that having someone question you Socratically is super annoying and condescending. At least I didn't annoy them so badly that they sentenced me to death.
Which isn't to say that the method can't be used profitably in some settings. Just not general life. The moment where the people you're talking to have an epiphany and thank you for it is a fiction.
I think the challenge is to ask people questions in a way that isn't condescending, where you're not necessarily trying to corner them into some preconceived position.
My boss has a great way of asking questions– he precedes them with "just out of curiosity...", and I always get the sense that he's really, genuinely curious. He's gotten me to think about things that I hadn't even considered before, and I'm very thankful for it. I've grown to adopt it myself, and I've found it helpful even in my marriage and in my friendships.
There are many different ways to say something like, "Hey, I notice that this happened– any idea why that is?"
With the right tone and body language, people just open up. It's wonderful.
> With the right tone and body language, people just open up. It's wonderful.
Also, your boss might be genuinely curious. A lot of people who employ this technique precompute trajectory for arriving at their conclusion. They're often right, but the times when they're wrong are really interesting.
Bottom line - I agree with you. Don't be condescending, because you might learn something from the people around you. :)
People will fight you, too. As in, you ask a question and they will refuse to answer it in any way that might be perceived as advancing your point.
You need two willing participants, otherwise it's a) annoying and b) immensely difficult. The only way I've been able to execute the socratic method against an unwilling/unwitting person is to basically corner them with questions, and people hate that. It's also difficult to craft the perfect question that a person can't weasel out of.
There IS a difference between using the method to teach a receptive learner who wants to understand the logic of the topic, and using it to try to change someone's mind. Socrates did make many enemies because he was often trying to change people's minds about strong beliefs they held dear. People tend not to like that and to resist any logic that leads to a contradiction of their beliefs. But that is true even if you present your case as an article, essay, or lecture that has no questions.
It is a matter of attitude, approach and social savviness, rather than the 'method.'
Give somebody who's socially savvy the socratic method, or something else, they'll do well. Give somebody who argues with people any method, they'll fail.
The key takeaway here is 'argue' - if you argue with people, you are not doing it right. There's really no situation in life where that's necessary or the optimal approach. Most people don't know this, so...
It is a lot like yelling at or hitting people - if you don't realize that if you stoop down to that level more than a couple of times a year, YOU are the asshole, no amount of socratic or otherwise is going to help. The standard for behaviour simply needs to change.
Once you raise the bar to 'talking down to people is not acceptable' - all of a sudden you'll find that arguments don't happen anymore, who is there to argue with? It is either a negotiation or a conversation that you are choosing to have.
Most teachers don't know this. The amount of talking down to kids is incredible, they just don't know any better.
I saw 'A most violent year' recently - it is a great example of how to handle stressful situations. Should be mandatory viewing for all adults really.
Well, not necessarily - it is a matter of context.
If you start doing that stuff when people just want to chat, then you're being annoying.
But it is also used for intellectual/leadership coaching, called Protreptic. And if the one doing the coaching knows what he or she is doing, it should be very good.
Of course the Socratic method is effective, but it is also subversive--it encourages people to think for themselves, an endless source of trouble for those preferring that we do not. It must have been the issue in ancient Greek times, recalling the incident with Socrates and the hemlock...
A great example of the method's use in teaching programming was/is the "Little Schemer" series (by Freidman and Felleisen). As a book for beginners it goes amazingly deep, if only the reader will follow. Once in a while I enjoy going down that path again, and it never fails to stir me to think and learn.
Isn't that what an excellent teacher or book is supposed to do? Sure, present it in a "sneaky", fun way, it's even better, and all the more dangerous.
Socratic method is quite effective in introducing new subjects or "ways of thinking" that are new to someone, by making them ask questions about what they know. But there's no need to generalize everything in Education and say one method of teaching suits all things, it works in some stuff and fails in others or is less intriguing when the answers are more obvious. But the material can revolve around questions sometimes.
Socratic method is the typical way of teaching classes in law school, and I personally found it a lot more engaging than lecturing. It's easy to think you understand a concept by reading it, then realize when the professor prods you to think about the corner cases that your original understanding was superficial.
