Chuck Swindoll mentioned, in a podcast, the church's use of gimmicks to attract people. I remembered an incident in my own life involving a gimmick.
My first semester as a graduate student, I taught two sections of remedial math. Most of the course was arithmetic and light algebra.
During the semester, I missed a week. The school provided a substitute for those sections, who taught the kids a gimmick to work a problem. They loved it! They were very angry with me for not showing them. I had not taught it for a specific reason. Also, my responsibility was to teach them mathematics not gimmicks. I also wanted to push their ability to reason through problems. I wanted them to think.
After they learned the mathematics behind that type of problem, I was going to teach them the trick. I am not a complete hardliner just a partial hardliner.
When I returned to the class, they were outraged and complained so much you would have thought I was the worst person ever in their lives. They wanted problems on the exam that employed the gimmick. When they heard that was not gonna' happen, the outrage began all over again. They pushed so I devised a compromise: one problem would employ the trick and one would not. My job was to teach. I also wanted to know if I had done my job.
You may be wondering why I took that line of reasoning because it was remedial math, after all. That gimmick did not work for all cases for that type of problem. My substitute failed to mention that point to my students. I wanted to educate them not enable them. If they were going to continue in their educational pursuits, I wanted the next math instructor to know they had been taught. I wanted the students to demonstrate it by proficiency with elementary mathematics.
Gimmicks do not work in life. Only true systems work.
My first semester as a graduate student, I taught two sections of remedial math. Most of the course was arithmetic and light algebra.
During the semester, I missed a week. The school provided a substitute for those sections, who taught the kids a gimmick to work a problem. They loved it! They were very angry with me for not showing them. I had not taught it for a specific reason. Also, my responsibility was to teach them mathematics not gimmicks. I also wanted to push their ability to reason through problems. I wanted them to think.
After they learned the mathematics behind that type of problem, I was going to teach them the trick. I am not a complete hardliner just a partial hardliner.
When I returned to the class, they were outraged and complained so much you would have thought I was the worst person ever in their lives. They wanted problems on the exam that employed the gimmick. When they heard that was not gonna' happen, the outrage began all over again. They pushed so I devised a compromise: one problem would employ the trick and one would not. My job was to teach. I also wanted to know if I had done my job.
You may be wondering why I took that line of reasoning because it was remedial math, after all. That gimmick did not work for all cases for that type of problem. My substitute failed to mention that point to my students. I wanted to educate them not enable them. If they were going to continue in their educational pursuits, I wanted the next math instructor to know they had been taught. I wanted the students to demonstrate it by proficiency with elementary mathematics.
Gimmicks do not work in life. Only true systems work.
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