Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 07:24:08AM +0000, Joe wrote:
> On Thursday 06 March 2003 11:42 pm, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[snip]
> > Well, I still think there is a fundamental difference. With children,
> > learning should be a very focused, very disciplined matter.  Basically,
> > leverage their intense learning capacity. With adults, I think it would
> > work better with more informal, less intense settings. The underlying
> > methods may be similar or the same, but the emphasis is different.
>
>
> You think so?  As a school pupil myself, I find I work better if the teacher
> will interact with you more informally, answer your (sometimes slightly
> irrelevant) questions, and soforth.  If the teacher just teaches, and you
> just write, I find it hideously boring, and don't really learn anything.
When I say "very disciplined" or "very focused" I do not mean "impersonal"
or "lecturing". My own experience also confirms that a teacher that knows
how to talk to the students outside of academic subjects is usually among
the ones you learn more easily from. If a teacher can't interact with the
students, then IMAO she's not qualified to be a teacher.

Having said that, my original point was that with younger students,
generally speaking, there ought to be a challenging, disciplined
curriculum. At that age, you're able to learn a LOT with relatively little
effort; and leaving it up to the students to take the initiative to learn
will not work in most cases. Let's face it, if you leave kids to
themselves, they'll just spend the whole day playing. Not that playing is
a bad thing; just that for most kids, their playing usually does not
involve a lot of learning. (Of course, there are exceptions, as Rachel's
reply shows. But that's another story---see below.) You can't do the same
with adult learners because they are just past that stage, and they just
don't learn things that way.

Now w.r.t. homeschooling, as Rachel mentioned, that is different from a
school setting. In fact, my personal opinion is that homeschooling is much
better when possible. In a school setting, teachers do not have the
time/energy to personally coach every single student; so the only
effective way is to lead the kids through a challenging curriculum which
would encourage them to learn. In a home-schooling environment, however,
there is much more opportunity to foster a direct, more personal coaching.
This is much better than any educational system you can come up with for a
school setting, because the fact is that people are different and learn
differently, so you can never have a single method that works for
everyone. With home-schooling you can adapt the material (or its
presentation thereof) for that particular student. Obviously this works
best for the student when done correctly, much better than what a teacher
of a 30-student class can ever hope to do.


T

--
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. --
azephrahel