Posted by alexandra_k on March 28, 2014, at 17:36:17
In reply to Re: increasing sensitivity, posted by alexandra_k on March 27, 2014, at 21:35:09
and i don't know why anybody would expect chemistry people... or bioscience people... to know how to teach. i mean... i started out university with education and english literature and then picked up psychology later... the value of getting all your english literature reading done over the summer prior to class should be obvious to anybody who thinks upon it...
now i'm remembering stuff i read something, something about the number of repetitions a person needs for retention. how the average is... i forget. four or six or something like that... how some 'gifted people' only need hear things once or twice... how others need... many many more repetitions than that... etc.
thinking back to school... the teacher would explain the same thing over and over and over and over and over. and really... probably half the class didn't get it the first time. something distracted them. some kid next to them was fiddling or there was this banging outside or they couldn't see because the piller was in the way or the kid in front was bobbing about... maybe they were hungry or sleepy or... and so on...
i never really worked at high school... but actually, i was placed in the year 13 calculus class for math... it was supposed to be punishment for me. because my current maths teacher couldn't keep throwing me out of class and the calculus was what the head of department happened to have going on at the time... and i think about how they were working... much as we are working now in our chemistry tutorials. teacher would go through some stuff for a bit... then the students would work. and there was a little chatter... but not much. people were working through things individually together. a... fairly nice work environment...
and now i'm thinking about how the curriculum is cumulative... so much of it is repetition on the previous year. i'm thinking... the teacher goes through something then people do the problems and the teacher probably goes through that very same thing again for people who don't feel they get it (and the others overhear that while going about their work). even if you don't get much in the way of homework done... you get lots of repetition of the content just by going to class...
and now i'm thinking that people have 2 years of chemistry in high school. and actually a bit before that there is a bit before that. then they get to university... and much of it is repetition. so they can just turn up to the lectures without having done any preperation whatsoever... they can have their half filled in course notes (that they can probably fill mostly in from memory before the lecture even starts)... they can half heartedly listen to the lecture and half heartedly jot down what they already know... probably while simultaneously wondering where they are going to meet their friends for lunch... for much of the semester.
and so the party line is 'you don't have a hope in hell of doing well in the course if you don't have the solid school foundation behind you'. but... if they gave me the lecture notes prior to class... i could do a focused read of them... and i can focus good... then quickly go through them again in the 5 minutes before class while most people are yapping about to their neighbours about sh*t... and then... well, now the playing field is a lot more level when it comes to following along what the lecture is saying in class...
i think the lecturers have mostly been spoiled by being sent heaps of really well prepared students. so... they don't know how to teach. they don't need to know how to teach. they don't actually teach. it is just a... culling year. it gets rid of a bunch of the high achievers from high school who basically get lost in the alcohol / drug / sex haze they find their way into in first year...
they think it is about... the content being particularly fast or hard or whatever... i don't think it is about that... i think it is about their teaching / learning methods not being as efficient as they could be. i wonder what the med curriculum is like? most everyone says the amount of information is overwhelming... i couldn't find a lecture schedule... people say it is more like high school because you are with the same bunch of kids for everything all day everyday...
i think... they keep the teaching style like high school (fill in worksheets during lectures) because... the kids doing the best are the kids who worked like that... because they are in the position of hearing it for the 4th or 5th or 8th time... whereas people like me... hear it for the very first time. and then people think i'm dumb or disabled that i can't listen to you talk about stuff that is alien to me while simultaneously drawing branching alkanes with f*ck knows how many methyl groups...
pre-reading? sigh. i'm not entirely sure what to do. i want... i know that people update ppts a bit on the fly... but... the weekend. i need the opportunity to read them in advance of the lectures. everyone would do better working that way (then the content is novel) but... you can't rely on student feedback... its like asking us how best to moderate babble ha... going about this the right way seems important. with the right... manner. not getting people upset. not having them feel criticised. i don't know how to go about this appropriately. :( i don't believe this is a disability issue :( i need full notes to have any chance next year...
if they want to give people a chance who didn't get to go to the best high schools or who didn't work the best in high school (if they really want to make the playing field level as much as they can) then doing things like providing the lecture notes before hand... makes it a little more possible for people like me to play keeping-up.
otherwise... its just about whose parents were rich enough to send them to the better schools with the less dumb teachers with the smaller class sizes with the kids who are eating better so more well rested and alert and less fiddly... its just about those doing well keeping on... and everybody else was just f*ck*d over from the start, really :(
its like... how the maths people... i got tested for the foundations program and... they woudln't tell me how i did - but i think i did quite badly. and the maths lady said something about how the questions were designed to test mathematical ability and not mathematical knowledge. so, for example, there was this one with boxes and shapes in them... then numbers outside the box. and you were supposed to assign a number value to the shapes. she seemed to think that that was a test of mathematical ability and not mathematical knowledge...
i explained to her... that i assumed the idea was that each row / column would (with some function, i was going with 'plus' applied to them) produce the number outside the box. i was assuming the rule of the game was that each number was to be a positive whole number. i had the mathematical knowledge to know that 20 divided by 4 was 5 and thus four clubs in a row would mean that each club was worth 5... but i couldn't figure a consistent assignment of values for the other shapes that had ALL the rows / columns add up. because i wasn't able to work very well with those other numbers, obviously.
i explained to her... that the triangles with numbers in the 3 corners and a number in the middle... was something i'd never seen before. there were four of them in a row and so i thought there was going to be some function or pattern or progression from the number in the top corner... from left to right across the page... and the bottom left corner... and so on... but later google told me the idea was to multiply the corners and put the product in the middle. i said i didn't see that because i was still learning my times tables so that pattern didn't have visual pop-out for me. that i was looking for sequential pattern along the shapes... not pattern within them...
all this is supposed to be unalterable by teaching?
anyway... her point seemed to be that if i couldn't get most of the test right already then i couldn't do science math. i was like... so... you don't actually teach anybody anything. you just take the kids who can do it already and then give them a piece of paper at the end of the course for what they could do from the start? and she looked a bit sheepish. so... yes. i expect that that kind of is what they feel they are doing. because they don't know enough about learning to realise the value of what they do do... what they can do... what they could do... to actually teach.
i think that... to at least some of the science people... yeah. that is kind of how they feel about it.
like athletes, i suppose. they don't appreciate all the work (teachers working within the bounds of attention and retention and repetition etc) that went into those wonderful 'gifted' abilities that they believe simply to be 'natural'.
sigh.
maybe i'll have to go crawling back to psychology after all.
beyond that... things will be different because we will be in the same boat at least. i bet the reason why people say they feel overwhelmed by human bio in the second semester is because they didn't do human bio at school. so... how well do they do on first hearing? i wonder if prereading could bring up objective performance?
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1058481
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20140312/msgs/1063367.html