Effective Teaching and the Use of Examples

I know I’ve mentioned that I tutor at the local schools and the junior college in Santa Barbara and that I, like anyone who’s had these experiences, learned quickly that there are effective and ineffective ways of getting certain concepts across.  In many cases, it’s just best to give an example and let that illustrate the idea.

For one gearhead who was having trouble with “force = mass * acceleration,” I said, “You’ve taken the engine and tranny out of your car parked in the street, right?  OK, imagine that there was no friction between the road and the car’s wheels, and you were pushing it, adding force in a certain direction, it would accelerate in that direction, right?  Now, if you and a buddy were both pushing it, your force would be twice as much, and so it would accelerate twice as fast.  Now imagine that you put the engine and tranny back in, adding mass, you’d need more force to get the same acceleration.”

Some concepts are really tough to put into words, and that examples are really the only way to get the job done.  Take the idea of irony in literature.  I could define it: “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result,” or I could simply provide the example that we see above.