Anecdata

Snow day!

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It is a snow day! I think my position as a university employee puts me in a small segment of the adult population who gets to enjoy snow days. In my previous position, I would have had to go to work. It would have been an obstacle. But instead, I get to enjoy the day as a bonus. What luck that it came attached to the Memorial Day weekend. Extra weekend.

I have memories of waking up and seeing the world covered in snow as a kid. What joy. We would bust out our Super Nintendo, or later Nintendo 64, and jam. Staying indoors, free of responsibilities.

Except for that one class. I had a class that assigned homework in advance. So you still had homework. I remember being frustrated by homework as a kid.

It never made sense to do these in isolation. Would you not want to be practicing these properly during class? Where you could get immediate feedback from the teacher? It felt backwards to me. Sit in class and listen to lectures that, let’s be honest, the teacher has repeated his entire career. It may have been a recording, for all the difference it made. It should have been a recording. We could watch it at home. Or read it. Or whatever. This was not about learning styles, if that even exists 1. This was not about disliking the subject either, I was a curious child. I read and explored things on my own, constantly. It was about the organization of the learning.

This style of teaching would require them to be more involved in the class. It would not be as predictable. It would require individual attention, which given the growing class sizes makes problematic. No surprise that public schools need more funding. We need smaller classes and more teachers. But that’s not the whole story. I don’t think it is, at least. But I don’t know the solution to this either. There have been trials of flipped classrooms 2

This is why I think my graduate studies was vastly easier for me. Discussions and problems were done in class, while the “lecture” aspects of the class were your own responsibility. If you didn’t read it in advance, it was your own problem. You fell behind. There were folks who didn’t do the readings or watch the lectures. But they were able to catch up on their own terms.

I’m not sure if there’s one way that works. But the practice of solving mathematical problems and other assignments is the important part. The dispensing of knowledge can be done in a myriad of ways now. It does not make sense to be relegated to such an inefficient (and rather boring) way. The recall and experience of solving problems is the part where teacher instruction is most important. Yes, we have the option of saving the questions from homework and bringing it in, but that gap in time detracts from learning. Immediate feedback while solving problems have been repeatedly shown to improve recall. And, what’s the use of learning something if we’re unable to recall it when we need to?

But back to the snow day! Going to spend the day playing Baldurs Gate 3. And I recreated my very first character from Baldurs gate 1. Back then, I was hooked on reading Forgotten Realms, particularly books that featured Drizzt 3. My first character was a Drow Ranger. I had even thought about naming him Drizzt, but chose something else (which I can’t remember). But that’s the character I’m running with now. It should be fun.

Things from around the web

  1. (PDF) The Myth of Learning Styles ↩

  2. Flipped Classrooms ↩

  3. Drizzt Do'Urden Forgotten Realms Wiki Fandom ↩