Thing #15

I have never been a big fan of flowcharts. They seem very constraining to me. I understand their uses for really right-brained people and concrete learners, so I do use them from time to time. However, I feel that life generally comes at a person too fast to break most decisions down into a flow-chart format. My own brain probably works more in flowchart format than any other, but I think that is a hinderance to my ability to function among other people (one reason I have been evaluated as 'too much of a lone ranger'). I think that a much more global approach to problem solving is more useful to people in general and to students in today's world especially. That is why I try to guide my students more toward free-thinking, open-ended problem solving where I reward them for coming up with solutions that I could not even have predicted.

Even the mind-maps are constraining in that, though they are not linear, there are predicted outcomes. Granted, most things we teach in high school (especially at the IPC level) have predictable outcomes, I think it far better for students to figure out where they should end up, than to have set outcomes for them.