Eleanor Duckworth

An engaging collection of essays about, well, teaching and learning. Duckworth's writing is generally clear, and certainly thought-provoking. Here are some thoughts that were provoked:

- There are many skills involved in not knowing something, which are critical to learning and also tremendously undervalued by The System. This makes me think about how interviews at tech companies fall into this trap of caring more about what people know than about how people deal with not knowing.
- It's important to try to understand what the students are thinking; by doing this you help them clarify their own thinking and find new avenues of interest. Duckworth also mentions that this applies not only in a traditional classroom setting; obviously this would be helpful in a tutoring situation.
- Tied in to the above, it's very hard to make someone understand something your way by telling them. But if you can get them to think about their own understanding maybe that understanding will change. It's interesting to think about this in a situation where I disagree with someone's politics.
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