The traditional teaching approaches are generally teacher-directed and where students are taught in a manner that is conducive to sitting and listening. It is true that the traditional expectations and department philosophies often allow us to continue with the lecture-based model with some useful results as evident by the past accomplishments of many and this cannot be disputed as much. However it is often argued that the traditional approach may not provide students with valuable skills and indeed some even go as far as saying the traditional method leads to a student not retaining knowledge after exams – they have little or no recall of the body of knowledge learnt beyond the end of a semester, for example. The teaching of mathematics that is usually referred to or called non-traditional uses constructivist philosophy as its basis; this implicates strategies in which the individual is making sense of his or her universe. So the student is an active participant, which allows an individual to develop, construct or rediscover knowledge – a major goal that can be very time consuming process if taken literally for each student; alternately, there is also a philosophical position known as social constructivism; which suggests group work, language and discourse to be vital for learning in a cultural framework of the knowledge base; so the use of group work, discussion, and group solving problems in a cooperative manner lead to a discourse which is believed to be the most important part of learning process. It is argued that the non-traditional teaching is done using a problem solving approach; where the learner is the problem solver.