“I decided we would do an oral exam* because it’s a great way to see if people have actually learned anything from my course and aren’t just parroting notes. Because I can ask them to elaborate on their answers.”
Yeah and it’s also a great way to get otherwise good students to go blank because it isn’t possible to absorb every bit of complex information you spent 12 weeks rushing through, Barbara.
This “gotcha” style teaching fucking pisses me off. There is no time in the real world people are not going to be able to look up their notes. Fuck, half the time I’ll ask a professor something and they’ll be like “I’ll have to look that up later and get back to you.” Why? BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMAN AND THATS HOW BRAINS ARE.
This type of teaching only favours students that already had experience with the subject beforehand and freaks with amazing memories. This kind of understanding of the material only comes from experience and repetition, something that the traditional 12 weeks of rushed lectures/labs that discard each topic quickly to fit all of them in don’t do.
I fucking hate how much I am going into debt to be taught only the vaguest concepts but doing most of the teaching myself in my own time. Education under capitalism is a joke.
*An oral exam is an exam where instead of answering questions in a quiet room on paper, you have to answer questions on a live video call with your instructor.
I think our entire approach to education and training is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up, like so many other systems in place.
The education system should be tailored to identify each person’s passions, talents, and aptitudes from a much earlier age. I know peoples’ preferences change but by the time you enter high school, you are old enough to start specializing for your future imo.
While kids still have access to the resources public education provides and the time to take advantage of them, we should be giving them every opportunity to explore everything they can learn and focus on learning what they like. And I definitely don’t just mean ‘practical’ or ‘utilitarian’ skills. Some kid is an amazing painter? Let them triple the amount of art classes if they don’t want to take a foreign language and math. Mathematician? Writer? Chemist? Same goes.
I understand a well rounded education is important so people can have a broader view of the world and understand the work other people do, but what we’re doing now is wasting so much potential.
Super idealist I know, but how did we make a society where the kids are an afterthought?
Nah, don’t feel bad. Idealist or not, it’s practical and rational to make sure your people are reaching their full desired potential. That’s how you have a healthy strong society and probably one of the many reasons our current society is falling apart.
Yeah viewing public education as a ‘money sink’ or something that needs to be ‘efficient’ has trickled down into how some people view their own children as investments or liabilities.
Take all the money from defense funding and put it in education.
MIC: has Congress force school districts to spend the new funding equipping every classroom with armed ChatGPT quadcopter roboteachers
Sulvor: How could you possibly think that’s what I–