Bill Oliver's essay on "just follow instructions".

[Tim]

On Sat, 2013-10-12 at 09:40 -0500, Steven Stern wrote:
> As a graduate student, I was required to teach.  It took a number of
> years to figure it out, but I did figure out why I was a lousy
> teacher. Everything I did in class reflected the attitude "It's
> perfectly clear to me; what the f***'s wrong with you?"

We had a teacher like that when I was college, and after a long time we
(the class) ended up having an argument with him trying to understand
something that he just wasn't teaching.  His response was almost what
you just said.  And, he finally explained it, as well.

We had a mixture of teachers at college:  There were those that had come
from university and into teaching, many of whom were hopeless at
teaching.  They may have known their stuff, and some really did, but
were terrible at imparting their knowledge.  A few that obviously did
not know much about what they were teaching, and couldn't even answer
anything you queried them about.  And there were those that had come
from industry, and were teaching us how to do what they used to do, and
what we were going to do.  They were the best teachers.

I despise this move away from apprenticeships, where you're trained to
do the job that you are actually going to do; to school based training
for a job that you hope you might get, against hundreds or thousands of
other applicants, and where the teaching is way too theoretical, and
often impractical.  And I consider it to be cruel to put a hundred
students through three, or more, years of schooling where there was only
ever going to employment for a mere handful of them across the state.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.