That said, you need small class sizes for it to work. It's impossible for the professor to have a proper dialogue with 60 people in a room, much less the 100+ you might see in an introductory undergraduate course. Which is unfortunate because it's those introductory courses, where students are learning how to think in a new field, where Socratic dialogue is the most helpful. In my opinion, class sizes trends in higher education are backwards--massive lecture halls for freshman and small collegial classrooms for seniors.
It will work in a large group IF most of the people in the group are as attentive to the responses of (and to) others as they would be to their own responses and to responses to them. That is often, but not always, the case. And as others have pointed out here, the questioner has to be engaging and personable in ways that help make it stimulating, over and above just the content of the topic.
I believe that the socratic way could really big the next revolution in education... Not the iPad...
The point is, how do we bring that into books ?
(And this is the wrong/easy way to look at the problem, the one that we cannot really solve, and will be pretty meaningless to solve anyway.)
Or even better, how can we apply the socratic method without a Socrate ?
(where with Socrate I mean somebody who keep asking question)
Not sure if your question was supposed to be a Socratic one... In general I'm skeptical of using the Socratic Method on people who have been shown capable of teaching themselves. It's a more engaging form of spoon feeding, but it's still spoon feeding and some people hunger for steak. I'm also skeptical about expanding the process as The Way beyond the legal field. (It's interesting to see law schools start questioning the method too: http://abovethelaw.com/2014/06/former-law-prof-says-the-socr...) Finally I think it would be less successful in engineering disciplines where there are clearly right answers you can get from calculation, not intuition. (It's also frustrating for the 'Socrate' and maybe amusing for the student when the student answers along a line the 'Socrate' doesn't expect, e.g. http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1879)
The part that the article leaves out is that when you go home after having been led so magically to a place you could've not gotten to yourself - you still have to sit down and comprehend it and work through it by solving similar problems and re-tracing your steps.
Just because you were able to grasp it temporarily in class, does not mean you'll get to keep it when the excellent teacher is not around.
It is a lot like when somebody guides you through cooking something step by step with you doing all the work. It is definitely great because it inspires confidence in you doing new things. But when you are by yourself and you try to repeat the experience, you'll stumble and fumble quite a bit.
So in short - teaching anything using logical steps makes a lot of sense and is a great way to do it. Caveat: you still have to put in the work to solidify that knowledge.
Problem being: solidifying things is oftentimes tedious unless the task you're learning is intrinsically interesting/pleasing (solving math puzzles is just fun for some folks), so there is no revolution around the corner. People will put up with a lot if they have the natural dexterity for it, good teachers/methodology makes the whole experience more pleasant is all :)
I am not sure I agree completely, what you mean by "knowledge" ?
Let's suppose I don't know how to multiply numbers, however I do know how to add numbers and I also know what multiplication is... Do I know how to multiply numbers ?
The real caveat here is another one, the author prepared a sequence a question, for what I can recall from my philosophy class Socrate did not...
It was more a random exploration...
Finally we all know that some work is necessary to retain knowledge (again, what we mean by knowledge ?), but a logic, inductive work is way more enjoyable (read easier) than a mere mnemonic one.
The point I was trying to make is very simple - the article presented a way to teach kids by getting them to a place using questions.
He/she left out the part where you have to go home and solidify what you learned in class. That's where kids will struggle.
That home part is not solved by socratic method or otherwise. Nothing solves it, except doing the work.
All the socratic way of teaching in a classroom does, is make it more fun and interactive than a traditional lecture. If it gets people excited about learning, they may feel more inclined to put in the work at home.
Hence what you were proposing - putting the socratic method in a book, doesn't make sense to me. In a book, you want concise explanations. In a lecture, you do want more interactivity to get people excited to go home and look up the concise information.
That's my take on it anyway. I don't know where you were going with defining 'knowledge' - I don't find defining words useful, as long as we both know what we're talking about, we should be fine :)
This was about one lesson, and yes that lesson needs reinforcement. But part of that was being done by those students who were inspired to try it with other mathematical "bases", such as base 3 -- a system with 3 digits.
Also, in a full course, if you consistently and frequently use the Socratic method or any method that questions students' logic, many of them begin to do that on their own about their logic or, usually, the logic of other people, even the teacher. I have had students come up with good flaws in my own logic, by the middle or end of the term. But yes, it takes reinforcement.
