"Just tell me what to understand and I'll understand it."

That's from a student who is always in class and wants to do well. She's come for extra help and has really tried her best as far as I can see. Yet she's still looking for me to tell her what to think, and that's the problem. Some people call it the 13th grade problem, that they don't understand the difference between high school and college. But near as I can figure, many of their classes are 13th grade, asking them to memorize terms so that they can then recite them. If History 101 were a prelude to something, to further study in history and they had some agreed upon body of knowledge that they had to have, some set of facts and figures, they needed, or some theoretical concepts that they needed then we might usefully spend our time with those -- like learning the elements in preparation for chemistry. But it's only a prelude to further college study and in that the goal was supposed to be critical thinking. We can't MAKE them understand. We can make them know, we can store information in their heads, but where does the understanding come from?