Why should the nature of the child rather than the nature of the subject matter determine the nature of teaching?

Answer 1

I think that both need to be considered. However, the child (or adult) learner needs to be considered, because the style of instruction might be able to be tweaked in order to engage the student more, and therefore help the student retain more of the content. You can throw two people into a class that teaches Japanese, and one person will glom onto all of it and learn quickly, and the other will fail. ... The pace of the class might be the only difference. If you taught the second learner a slower-paced class, they might succeed and be exceptional. Some people take longer to learn something, but also retain it longer. The second person might even be the better translator eventually, depending on a lot of things... the point is though, that throwing the same subjects in the same way at everyone will be good for some of them, and not good for others. Although we need to learn some learning style flexibility as students, we ALSO very much need to learn some flexibility as educators. Knowing how to engage the individual and present the material in a way that will be interesting and fun is *essential* when we are trying to maximize educational benefits. ... I understand that it can't work sometimes, and that teachers are thrown into classes with so many students that it is impossible to individualize. That is a broken system. However, varying our teaching styles, and allowing the entire group to learn the same things in different ways and at different paces during different activities will help gather in at least some of the students that would otherwise be badly served by our generalized instruction.