gEDA-user: Teaching credentials (was geda cygwin package)

[msokolov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Sokolov)]

Joerg <joergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> But then lots of road blocks are thrown 
> in front of them. Like having to first get teaching credentials and so 
> on. Costs time you may not have, and money. I really don't understand 
> why someone who explains electronic design to students and has decades 
> of hands-on experience needs a "credential".

Well, it can be seen both ways.  I have learned the hard way that knowing
the subject matter well yourself and teaching it to someone else are two
very different things.  For example, after having maintained my own
version of UNIX for 10 y, using this UNIX system for all daily work all
this time, administering the system and making plenty of code changes
both in the kernel and in various userland components without any outside
help (my system is totally divergent from the direction in which the
rest of the world has gone), I think I can say that I know UNIX pretty
well.  However, my attempts to teach UNIX to my significant other and
her son have not been very successful.  Even though they have already
been required to give up Weendoze as a condition of receiving financial
and emotional support from me, so if they want to use any computing
technology at all, it has to be UNIX or Linux, but that still doesn't
give them the motivation to get up from the bed/couch and learn UNIX.
Very frustrating.

And it isn't just UNIX either: when I tried to teach my S.O.'s son a
little bit of high school physics, that didn't go too well either.

I guess it depends a lot on the student's motivation.  If the student is
highly motivated and has a burning desire to learn, that makes the
teacher's job so much easier.  About 5 y ago a young hacker has contacted
me over the 'net (he sought me out, not the other way around) wanting to
learn more about 4.3BSD-Quasijarus (my divergent version of Ancient UNIX).
He was and still is rather "green" in many ways, but he had and still
has a burning desire to learn, and teaching him various technical things
ranging from Ancient UNIX to hardware engineering has been a quite
pleasant experience, totally different from that trying to teach UNIX to
my S.O. and her son.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a push vs. pull issue: if
someone is actively pulling you for information, it's quite easy to give
it to them, but it's much much harder to feed the information in a "push"
manner to someone who is passive at best or resistant at worst.

It would be absolutely wonderful if every student was internally-motivated
and was actively pulling his/her teachers for information, but
unfortunately I don't think that's the reality in any school system,
even in the best ones like the old Soviet I grew up in.  Even if you
don't have students who are outright lazy or stupid or categorically
disinterested in learning, I don't think it is realistic for a teacher
to expect every student to have a burning desire to learn his/her
subject.  At best you can expect a moderate general interest in learning,
but you still have to have the skill and talent of presenting the
material in a way that keeps the students interested and motivated.
A special talent which I sadly lack.

So in summary my view is that you don't need special teaching
qualifications to teach the subject of your expertise to the exceptional
super-motivated student who is actively pulling you for information, but
you do need one to teach the average.

> My second chemistry teacher 
> did not have any teaching credential, had a hard to understand Czech 
> accent, and was one of the best teachers I ever had in my life. He was a 
> lead engineer at a chemical plant that makes laundry detergents, on 
> "emergency loan" to our school.

Well, since he was in a lead role at his main job, it is quite likely
that his job involved mentoring others, perhaps ones with only moderate
motivation, so that's how he had perfected his teaching skills.

To me it doesn't matter whethor or not you have a teaching credential as
in a piece of paper, but it does matter whether or not you have the
ability to teach, which I maintain is separate from knowing the subject
matter itself.

MS


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