I recently had a teacher tell me one of her students had accused her of not teaching him anything. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You don’t teach us anything in science.”

What?! The teacher was confused. What about all those experiments we did? What about the weeks of carefully planned lessons? What about all that stuff you learned?

The student responded, “yea, but you didn’t teach me that. I did all that by myself.”

Isn’t this what we want to have happening? Having students play a roll in their education. Not just being lectured to, but actually learning though experience? Something needs to change if we have a culture where students feel cheated out of something if their teachers don’t rely on direct instruction.