Practice is built into the traditional teaching of mathematics. The struggle, always, is to get students to do enough problems to reach a critical level of proficiency. I twenty-three centuries ago, no royal road to geometry. Everyone must travel the same road of continual practice. The reform movement in education, which is dominated by idealists, never mentions practice.
Teachers focus inquiry predominantly on real phenomena . . .
The example contains no scientific or technological inquiry at all. Students build paper airplanes, but learn nothing about air flow, pressure differences, or the Bernoulli principle. The unit diverges away from its central question in an inherently unscientific fashion. Actual scientific experiments on simple phenomena provide much deeper insights into scientific principles. Last year students in a seventh-grade science class stumped me with an authentic question generated from their experiences with an activity I had developed for them.