First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense.
Interpretation
Understanding your motivations in teaching helps shape effective methods and outcomes.
This quote by Richard P. Feynman emphasizes the importance of establishing clear intentions behind teaching a subject. By identifying why you want students to learn and what essential knowledge they should acquire, you can intuitively select methods that will effectively engage them and facilitate their understanding.
In practice
During a teacher training workshop to discuss effective teaching strategies.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation.
I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
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