Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Means Not the End
This past week in AS we were talking about how to ask questions without true answers. Our teacher Mr. O'Connor said, "A question with a correct answer isn't a question worth asking". From years of experience I knew what he meant. When I was younger and very stubborn (the latter hasn't changed much) I never understood why when doing math problems the teacher was so insistent on showing work. I believed that if I got the answer then the rest of the problem was irrelevant. I didn't understand that the answer was not the important part of the question. The concept and the decisions and actions that brought me to that conclusion were more important. The teacher didn't care if x= -3 or 2; how I went about factoring the original problem was what concerned them. I thought that the means to and end were irrelevant but they were the actual problem itself. And (I kind of hate myself for linking it to this, but it makes sense) maybe the cheesy pop song 'The Climb' by Miley Cyrus (or Hannah Montana) actually had a point. The answer is not the solution, it is the getting there that answers the question.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
When I read your post, I thought of two things. The first being that your teacher didn't want you to know how to plug in numbers to a calculator and get the answer. She needed to know that you knew how to get the answers by hand. The other is how Shakespeare wrote his stories. My English teacher last year said it well, "Shakespeare's plots aren't very interesting, but the way he gets there makes them great." Take Romeo and Juliet, for example, Boy sees girl. Boy loves girl. Boy can't be with girl. Boy thinks of stupid way to get girl. Boy dies. The way he got through the stories made them amazing. It's not what you do, its how you do it.
ReplyDelete