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That last one isn't a bad idea. Remember that our teachers are people who are formally educated in teaching, not necessarily in the subjects which they're aske
by warwick 17y ago
That last one isn't a bad idea. Remember that our teachers are people who are formally educated in teaching, not necessarily in the subjects which they're asked to teach.
Especially in the early grades, a teacher has to be a generalist. Students who take an interest in any given subject will undoubtably know more about it then their teachers do. This is absolutely worth encouraging.
It's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan.
- petercooper 17y agoThat last one isn't a bad idea. I started out with the concept as a joke/parody, but the more I went through the chapter titles, the more apt some of 37signals' ideas related to the education concept. Spooky! Their ideas are so universal that they work everywhere. A few months ago, some of my Twitter friends and I went through Getting Real as if it were a book about curing constipation. Most of the chapter titles (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php) work as-is: Less Mass It Shouldn't Be A Chore Hold the Mayo Rinse and Repeat Alone Time Meetings Are Toxic Seek and Celebrate Small Victories A Softer Bullet Track Your Logs Beware the Bloat Monster Go With the Flow Horrifically, I could go on..
- sketerpot 17y agoI wish more of my students would get off the lesson plan. It's more work, but damn do they learn fast when they're doing something they find interesting.
- warwick 17y agoWhat level of student do you teach? I'm curious if they've been conditioned to not get off the lesson plan because they know it's not worth the effort and it won't be on the test anyhow.
- sketerpot 17y agoI teach introduction to programming for electrical engineering freshmen. There is no test; only weekly assignments, and I make it clear that they can get off the lesson plan and get full credit if they do something interesting. I try to encourage this, and I've never been disappointed by someone who takes me up on this offer. But, yeah, a lot of what I do is de-conditioning. For one thing, people need to get out of the habit of waiting for all knowledge to be spoon-fed to them, because that's ridiculously inefficient. They need to learn to use the Google instead of sitting there staring off into space whenever they don't know something. It's hard getting people to take a more active role in their own educations when they've been taught to be so damn passive, but I hear from a lot of graduating seniors that this was a very influential class for them, for precisely this reason.
- petercooper 17y agoIt's no wonder that students aren't interested in learning if their desire to learn is suddenly discouraged once they've gotten off the lesson plan. When I was at high school (in the UK), teachers were keen to only cover things that were known to be in the eventual tests. In math, we skipped set theory entirely because it was known to not be in the final exams.