Start with the misconception

Saturday 23 January 2016


It's a big problem that students often remember what they have learnt before rather than what we try to teach them. I recently had some swimming lessons, I'm not a very good swimmer so the instructor had lots of useful tips as to how I could improve my technique. This made me think about how I picked up these bad habits. Well, I suppose it was when I learnt to swim at the age of about 6. Most people learn to swim when they are quite young and stick with that technique for the rest of their life. Same thing goes for brushing teeth , cutting bread, writing and a whole bunch of other stuff. To re learn you have to first understand what you're doing wrong then start from the basics. In swimming that meant learning how to move the body through the water, swimming with no arms wasn't fun.

Here is an interesting TED talk by Derek Muller the founder of Verasitium.

The other reason we have to teach the misconception is because IB examiners tend to play on them, hmm.

I never did learn how to swim properly.


Tags: verasitium

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