[DontchaKnowit]

Dusde honestly I think its a personal preference thing. Like personally, calculus never clucked for me at all until I took a rigourous course with a skilled lrofessor who derived many important theorems in front of the class. After that I was able to contextualize all the real world examples and things fell inti place. I think some people really do learn better in the abstract first.

[atoav]

I guess you are right, yet seen from the perspective of an educator you might see the advantage of choosing a teaching approach that gets more people going in a faster way. I am not talking about people who are studying maths, but people for whom maths is an means to an end, or maybe even just an obstacle they are forced to deal with.

Imagine a language class where the teacher only engaged with those who already know how to speak the language, that would be seen as bad teaching, especially if it is a course for pre-school-kids.

[AnimalMuppet]

Some people think top-down (general to specific); some people think bottom up (specific to general). You cannot specialize your teaching for one group or the other - not unless you know that you only have one kind of people that you're teaching.

[atoav]

Yeah but with top down we are talking about the question how it fits into the students known world not about how it is defined in the most basal abstract way.