[kenjackson]

Thank you for that Eric Mazur talk -- it really captures what I see. In particular the part where he talks about how his students, at Harvard, were solving triple integrals of complicated bodies to calculate the moment of inertia -- yet they didn't have basic high school level intuition of Newtonian physics.

We're so "drill, drill, drill" focused that we lose sight of why we're doing the drills (Eric Mazur calls it "plug and chug"). It's possible that these drills will in rare instances create the likes of a Colin or an Andrew Wiles, but for virtually everyone else you have a group of students that can solve triple integrals, multiple 5 digit numbers in their head, factor matrices into any form desired -- yet not have a clue why.