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

[Bill Gatliff <bgat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Sokolov wrote:
>
> 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.
>   


As a professional teacher, I completely agree!

Someone told me a long time ago that the best way to learn something was
to try to teach it to someone else--- and that's definitely true.  BUT,
the ability to teach something, anything, is as much a specialty as the
subject matter you are teaching (embedded systems, in my case).  And
that's what the credential part that you are referring to is all about,
or at least should be.

While it's true that I'm a professional teacher, I'm not a credentialed
one so I can only speculate as to what you actually learn when you
pursue a degree in education :).  I've had to learn by rote, research
and experience the skills that any teacher needs to know--- on top of
mastering my subject matter.  That's taken me almost a decade.

Things like putting together the "scope and sequence" for complicated
material isn't always intuitive.   Or the subtle psychology behind the
learning process itself.  And it's been especially difficult for me to
learn to communicate as a teacher, rather than as an engineer.  Somehow,
I've managed to do well enough.  But I've seen a lot of disasters over
the years, and even participated in a few myself unfortunately.

If I were to find myself an opportunity to teach full-time instead of
about half-time as I do now, the first thing I would do would be to go
get some training in education.  Even after doing something that
resembles being an educator for so long, I'm confident that I could
still learn a thing or two.  And I'm also certain that what I don't know
about teaching is preventing me from being even more successful than I
am now.

Just my $0.02, but since I'm someone who has been doing embedded systems
development for almost twenty years, and been teaching that subject
matter for a decade, I couldn't resist the urge to chime in...


b.g.


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