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Isn't this pretty much what musicians do anyways? When I was learning how to play piano as a kid the exercise books basically would take one pattern, make you l

Isn't this pretty much what musicians do anyways? When I was learning how to play piano as a kid the exercise books basically would take one pattern, make you learn it over the keyboard, and then the next exercise would be a slight variation on the previous one. Enough that you had to spend time with it, but not completely different than the last exercise. All musicians I know do the same: scales, pattern exercises, and songs of increasing difficulty.

danharaj 11y ago
Surely such knowledge and technical skill in learning and teaching was arrived at by empirical methods. However, it is not subject to peer review and the controlled experiments one can run in order to verify it are not obvious. Watching an expert do their craft, one can observe their virtuosity and yet have not a clue how to explain it in words. There's no manual for teaching that one can read in order to become a master teacher. There never will be: skill is a knowledge beneath words. Still, whatever knowledge can be put into words ought to be. The best social science is the most modest: that which seeks to clarify and observe what human beings already do. There is a double edge to this: institutions cargo culting science and producing monstrosities like the Common Core. Prescriptive social science can be a disaster. Teaching, being the most important profession, is a weird place where the people in charge completely disrespect the expertise of the people doing the work but understand that whoever controls it controls a great deal of society's functioning. That's why systems like the Residential Schools in Canada were allowed to do so much harm and why administrators are allowed to trample all over the interests of both students and teachers. I wring my hands a lot over the bureaucratization, corporatization, and centralization of universities and schools. The powers that be most definitely wield the apparatus of science to harmful, unscientific ends.

danharaj 11y ago

Surely such knowledge and technical skill in learning and teaching was arrived at by empirical methods. However, it is not subject to peer review and the controlled experiments one can run in order to verify it are not obvious. Watching an expert do their craft, one can observe their virtuosity and yet have not a clue how to explain it in words. There's no manual for teaching that one can read in order to become a master teacher. There never will be: skill is a knowledge beneath words. Still, whatever knowledge can be put into words ought to be. The best social science is the most modest: that which seeks to clarify and observe what human beings already do. There is a double edge to this: institutions cargo culting science and producing monstrosities like the Common Core. Prescriptive social science can be a disaster. Teaching, being the most important profession, is a weird place where the people in charge completely disrespect the expertise of the people doing the work but understand that whoever controls it controls a great deal of society's functioning. That's why systems like the Residential Schools in Canada were allowed to do so much harm and why administrators are allowed to trample all over the interests of both students and teachers. I wring my hands a lot over the bureaucratization, corporatization, and centralization of universities and schools. The powers that be most definitely wield the apparatus of science to harmful, unscientific ends.