The Lessons of 5050
A friend recently showed me a neat little trick, and in so doing reminded me of some fundamentals of effective teaching.
“Do you know how to add all the numbers from one to a hundred in less than a minute?” he asked.
I knew that adding 1+2+3+4+5…….+98+99+100 would take much more than a minute, so I took the bait. Anyway, I knew he was dying to tell me.
“Well, the trick is in pairing the numbers which add up to 100. Do you follow?”
“You mean like 1+99, 2+98, 3+97?”
“Exactly!” he responded enthusiastically, “and how many pairs would that be?”
“Forty-nine pairs, so that would make 4900,” I answered, feeling rather clever.
“And then?”
“Well, the 50 and the 100 have no matches, so you have to add those independently, for a grand total of 5050.” For a moment, at least, I felt brilliant. My friend just chuckled.
More than showing me a nifty little party trick, my friend had reminded me of two key principles of teaching:
1. The human mind loves patterns and is always looking for them. The more you can teach by pattern and analogy, the more effective you will be.
2. If you just tell the student the end result, you not only spoil the fun, but you destroy the effectiveness of the lesson. Tease the student with little hints, but make him do the work– he’ll keep the lesson forever. The good teacher doesn’t teach, the good teacher sets up the student to learn.
Oh, yes, and there’s a third great teaching technique: telling a story!
Make a point of trying all three this week!
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