Students get ticked off when we introduces shades of gray into black and white concepts they learned long ago.
There’s a good reason to do it, of course. We want to introduce students to concepts before they’re really ready to comprehend it all, so we introduce a simplified version. Later, we return and fine tune the concepts.
The earth is not a sphere, though that’s what we teach. It’s an oblate spheroid. But that’s a lot harder to understand than holding up a basketball.
And the earth doesn’t go in a circle around the sun – it follows an elliptical path. But ellipses are hard to teach to elementary students, so we start with circle.
Everywhere you look, we start by giving students knowledge, and then later saying, “Remember when I taught you X? Well, it’s a little more complicated than that…”
For example, when I talk about compound meters to my students, they are affronted when I tell them that 6/8 and 12/8 don’t have 6 and 12 beats per measure. Truly shocked.
But understanding the nuance is important – and I can show that they intuitively understand the concept when we sing a song in 12/8 like “In The Still of the Night.”
And it gets better when we take the time to really understand why it was taught the simpler way first, and why they are ready to add more nuance to their understanding.
I think that it’s often the right strategy to teach simply, and then add nuance. But when students aren’t in on the arc, they can be pretty sore, feeling like they’ve been lied to.
Compare it to an expert drawing Mickey Mouse. They start with simple shapes, and then slowly add more detail. That’s what we’re doing, in the long run, as educators.