I actually think you misunderstand the point. I'm not trying to argue that learning complex things is easy and it doesn't require mental effort, but this is not simply "teaching anything using logical steps". It's about encouraging the student to discover the solution on their own, with very careful and reluctant guidance.
You teach Socratic questioning as a habit (otherwise, you forget it). And as a habit, it requires repetition. Repetition, in turn, needs motivation. But the best motivation I know comes from people around. So, it's very non-techy.
And computers still do a lousy job in talking to people. Try to make people to answer a 10-question online survey. Harder to motivate than in face-to-face meetings.
What I find interesting is it has been around for eons and appears to get rediscovered every few years as a new generation happens upon it. I think it could go a long way simply to expose young people to more ways of thinking and formulating arguments for daily discourse. We seem to only focus on modern formal methods like proofs, papers, and the scientific method.
> Or even better, how can we apply the socratic method without a Socrate ? (where with Socrate I mean somebody who keep asking question)
I think that is what a FAQ does to some extend. Of course, quesions do have to be asked frequently to be part of the FAQ but a lot of people don't have to ask any questions but consume the FAQ instead.
Been thinking about this on and off since the last few times this has been posted. I could see a wiki or collaborative editing space being useful in creating lines of questioning on different topics; refined over time as new questions/answers come up that might derail the topic if not addressed properly.
That guy's whole website is incredibly interesting. I may not agree with all of his viewpoints, but it's hard to deny that he argues them in a more unbiased and rational way than almost all writings I've encountered.
IMHO, I really do believe how Socratic Method can improve teaching. Coming from a computer science degree and then studying Law, this method was really an eye opener on how to learn in a school room setup. It has been long used in Law schools and I believe if it can be implemented partly or fully in all schools, we might see good results. It tests the knowledge of the person being asked, whether he/she really understands the subject.
I do believe in it too, but so far it's only a belief. I accept the question first method because it avoids the rote learning since it doesn't give a lot of information to the student, and merely drives him through ideas. Which was the case every time I learned something, being left mostly alone in a concept and poking at it until something clicks. That said, I never experienced a real Socratic class.
This is an awesome example. What would be an example of teaching the socratic method itself using the socratic method? Bootstrapping teaching methods works as a test of their validity :)
It's a good interactive method to constantly challenge yourself into remembering and learning material.
Basically, what you're supposed to do when you're actively reading material. I never really learned how to study until later in life but apparently this is how you're supposed to do it.
I think we don't see it a lot in many classrooms because of economy of scale. When I was in school, we had a professor who did this with his smaller class on computer networks but seems like maybe didn't in his larger classes. He'd ask questions but so many people trying to answer, less time for personal answers (which was fine with me since I was always the slowest person in the room).
I was fortunate in my schooling. From 6-11 I was at a boarding school in the country, and we had classes of 12 or so at the most.
The three science and geography teachers (overlap, in the most excellent fashion) were autodidacts who believed everybody else could be too - and proved it in shovels. I recall the phrase "now why do YOU think ...?" being almost percussion in lessons - almost everything was "you figure it out and then let's bash heads and figure out what's right".
Nothing beat first hand experience. If we were studying population density, we'd be taken to a nearby town and would spend a Sunday measuring frontages and documenting usage, to then graph the data and draw our own conclusions. The fascinating takeaway on that was that houses nearer water were usually poorer - rich folks could afford to live up hills and have water carried to them. Properties get rebuilt, frontages have a habit of staying the same, or in multiples of their original size. Stuff I would not know or even think about were it not for this experience. Chemistry was always "here's the thing you need to do. Here's a mystery bag of reagents and kit. Figure it out. I'll keep an eye in case you stray into danger." Two examples, but it was the core of how they taught sciences - make us do our own investigations, and ask us the right questions to precipitate the correct lines of thought. They nudged me into coding the same way - "there are some dusty old BBC micros and some magazines about how to use them in the basement. You guys figure it out.". We figured it out so well that we got the machine with the vocaliser to cuss at the teacher when he entered input into a fake basic prompt, and went on to make a "Hugo" clone set at the school. Also just recalled being taught normal distributions by being told to go count car colours outside the school gates.
