Part of Friday's lesson involved reviewing special right triangle lengths. I had given the students a 30-60-90 triangle with a hypotenuse of 1. The students remembered numbers like the square root of 2 and the square root of 3 were involved, but didn't know how to figure out what the sides of the right triangles were. I told the class to get out their laptops and look it up. "Google it." One student said "But I don't even know what question to ask." Some students quickly found an answer, but it wasn't quite the answer we needed. The right triangle they found had a hypotenuse of 2. With a little bit of discussion, we were able to figure out that the triangle with the hypotenuse of 2 was twice as large as the triangle we were considering.
One argument against teaching basic concepts or facts is that students can always "Google it". And while it is true that students have a vast resource of information quickly at their fingertips, if they "don't even know what question to ask", they can't get the answer. It had never crossed my mind that students don't know how to ask questions or evaluate sources. This is a skill that is easy for me and a skill that I assumed my students had. Asking the right questions, evaluating resources and modifying searches. Those are life skills that all students need. I know we don't have a course where this is taught, but perhaps I can model this more. It is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed across the curriculum.
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