After tending a bit too challenging I’ve recently put up exercises a couple of times that were nice and standard, nothing unexpected, just straightforward examples to work through … it seems a sure-fire way to a very dull class with students either quietly drifting around somewhere else entirely … or else chatting off-topic amongst themselves if you don’t spend half the class enforcing a kind of compliant, obedient inertia. In either case few are listening or learning anything.
If you do achieve the quiet state the ‘good’ students are giving answers that are basically not even close to their ZPD, some others wake up occasionally to copy the next few lines verbatim from the board … which are available in the textbook anyway … and the rest are AWOL in spirit, quietly learning to wish they were somewhere else, anywhere else, than a maths class. Try giving two such exercises in a row and the second shows the same people can still answer it, and the others still must wait for the answers on the board, nothing has been gained from the first except a page or two of notes … and very slowly delivered notes because you kept giving time for them to work on it, and kept up a dialogue of sorts. A steady drone of 60s style teaching would at least have covered more territory. But fortunately that hasn’t been my usual experience.