When you see someone doing something and, to you, they are doing it the “wrong way”, how many times do you want to just move them aside and take over to do it “right”? I know not to fold my wife’s clothes because even though either way the clothes are folded, the way I fold is wrong compared to the way my wife folds. Just because someone does things in a different way, it doesn’t make that way the “wrong” way. This idea came from a cartoon that I found on my desk. It’s a Jungle Out There! by Hagen – an owl is driving and looking behind him by turning his head instead of using the rear-view mirror. His passenger yells at him, “Would you please use your rear-view mirror! You’re freaking me out!”

My coworker, Tom, says his daughter used to do math in a different way compared to everyone else. She saw it differently and was able to use math that was more advanced compared to the others. She still got the answer right, but could not do it the way the other kids did. To her teachers, she was doing it the wrong way, even though the answers were right. They told her parents to slow her down because she needed to learn it the right way. Luckily, Tom told them no, that they would have to deal with the way she did math because she was finding the solutions, and the way she was doing it was correct – for the higher grades.

How often do we slow students down because they learn differently from how we teach? Or we have our way, and their way, in the end, gets the same result? As long as safety and cheating are not issues, does it matter how a student does something?

Mark Viquesney