Recently, I listened to an interview on the radio with a Psychology Professor named Jim Stigler at UCLA.
He was talking about how he’d watched anxiously as a fourth grader in a Japanese math classroom struggled at the front of the class to solve a problem.
Maybe you didn’t know this, but I used to be a high school chemistry teacher. So although I don’t teach high school any longer, I’m still keenly interested in pedagogy (the study of teaching), and my ears always perk up when I hear things that relate to teaching, mental training, and that sort of thing, as I think those topics are applicable to agility.
Anyway, this guy was talking about how the teacher had called on a student who obviously DIDN’T know the answer to the problem at hand. Now, as a teacher, I always tried to choose a student who I was pretty sure knew the answer 🙂 But in this case, the student didn’t know the answer, and was up at the front of the room for a LONG time, getting the problem WRONG, over and over again. Finally, they solved the problem, and the class applauded.
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