[ExI] khan again, was: RE: david statue coincidence

Mon Aug 22 17:02:04 UTC 2016

you could never get very many of your students to actually get good value
out of your course by reading the material beforehand.  College students
just don’t swing that way.  spike

Maybe the most enjoyable class I had from a studying standpoint was the
first psychometrics course.  the university required that profs keep their
notes on file in the library, where we could go and copy them.

So I sat in class with notes in hand while the prof went through them.  I
don't remember bugging him like I did most of my profs because it was all
there and clear.  Easy A.

The best students liked what I did in a lot of upper level classes:  I made
up a list of questions for each chapter from which the test questions would
be selected.  Class time was spent answering those questions, which were
all the questions I could think of for that material, so if they knew those
answers they knew it all, and they never got a test question that surprised
them.  You might think that this was too easy, but it wasn't.  The first
test in one class yielded 23 Fs and one A, as I might have posted before.
Then they got serious.

Spike, you seem to be a lot like me:  I bugged every teacher from high
school on, and did not omit visiting them in their offices until they ran
me off, which they rarely did.

The ONLY guy who knew how to play a sax was Paul Desmond.  Period.  If I
were a mean and nasty guy and could move in time, I'd go back and kill
Adolph Sax.

spike   College is the age when that happens.  The heavy lifting in the
learning process should be mostly finished by that time.

I don't get this.  College is where you start getting into the upper
levels of Bloom.

I have the equivalent of 120 semester hours of psych and when I left grad
school I really began to study.  Sometimes I wonder how we are able to
communicate at all.  If we were on a committee together

 we'd be talking at cross purposes a lot, I think, and that's why your
idea of letting one guy design it all is interesting, but how can he know
it all?

"It all" would have to be just in certain areas, like math and science, or
humanities, or behavior sciences.  

you could never get very many of your students to actually get good value
out of your course by reading the material beforehand.  College students
just don’t swing that way.

They do in grad school or they get out with a booby prize Master's degree

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 8:29 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On
> Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace
> *…*
>
>
>
> >…Are we through discussing teaching?
>
>
>
> Not at all, but keep in mind we are discussing two different things in a
> way.  You are writing about teaching from a teacher’s point of view.  I
> think I am hearing your argument that if a teacher’s job is to coach
> students to work online resources, that would be unrewarding as a career
> path.  Entirely possible, but we are then discussing two different things,
> for you are a college professor, and I am thinking of an elementary school
> teacher with entirely different challenges.  Not the least of these is that
> he has some of her fifth graders who are already waaaaay past her in some
> fields of study, while others struggle to read at their grade level, where
> the standards are modest to the point of being nearly comical.
>
>
>
> College students’ goals haven’t changed and will not change.  You know
> better than most of us that real interest in the topic you are trying to
> teach is rare.  You are lucky to have a single student in a class of 25 who
> is genuinely interested in the topic, who will hang around after class and
> talk about the subject.  I know this for in chemistry and some of my math
> classes, I was that guy.
>
>
>
> >…That's what I did starting sometime in college, and it worked well for
> me.  But they used the old way:  read the book the night before the
> test…bill w
>
>
>
> Ja, because your goals were to learn the material, and perhaps become a
> professor.  I suspect most of your classmates had other goals.
>
>
>
> College students have a goal of getting sufficient credentials to get some
> mundane office drone job while freeing up as much time as possible for
> getting laid.  I had a huge advantage in that department.  I already knew
> that even if I had as much free time as had passed since the mid Jurassic
> period, my chances at getting laid were still so negligible as to make the
> investment scarcely worth the effort.  I didn’t bother.  This freed up
> money, spared me from embarrassment and heartbreak, freed up that time to
> think about actual course content.
>
>
>
> If there was some deal available to students whereby they could pay their
> entire tuition today and collect a diploma four years from now with no
> further requirements or demands on their time, plenty of them would take
> that deal in a heartbeat.  This makes students perhaps the worst consumer
> group in history.  This business opportunity was not lost on one of our
> current candidates for president.
>
>
>
> So BillW, you noted repeatedly that regardless of your efforts, students
> really wanted to just come to class, listen to your lectures, do nothing
> else, then the week before the midterm and final exam, read the material,
> cram in everything and hope for the best.  That isn’t going to change my
> professor friend.  It’s human nature.  My guess is that regardless of what
> you did, you could never get very many of your students to actually get
> good value out of your course by reading the material beforehand.  College
> students just don’t swing that way.
>
>
>
> This is a good argument for what I have been pointing out with my
> observations of an open-ended curriculum: it takes advantage of students
> actual interests and methods of study.  It recognizes that study is an
> activity done only after the biological urges are satisfied.  This isn’t
> meant as a criticism.  I remember what it was like, struggling to
> concentrate while semen pressure threatened to blow the top of my head
> off.  College is the age when that happens.  The heavy lifting in the
> learning process should be mostly finished by that time.
>
>
>
> Our notions might at this time diverge, for your professorship was in
> areas not generally known to me, and not readily broken down into a number
> of discrete skills, such as Khan Academy’s 1040 identified skills necessary
> to claim mastery of mathematics through first semester calculus.  I don’t
> know how that would be done for English literature, psychology, political
> science, or journalism.  I don’t even know if it can be done.  Those
> mysterious arts were taught up on the east end of campus.  We math,
> physics, and engineering geeks didn’t go there, didn’t know anyone there,
> wouldn’t know of its existence other than being occasionally reminded we
> were banished to the west end of campus and we were weird.  I don’t think
> we really were; we just dressed that way.  Well, OK I was weird.  But I
> like me like that.  Besides my sweetheart was one of us.
>
>
>
> But back to reality, which can also be a fun place.  My notion is that
> teaching the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) disciplines can
> be done at triple the efficiency if the entire curriculum is designed end
> to end by one guy.  We have been discussing a stunning work of art which
> was designed not by a fractured committee by one brilliant mind, one.  I am
> not an artist myself, never carved anything other than soap.  But I never
> cease to be amazed at the thought of a guy looking at a huge pillar of
> marble, envisioning David standing inside it, then freeing him of the
> overlying rock so effectively the result can practically get even hetero
> men turned on.  Now that is an accomplishment.  It was done by one guy with
> a vision.
>
>
>
> An example I was thinking of was a particular invention to which I am well
> acquainted: the saxophone.  Other instruments evolved over time, but the
> sax was invented in 1846 by a singularly talented guy, Adolphe Sax.  I
> played a replica of his original 1846 version and found it most remarkable
> how very similar it was to the modern version.  He did a great job, just
> terrific.
>
>
>
> OK then, my real thrust in the Khan Academy thread was that given a
> sufficiently talented designer such as Sax and Michelangelo, a single
> designer could put together a complete curriculum which would be so much
> more efficient than the design by fractured committee alternatives that the
> result could teach children at triple the efficiency.  It could allow them
> to achieve a similar level of mastery in a third the time investment, which
> leads me back to a concept I will introduce in my next post on the topic,
> after you have had time to think and respond, recognizing that we have two
> completely different topics running more or less in parallel.
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
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>
>
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