How Not to Teach 175

How Not to Teach 175 Of course, the system teachers teach in does not allow them to separate assessment and teaching. But it doesn’t allow them to teach only cognitive processes either. For a cognitive process-based educa- tion system to work, teachers must be allowed to teach, and others should be the ultimate judges of success. Teachers need to help stu- dents get where they are trying to go and let others decide whether they have gotten there. So, we have rule #2 for teaching: Rule #2: A teacher should never be the ultimate judge of the teachers own students’ success. Here again, this seems absurd. But in the end, this separation of responsibilities is very important. Parents judge how well their children are walking and talking, of course. But the children are not anxious about passing their parents’ assessments. The success is its own reward. And in the end, others judge how well your children speak. A parent is really there to help, not judge. Let’s look at mistake #3. Mistake #3: Thinking there is something that everyone must know in order to proceed This is, of course, the killer mistake. Go to any faculty meeting, or interview any teacher, and he will tell you that something is the basis for all that follows that, and if you don’t know it, you can’t proceed in the subject he teaches. Theory first is the mantra of nearly every teacher. The question is why this is so. I have been in arguments about this so often that I wonder why these views are so widely held. Teach theory first, then practice. Because of this mantra, computer science majors often don’t learn to program in a way that actually would make them hirable, and budding medical students drown in a sea of chemistry equations. Businesspeople learn about finance long before they learn how to run a business, if they ever do learn that, and psychology students learn about B.E. Skinner when what they really wanted to know is why they are so screwed up. Why do teachers like teaching theory so much? I think that the answer is that it is orderly stuff, with official answers that the teach- er gets to know while the students try to learn them. This puts the teacher in a powerful situation and teachers are comfortable with that. Teaching practice is much harder. There often are no right an- swers and many screw-ups, and the learning process is much messier. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023921