Anyway, the upshot is that from that class, of those I've kept in touch, all still have a childlike curiosity about the world, myself included.
I think we were taught to think for ourselves in the most earnest way - something which is increasingly missing in education today. Fuck, we were allowed access to guns, a deep lake with floating islands, abandoned underground cool stores - all on trust alone - and if you violated that trust you lost it, and you were punished. The bog-eye. Shudder.
Also there's a relationship between remembering and understanding. Sometimes just remembering a lot of premises is the only way to be able to really understand them later on (because they fit in your brain cache -- programmer analogy). Many times a concept became clear to me after a while, even though I did nothing special, but the pieces and their relationship became familiar enough to be meaningful. Some mathematicians said it better, it still feels weird anyway.
That was interesting. It was also bizarrely coincidental. My son is also in third grade, and I also explained binary to him today. During the conversation, which arose adventitiously, I found myself contemplating the socratic approach -- so the author's considerations resonated.
That said, I think the author's idea of 'only asking questions' is perhaps overly rhetorical. If you read the dialogue, he clearly injects statements without questions, and he also asks questions of the form, '<STATEMENT>, right?'. I have no problem with that, and found myself doing the same for the same reasons. My point is only that I think there is a 'truth' behind the approach which is better encapsulated than 'by only asking questions'. I think the more important consideration is that there be true dialog.
Just because it's such a completely weird coincidence, and because I think it demonstrates my point, I'm going to try to write out our conversation from memory. The whole thing probably took about ten minutes. As you'll see, it transitioned smoothly from questions my son was asking me. I think that's important, and it's why I think an asymmetrically 'socratic' emphasis on only asking questions is also stifling.
S: Why does the computer go faster after you restart it?
Me: The likely possibility is that there are memory leaks.
S: What is a memory leak?
Me: Imagine someone who got a new plate every time he had another serving of potatoes, instead of putting more potatoes on the same plate.
S: Okay.
Me: I guess he would make a lot more dishes than someone else.
S: I see that.
Me: Now imagine you had this guy over for dinner every day and you never did his dishes.
S: [Laughs]
Me: Pretty soon, you would run out of plates. You're supposed to reuse your plate within a meal, and you're supposed to wash the dishes between meals. But if you don't, you can run out.
S: So what does this have to do with computers?
Me: Computer programs are supposed to clean up after themselves too, but if they don't do it correctly, then they are like weird guests who make too many dirty dishes.
S: What are the dishes?
Me: Computer programs use memory. Remember we've talked about RAM, and different computers have different amounts of RAM? Well, when a computer program needs to hold some information, it asks for memory from the operating system. This is called 'memory allocation'. Asking for memory so you can store some information is like asking for a plate for your potatoes.
S: Okay.
Me: Normally a computer program doesn't ask for too many plates, and it lets you clean them up when it's done, but not always. That might be why restarting speeds things up. Sometimes you have to kick all the guests out and do the dishes.
S: Okay, so how much memory does a program ask for?
Me: That depends. How big are your files [that we were transferring]? A few K? K stands for kilobytes, so that's a thousand bytes. Actually it's 1,024 bytes -- but memory might be allocated in smaller units too.
S: What's a byte?
Me: A byte is eight bits.
S: What's a bit.
Me: It's a one or zero. Well, actually it's one piece of information, like a yes or a no. But it works out very well to call it a one or a zero, so we can do math with it.
S: How does that work?
Me: It's just like normal math, except instead of having ten numbers, you just have two: one and zero.
S: So you only have two numbers? What good is that?
Me: No, I mean you only have two digits, instead of having ten digits. You still have all the same numbers.
S: I don't understand how that works.
Me: Well, if you just have one bit, you have either a one or a zero. How many numbers can that be?
S: Two.
Me: What if you have two bits, or two digits, each of which is either a one or a zero. How many numbers now?
S: I don't know.
Me: Think about it. What if you have a one then a zero? [Note, we are in the car, so we can't write anything down.] What number would that be?
S: Ten.
Me: Yes, in base ten -- which is what we call it when there are ten digits. But we don't call it that in base two, which is what we call it when there are two digits.
S: What do you call it?
Me: TWO!
S: What!?
Me: Think about it.
S: I don't get it.
Me: How many two-digit numbers are there in base two?
