On Teaching

echin and myself had a great conversation about many things this evening. Started off somewhere around why tips are silly, and quickly moved on to other archaic customs we continue today. This reminded me of a link I have been meaning to post for a while about the Gutenberg method of teaching. I'll provide a brief summary to give you the idea.... but it is a really well written narrative, and worth the read just for that.
So why do we sit in large lecture theatres and copy down what the professor says [notes on the SFU system later]. Well, turns out books used to be expensive, not just $100 expensive, like 4 months work for a monk type of expensive. So how do you get students copies of all the relevant texts? Well one guy teacher stands at the front of a large room and reads out the text while all the scribes students copy it down. Yep, thats what you pay for with your tuition money, the opportunity to copy down a book. Now things have changed a little since then, printing press and all. So now you copy down your teacher's dictated text book in an incomplete and somewhat hap-hazard manner under the guise of "learning the material." They even encourage you to ask questions now, although no one does.
The Gutenberg method of teaching is basically exactly what you'd come up with as a teaching method if your weren't terribly biased by current customs... Get the students to read the text ahead of time and then answer their question and give them your intuition in class. Simple isn't it, now that you think of it. There are some other points that the article touches on, like, we have to write text books that are actually readable from front to back (note: this means not written as a reference on a subject) and this makes teachers jobs much harder (you know, they have to actually teach rather than just repeat material they are very familiar with).
Now, I have had the privilege of actually attending a university that half got this. Most courses provided copies of the overhead lecture notes in some digital format. This meant that we didn't have to play the roll of scribes most of the time. I found this hugely beneficial since it meant that I could actually pay attention to what the teacher said, not just on writing it down. However, the read the text before and have a discussion in class was missing. Now I'm sure this was partly my lack of initiative, but the university atmosphere wasn't really helping. There were many classes I got by on not even opening the text (probably more a fault of the text rather than the class). So SFU was part way there, but still has a good ways to go before bringing scribing learning out of the dark ages.
Anyway, a good read for anyone. Seriously, if you have read this far and haven't read the article, go read it now, it is worth it.



wow, I set out just to write something for the sake of writing and look what I ended up with. Real wind bag I am. Anyway, I really need to improve my writing skills, specifically my technical writing, so hopefully there will be more posts in the future. I should make a series of posts about the javascript app I'm writing, maybe next week.


Cheers for now.
Andy.