>>>>> "Raymond" == Raymond Wan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Raymond> In academia, it is common to blame the student, but up to a point, it Raymond> might be worth asking if the teacher can teaching things Raymond> differently...especially if enough students complain. As someone who has built a solid reputation creating quality training materials in this area, allow me to elaborate. I've seen a lot of ineffective training materials in my life. Many times, instructors don't understand that the point of all training is "state change". Students start some place, and want to end up in a different place. It's not enough to simply throw facts at a student and have them try to sort out the framework in which to hold those facts (which is what my junior high History teacher thought "teaching history" meant, and why I still have a distaste for that to this day, but I digress). As an instructor, I need to figure out what incremental change in frameworks *and* facts are needed at each step. And for efficient learning, I also need to linearize the knowledge... each new item buildling closer to the final desired state. One of the reasons Learning Perl is so effective is that I specifically designed the starting and ending point of the reader, and then figured out the absolute minimum steps to get there, and *left everything else out*. I consider the selection of what we left out to be a lot more important than what we put in. :) People often ask "what about this" and "why isn't that in there", and I generally reply "because the course wouldn't fit in a week then... we'd have to take something else out, and we wouldn't reach the desired goal". The other thing that makes Learning Perl successful is that I take it *personally* when someone in my classroom didn't achieve satisfaction in the stated results of the course. I investigate each case. In some cases, it's because the person didn't meet the starting point of the course and tried to slide by... that's not anything I can do except make the pre-reqs clearer the next time. But if there was some break in the chain of new-things-building-on-old, I make sure that another way to teach that step gets incorporated in the next courseware update, and then back into the books when we update the books. In my view, there are no stupid students. Only misstated pre-reqs, misaligned goals, or *bad* instructors. No excuse for any of those. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside discussion -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/
