Chris Smeder
Thoughts on technology, design and the future
After reading comments on this essay I realize two things. First, my ideas are not formed, I'm unsure of my stance on some of the issues I brought up. Second, I didn't express how I really feel. For example, in the essay I sound like I think that having good teachers in small class rooms is a bad thing. In truth, I want that. What I was really trying to express is that I would rather have a good teacher via a web cast rather than a bad teacher in person. Other points in the essay are also misleading to how I feel. I'll leave the essay up, incase some wants to see it, until I decide I can rewrite it.
Main ideas
- College professors reinvent the wheel every day.
- The focus of college is too high on the specifics and not enough on the basics.
- Time management and study skills are the most basic and the most important.
1) College professors reinvent the wheel every day.
It has always troubled me that most of my courses in college were taught in a lecture format by a real person. The professor was often not great at keeping the attention of the class, didn't use the latest and greatest teaching techniques and interacted on a very minimal level. He (or she) wasn't a bad person, often he was a nice person. Rather teaching is hard.
Just like writing good software is hard: teaching is hard. A large percent of software projects fail. I would say a much larger percent of teachers fail. What I mean by this is not that a large percent of student don't graduate. (Though this is partially true). I mean that a compiler can not compensate for bad code, but a student can compensate for a bad teacher. (The student can work on his own to compensate for bad teaching.)
Even with the vast knowledge we as society have collected on how to properly create software: software projects fail often. Software project managers have frame works, tools, collaboration, popular essays on best practices and passionate intelligent people helping each other. Compare this to a typical college teacher. There is no Ruby on Rails frame work for your economics teacher. He is not reading blog posts daily about the best way create a fair test. Often, teachers guess. They reinvent the wheel each day. Over the course of a year they create a few hundred power point slides or write a few hundred lines of hard to read text on a chalk board and read these slides or notes to the students. They create a syllabus in Microsoft Word a few weeks before the semester starts. Arbitrarily deciding how much projects, home work and tests are worth.
The end result is often lectures that are sub par, homework that is not useful, projects that are lacking substance and unfair tests. That said there are great exceptions, but they are the few.
2) Grades are low. Most colleges focus on the symptoms not the cause.
Ignoring bad teachers the other thing that troubled me were the stickers, posters and larger posters that read: "Study 25-35 hours a week". But the school provided no where to study. I have always been a fan of the movie Field of Dreams. "Build it and they will come."
At the Junior College there were study area's. And we came. We collaborated, we taught each other and had fun doing it.
3) Teach a man to fish
A large percent of students have bad study habits, poor time management and bad hand writing. The end result is they suffer in their ability to learn and produce quality work. The college's solution is to give them bad grades and tell them to do better.
Why not focus on the cause and not the symptoms. Yes, I am saying colleges should teach study habits, time management and hand writing. But colleges don't. The result is that instead of the most brilliant and creative students doing well, its the students who had parents that taught them good study habits, time management and good hand writing!
The list doesn't stop at hand writing. Their are many basics that are more important than learning what schools currently teach. For example: reflection in java. Students can learn reflection in Java on their own time in about 4 hours sitting in front of a computer open to a tutorial and the command line. What I am purposing is that colleges put a higher priority on creating good students and a lower priority on teaching the details. Good students can teach themselves the details.