Have you ever noticed that we really can’t teach a child to ride a bicycle?  We can give them all the tips we want ahead of time (sometimes too many!), but we pretty much have to put them on the bike and let them learn the process. No other way around it, really.
Naturally, we usually try to maximize the environment for that learning:  training wheels, holding the back of the seat for a while, making sure the learning surface is level, etc.   But, when the (bike-tire) rubber hits the road, they pretty much have to learn for themselves, while we cheer them on.
I’m going to say this carefully, because the analogy is not perfect, but when we look at the entire educational process from K – 12, isn’t it true that a lot more of that process is like learning-to-ride-a-bike than we tend to acknowledge – especially with the ‘bigger picture’ skills?
When a child falls off a bike early in the process, we don’t give them a C+  in ‘bike riding’ – we understand that the falls are a relatively necessary part of the entire process.  However, we aren’t always that enlightened in the educational process, and my own discipline – mathematics – can be the worst.
Mathematics, like death, gets a bad press. 🙂 One reason is that it’s so widely misunderstood.  In elementary school, we often work with times tables (ugh), moving decimal points, fractions, etc.  But (again, I tread softly) those things aren’t really mathematics.  They’re arithmetic.  Arithmetic is an important tool for mathematics, but it’s only one tool, and it’s not what mathematics is about.  In the same way, hammering and sawing are VERY important skills for the carpenter, but it’s not what building is about!
(Incidentally, be careful before you quibble and say “well, carpenters don’t have to do much hammering and sawing by hand anymore, so those skills aren’t AS important”, because that is the EXACT situation in arithmetic.  No one has to do times tables and long division by hand anymore -calculators are our ‘power tools’- but doing mathematics is perhaps MORE important than ever.)
To oversimplify a little, mathematics is about using tools to tackle and solve real-world problems, in the same way that carpentry is about using tools to build useful and beautiful things.  The tools change, but the big picture doesn’t.  Indeed, I have said repeatedly in teacher workshops that I’m worried, metaphorically, that we’re teaching our children to hammer and saw (and pass the hammering and sawing standardized tests!) and NOT teaching them to build things.  We’re giving C+ grades to kids in hammering without any connections to, say, table-building, or even letting them TRY to build a table (which is often the best way they learn hammering and sawing, isn’t it?) !
Which, in the end, brings us back around to learning to ride a bicycle.  Learning to tackle and solve real-world problems, using appropriate and available tools, is a life-long process, and – like a bicycle – one learns by practice.  And it can be as fun as bicycle riding!  And, yes, I actually DO have my own list of suggestions that help maximize that learning environment, but they must wait for a future column.
We can’t teach future bike riders by teaching pedaling in 1^st grade and steering in 2^nd. (And if we tried, they’d think bike-riding is boring!) Again, I’m being general, but it is the same with our future problem solvers.  We MUST ‘put them on the bicycle’ earlier (brain teasers, puzzles, strategy games, etc).  AND, we must allow them to ‘skin their knees’ in the process.