The power of 'best bets'
The other day I read Greg Ashman's post Why Education is like smoking which talked about the way teachers often generalise from anecdotes in the same way that when smokers are confronted with statistics about the health risks of smoking they might say things like, "Well, my nan smoked 400 cigarettes a day! She may have had bright yellow fingers but she lived to the ripe old age of 130!" Or whatever. Teachers do this sort of thing all the time. We say things like, "Well, the research may say x, but I find y works so much better for me!" Maybe it [...]