Today I stepped into the class, and had this feeling that it is a difficult day . Just before my period was the social studies period and the only significant point that I could notice while sitting outside preparing the study material was that the teacher could shout LOUDER then ME. While I have read 2 of the John Holts Books criticizing the current education model , I sometimes think that LETTING Children explore can turn out to be a big disaster . Anyways, I was bound to take a test and the children pretend that they were prepared for it on Tuesday and not today. A usual excuse. While doing the test they were all quite as they want to gain the marks, some were peaking here and there, but I let go of this matter for now . Once the test was done I gave them a little proving question:
The Question was : Prove that the exterior angles of a triangle adds up to 360. Since the children were not really fond of proving anything and take things for granted they were surprised as to why were they asked to prove anything:
I made this diagram
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| To prove that a+b+c= 360
Majority agreed that x+y+z=180 , but none try to use the knowledge of angle on straight line
So I try to solve it on my own . I wrote a few steps
a= 180-z ( angles on a straight line)
b= 180-x ( angles on a straight line)
c= 180-y ( angles on a straight line)
so, a+b+c = (180-z)+(180-x)+(180-y)
=> 540-(x+y+z)
put x+y+z =180 => 540-180
therefore a+b+c= 360 proved
But one boy Nidal stood up and said he had some other way to solve this question, so I let him explore this question
He wrote as follows
Let x=60, y=60 and z=60
thus a= 180-60 ( angles on a straight line)
b= 180-60 ( angles on a straight line)
c= 180-60 ( angles on a straight line)
adding the above
a+b+c = 120+120+120 =360
What I learned from this class is that If you use numbers to prove your point, Children do pick up things quickly
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