Home Page	MEI Courses	Registration	Workshops & Consulting	Courseware Archive & Consulting	Guestbook

Student Responsibility

Students learn. We don't teach. We guide, help, analyze.

There's nothing new in that statement. It goes back to Socrates, and was supported by George Polya, and is one of the main themes of modern cognitive science.

We believe that one way to start people on the learning journey is to throw more than ordinary responsibility for analysis of problems their way. One of the first problems in the first lesson on growth in Calculus&Mathematica is about the US population, its growth and growth rates. Here's an outline of the problem.

Here's a graph of US census data. Look at the population grow.
Here's a plot of the growth of the population by year.
The students' job is to compare what is seen in the two plots and to try to explain, according to US history, what they see. There aren't correct answers, of course. It's the students' responsibility to explain the relationship between the growth rates and the overall growth. One would expect the student to notice that the growth is always positive, and that those dips only indicate slowing and speeding up of growth. The historical aspects are interesting to read. One encounters amazing stuff.