
Soylent Green Is People (JB-JAH)
8.2K posts

Soylent Green Is People (JB-JAH)
@FreewayLoops
So I started to dance without wearing no seatbelt; Mathematician; Novel Gardener; Selector (Music Is Prozac For Free)




















I have long argued that one of the most critical and common mistakes in constructing explanations is to start with the definition. In my opinion, we shouldn't introduce a definition until *after* the explanation, at which point it is a "label" rather than an abstract item. E.g. in the case in the thread, when teaching thermoregulation, you start with the body's response to changes in temperature, and then say "and we call this process of maintaining temperature 'thermoregulation' " You might then use morphology or etymology or whatever as a *curiosity* but not because it has predictive or explanatory power. I think this is inefficient, and my experience is that people can't transfer this knowledge to new contexts (I sure as hell can't, and to my knowledge have never independently "solved" the meaning of a word in this way). Essentially, my belief is that we should construct meaning and understanding through concrete and/or familiar examples, and then attach a definition, rather than start with a term, break it apart, and then use that to define it. Of course, the inevitable plug: if anyone is interested in the technical construction of explanations, there are >100 pages with rules and heuristics in Teaching Secondary Science