S: Two zeros. Two ones. One zero. I'm not sure.
Me: What about one-digit numbers?
S: One and zero. Two numbers.
Me: Right, so can you combine those two?
S: I don't understand what you are asking me.
Me: Can't you create two-digit numbers by adding a digit onto all the one-digit numbers?
S: Sure.
Me: So can't you create two two-digit numbers for each one digit number? [I feel guilty for leading him so much, but hey, I'm arguing here against overly rhetorical socraticism.]
S: [Pause followed by evident lightbulb.] Yes, so it's four!
Me: Yep, you can represent two numbers with one binary digit, and four numbers with two binary digits. How many numbers can you represent with three binary digits? (Binary is another word for base two.)
S: Eight.
Me: Because eight is two to the third power.
S: No, four.
Me: What?
S: Two times two is four.
Me: Wait, let's go back. Two times two is four. That's two squared or two to the second power. Two times two times two is eight. That's three twos multiplied together. That's what 'to the third power means'.
S: Right, sorry, I got confused.
Me: So how many numbers can we represent in four binary digits?
S: 16.
Me: Because 16 is two to the
S: Fourth
Me: Right. What about two to the fith, five binary digits?
S: Thirty-two.
Me: And six binary digits, two to the sixth?
S: [Quickly] Sixty-four.
Me: And seven binary digits, two to the seventh?
S: [Quickly] One hundred twenty-eight.
Me: And eight binary digits, two to the eighth, which is one byte?
S: Oh! Let me figure this out. [Pause then triumphantly,] two hundred fifty-six.
Me: Correct. So a byte can be one of 256 numbers, expressed in base two.
S: I get it.
Me: Do you? Okay, so how would you write one?
S: One.
Me: What about two?
S: I can't.
Me: Why not?
S: Not enough numbers.
Me: But we just went through this. There are plenty of numbers.
S: But this part is too confusing.
Me: Normally you only have ten digits, but you can write numbers much larger than ten, right?
S: Yes.
Me: So when you write numbers down, there's a trick, right? [See, I'm doing this [<STATEMENT>, right?' thing too.]
S: Yes.
Me: Why is eleven eleven? It's a one in the ten's place plus a one in the one's place, right? You know about the ten's place, right?
S: Yes. So…
Me: So in binary, there is no ten's place because there are not ten digits. There are only two digits. So instead of the ten's place, we have a two's place.
S: Right! So it's one one.
Me: Yes! Instead of having a ten's, hundred's, thousand's place multiplying by ten every time, there's a two's place, a four's place, then what?
S: Eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four.
Me: Correct! So do you think you understand this now?
S: I think maybe I do.
Me: What is one one zero?
S: One in the four's place, plus one in the two's place equals six.
Me: Okay, how would you write seventeen?
S: [Long pause.] One in the sixteen's place plus one in the one's place.
Me: One, zero?
S: zero, zero, one.
Me: I think you do understand.
S: So how does the math work?
Me: You can add and multiply them just like normal numbers, but we probably need to write that down.
S: Okay.
Me: There's also a trick for negative numbers that computers use. It makes subtraction work like addition.
S: How does that work?
Me: It's called two's complement, but I can't remember the details well enough to explain it correctly in the car. Let's look it up later.
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Although I quibble slightly on the value of what I'm calling rhetorical socraticism, my main point is agreement. It's just a remarkably weird coincidence that a fairly similar discourse (teaching binary to a third-grader through investigative dialog) would have come up in my daily life today. That's the real main reason I wrote it out while it's fresh enough that I remember most of the details.
I am not a school teacher, but I am a parent -- so I'm more concerned with the issues involved in communicating with a single individual (at a time). The reason I think a more symmetrical approach is probably most reasonable is that information needs to come from somewhere. Why not provide it in as appropriate a form as necessary, and exactly at the point of need? Otherwise the 'socratic' teacher has to be an outsider to the process who swoops in to work magic on the vessels which have been primed by the faceless dead fact-giving of the their non-socratic counterparts.
From that perspective an emphasis on the 'question-asking' side of what might be a more balanced whole is understandable, though. That orientation is a useful counterbalance to the usual approach, even if it can't possibly (even in theory) replace it completely.
