| > Thanks! You're welcome. > Yes, formatting messaged up. Do you mean "messed up"? I can't make sense of "messaged up" but I'm guessing it doesn't matter. > I did read your article ... I didn't write it, so it's not really "my" article. > ... I felt that it buckets all hacks together as an unnecessary evil in education. I think in this case and this context, "hack" refers to "doing something a quick and dirty way without necessarily knowing how or why it works." > I don't ever remember a case where I was only taught the hack, for example. We learn it the long way and then the teacher/lecturer might show us a quick version in passing. Is this not the case all of the time? Then you are lucky, and no, it's not the case all the time. There are many cases of students being taught "Tricks" to get a result without them having any real understanding of what's going on. You don't need to spend very long talking to students about how they're solving exam problems to realise that in many (but not all!) cases they're just applying hacks, tricks, and processes without knowing why they work. |