{"id":517,"date":"2009-05-09T09:42:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-09T09:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/?p=517"},"modified":"2009-05-09T09:42:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-09T09:42:00","slug":"517","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/517\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Think"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some thoughts on teaching at university lifted from my comment on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2009\/05\/08\/howto-lecture-to-stu.html\">Boing Boing<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>1. A large chunk of first year students don&#8217;t really know why they are there. Many of them decide they shouldn&#8217;t be, so the second years and onward tend to be more involved. Therefore, first year lecturing can be pretty unrewarding.<\/p>\n<p>2. On the other side of the coin, I certainly remember some bad lectures when I was in first year \u2014 many lecturers simply showed up and read the notes verbatim. I ended up attending 2 hours a week and reading the notes myself. The response the next year wasn&#8217;t to make the lectures better, but to make attendance compulsory. Oops.<\/p>\n<p>3. Realise that your expectations of your students are likely based on your experiences as a student. Since you went on to become a lecturer, you were probably at the top of the class and are *not* representative of the average student. Lower your standards.<\/p>\n<p>4. One big thing that has changed in university since I went through in the early 1990s is that students go to university expecting a job at the end. This is a mistake. Students, please:<\/p>\n<p>If you want to be trained for a job, go to technical college.<br \/>If you want to learn how to think, go to university.<\/p>\n<p>Teaching at both, the technical college did a much better job of teaching both design skills and use of software. The uni did a better job of broadening horizons. Pick your path accordingly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some thoughts on teaching at university lifted from my comment on Boing Boing: 1. A large chunk of first year students don&#8217;t really know why they are there. Many of them decide they shouldn&#8217;t be, so the second years and onward tend to be more involved. Therefore, first year lecturing can be pretty unrewarding. 2. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/517\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Learning to Think<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}