Hey as a (mostly former) math educator I want to say something to Bean Dad and others like him.

Yes, it's good to have kids figure things out. But.... LIMITS! You don't have a kid figure out a stove alone. Nor do you have them reinvent all of society starting with fire

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True story time. When I was doing private math tutoring, I ran into QUITE a few schools who had figured out a "new" "trendy" "AWESOME" way to teach math! It would be better than anyone else had ever taught math before!

(spoiler alert: it was always worse)

One of these schools had the "genius" idea kids would learn better if they "figured things out on their own".

My student was in Geometry. The book was written for this method & contained NO explanations, only problems. Teacher put them in groups and told them to "figure it out"

I am not making this up. I am not exaggerating. Her teacher did not teach!! Just told them to figure out the problems on their own!!

Because that would be "better"

The teacher also wouldn't answer questions because that would mess up the method, doncha know

The students were lost, failing (and some cheating because they had no idea how to pass).

My student was very bright and a hard worker but -- she needed someone to, yanno, *teach*.

Look, there's a method to teaching. I'm good at it. Here's what I do.

I explain things to connect to what they already know. I demonstrate, use visuals/other metaphors... As we go I ask questions to help them make the important connections themselves, & I help them build to where they understand the underlying enough to work a problem, supervised

Here's the key though -- if they can't answer one of my conceptual questions, or they are totally lost with the problem, I don't, uh.... leave them for six hours and tell them they can't eat till they finish.

I back up. I help them come at it sideways. We work at it together.

So, SO many of my students -- mainly young women -- came to me convinced they were terrible at math.

They weren't terrible at math. At all. But they'd come to believe they were.

Unless you're Ramanujan, you're not going to reinvent all of mathematics on your own. You're just not.

Teaching is NOT doing it for someone -- it's supporting a person in their own learning. But it's also an active process. It's not leaving a kid to bang their head on a wall.

And yeah, there are delicate balances, in how long to let a kid struggle & exactly how much to buttress & where. Not saying a reasonable argument can't be had about that

But personally, I think telling a 9-year-old she can't eat till she solves it is about 5,000 bridges too far.