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Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach. As much as I would love to believe this,
by unalone 18y ago
Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach.
As much as I would love to believe this, I'm at a college that's renowned for its teaching program, and teaching majors came to me for quite a lot of tech problems. (Two didn't understand basic algebra - worrysome.) The problem is that people who decide they want to become teachers very rarely work well as teachers. My favorite teachers were all passionate about their subject first and foremost: many of them, even in high school, committed to their work outside of just teaching. The people who say "I want to teach and I don't care what" are very often the most problematic teachers.
I agree with you entirely about how enormous the world of media has become. That's part of the problem. There are so many things to pay attention to that the slow pace of the average classroom doesn't have enough to appeal to students. With the exception of perhaps three teachers' classes, I learned more online than I ever did in a class. (The solution is to develop teachers who are more singularly fascinating than the Internet, which is a difficult challenge.)
- jacquesm 18y ago> The solution is to develop teachers who are more singularly fascinating than the Internet, which is a difficult challenge. That had me chuckling out loud. I think we'll see a certain game program for sale before that will happen.
- unalone 18y agoIt's possible. My English teacher in junior year absolutely was. I went in the first day, tried to pick a snarky fight with him over James Joyce, and then stayed after class to talk to him about Ulysses and Nabakov's Lolita. (Ulysses is one of my favorite novels.) By the end of the week, he'd recommended two bands to me that I fell in love with; before winter, he lent me his copy of 69 Love Songs, which profoundly affected how I looked at music. Later, he was the reason I befriended a kid I'd been at odds with for years, an arrogant film buff. When we started to have extended discussions covering literature, cinema, and music, I started looking for some of the films they were mentioning, and in doing so became close friends with the film kid. It led to one of the best summers of my life, driving around the state in his Wrangler to get a copy of Spaced. (Meanwhile, the class we met in was a half-year course filled with a ton of kids with short attention spans, and he managed to get us to read something like 7-8 books and a ton of short stories, and crammed us with 5 excellent films in between.) How you isolate people like that and identify them, I don't know. They exist, though. (Game program? What do you mean?)
- jacquesm 18y agoAmazing story... Identifying people like that really would be a mission worth undertaking, food for thought there. The game reference is a /. meme reference about 'duke nukem forever', a game that has been in production since '97. The running gag is which will come first: hell freezes over, duke nukem forever is released or the Hurd is finished. My money is on hell to freeze over :)
- unalone 18y agoRumor has it that the game'll be out by 2010. I saw the intro video myself. (And wasn't Chinese Democracy finally released?)