This comment sticks out.
Originally Posted by
Carlos Alvarez
I had so many issues in school with teachers who wanted the answers derived using THEIR methods, or whatever methods were deemed by the books to be the One True Answer. I have always been able to do math in my head using methods similar to common core; it's just instinctual. But they wanted me to show my work, which was hard to do to begin with since it was graphical in my head, not numeric. And then would say I did it wrong, even though my answer was correct. Silly. It's a big reason why I'm a high school dropout. Today, I use my methods in my head, not theirs.
Like Lee said, step into the teacher's shoes. Just because you had that answer in your head, it doesn't mean you have all the answers. What happens when you don't have the correct answer? You didn't allow the teacher to show you the foundations of deriving that answer.
I did this when I was in school. My whole life, I have music playing in my head. Any music from symphonies to jazz to hard alternative rock. I never had piano lessons but could watch someone play it once and then play it. (It was a great party trick for my parents visitors who had new instruments I had not seen yet.) My school music teacher wanted me to learn sheet music and once I showed him I could read which note was A vs F, I skipped reading sheet music because I could already play it. My downfall? You can give me sheet music with no name on it and I can't play it because I have no idea how to read the timing of those individual notes. If the sheet music had a name on it and I had already heard it once before, I could play it flawlessly and just skim the notes.
Charlie,
The fabulous part about your story was that you chose to turn a negative incident into a positive habit. You could have easily repeated that behavior and treated your students and peers with same negativity and closed-mindedness.
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and I think, "Well, that’s not going to happen."