Joys of Pedagogy
Monday, October 29th, 2007Tim Gowers offers what he considered an uncontroversial pedagogical principle, examples first. He discovered, though, that on the internet there are no uncontroversial topics.
When I started reading Tim’s post, I expected to agree completely with his point. I think I understand subjects almost entirely through examples. I expected him to advocate putting examples before theorems, but he’s actually advocating putting examples before definitions. I dislike that style fairly strongly; it’s like being led down a road by someone who already knows the destination, but they won’t tell me where we’re going until we actually get there.