> How come we have ten numerals? Could it be because we have 10 fingers?
Objection! Counsel is leading the witness, Your Honor.
Rhetorical questions are really statements in disguise: "The fact is such and such, don't you agree?"
The students should be given an opportunity to form their own hypotheses about why there are ten numerals, otherwise that particular element of the dialog is not genuine "teaching by asking".
Yes, the questions are logically leading. That is pointed out as what the method is about. That particular question was just to get the discussion started so we could get into "aliens with two fingers" to make it fun for the students to discuss two-digit math (no pun intended, of course). It was not really part of the logic of teaching. It could have been done without reference to fingers at all; e.g., "Could we have a math system if we only used two numerals, 0, and 1?" but that would not likely have piqued the interest of third graders very much. And actually some students might have taken issue with the ten fingers/ten numerals idea, since "zero" as a numeral screws that up. E.g., our number groupings in written, columnar form really go from zero to 9, and then 10 to 19, 20 to 29, etc. You don't count zero things on your fingers....
This one is a particularly weird leading question, since the idea is facially ridiculous. In every human society, we had ten fingers for hundreds of thousands of years before developing a system of ten numerals. We have ten numerals because, when the numerals were developed, we were already using ten-based counting.
Albeit I completely agree with the approach, and ideally would want kids to respond with this kind of respect, I find the need for a complementing article which describes how to mould kids' attentiveness, and respect of the elderly, in order to enable such fruitful discussions.
I'd argue that this is a form of coaching. From my experience and research (paper: "Self-organizing teams and the coach's adaptive role") the efficiency of Socratic methods depend on the mapping of past progress. Meaning that: by creating a system which is best at incrementally visualizing progress of the topic at hand, the efficiency of the method will be positively affected.
The author should have made the donation link more clear, because I had to search in order to find it. Why not make the word "contribute" as a link to the corresponding page?
Using the Socratic Method in teaching science to creationists is interesting. They will follow each step but reject the conclusion, every time.
Even when you preface things with "I am not trying to get you to believe what's in textbooks, I'm trying to get you to _know_ what's in textbooks, instead of stuff like MY GRANDPA WAS A MONKEY".
Creationist educators and even publishers have developed a unique narrative about what they think science textbooks teach.
This is seriously cute! And by the way, asking questions is also an excellent way, I would even say the best, to learn yourself while you are teaching, or thinking you are. At bottom, knowledge is somewhere between the teacher and the student. Or the good therapist and his patient. Or the world and the researcher. It doesn't reside with anyone, it builds itself up in the middle.
Be careful of the Socratic method if you are attempting to teach those who perceive themselves to be higher up in a social hierarchy.
When I try this it often ends up in confrontation as the person who feels they are being asked for knowledge realises I am trying to teach them. These days I just flat out state my position and if they don't grasp the argument I forget the whole thing. This is a much better approach than attempting to subtly nudge people along a path to knowledge.
It's a common problem for me as I look a 10 years younger than I am.
I would be careful also with those who perceive themselves to be lower down in a social hierarchy as they lack the force to confront you.
(I mean: maybe you cause the same effect always, but only get push back from ppl. higher up)
That's what bothers me about the article. It's about instructing a class, a way of going through motions, not about teaching any individual. What about the third grader who doesn't know Roman numerals? What about the one who can't read "ten"? What about the one who has only eaten a bag of Cheetos in the past 24 hours? Or the kid on the autism spectrum and the one who saw his mother beaten by her boyfriend last night and just about every other night for as long as he can remember?
How does this work when the 11 year old third grader hits Jamison in the back of the head with a book and the quiet girl wants to use the restroom because she is sobbing just like yesterday?
The reality of third grade isn't theoretical. Yeah there are little pods of protected well cared for children. There may even be a sweet spot where none are smart asses and love the call and response and each is equally bright and learns the same way. Just look for the full pony rack by the school front door and the M&M truck backed to the cafeteria loading dock.
The fount of well meaning amateur pedagogy is not the solution to the woes of public education. The lesson of the article is that kids can be incredibly kind and polite to adults.
[Edit: None of which is to say that I think trying to teach the ideas of boolean algebra to 3rd graders isn't a good idea. I'm all for pushing the limits of children's intellect.]