Teaching With Purpose and Judgment

Writing on teaching methods that challenge educational absurdities.

Classroom learning with teacher and students

A Vastly Resourceful Tutor as the Better Alternative

Much of what ails education may someday be circumvented by means of a new generation of cheap yet powerful computers, lightning-fast in computer speed yet not impatient with human speed, free of clueless plans for people, free of debilitating socio-political obligations, rich in thoughtfully designed instructional software engaging enough to eclipse the common distractions, vast with sensibly challenging options to meet individual needs and abilities (a solution far less troubling than are those involving tracking, labeling, skipping of grades or failing of grades)—a separate computer effectively made one’s own for each and every student in school (while not losing sight of the need for thoughtful adult supervision).

The Case for Personalized Aptitude

Please allow me to elaborate:

It is inhumane to burden students with subjects for which they have no aptitude. I had a grandmother who told me once that she had wished that she could die in her sleep when she was a schoolchild because she couldn’t understand her math assignments.
It is also unfair to burden teachers with classes over-enrolled with students unable to handle the subjects being taught. It is counterproductive to serious teaching and learning because it generates enormous pressure to purge the subjects of their contents. Teachers who possess good heads on their shoulders have better things to do with their lives than to have to put up with such transparently phony agendas.

Businesswoman presenting in modern office

The Reality of Intellectual Interest

Teachers are often demoralized by students who are bored with the subjects being taught. It’s naive to assume that you can interest just anybody with any subject whatsoever. On the one hand, for example, there was a classics professor, Paul Mackendrick, who was so fascinated by the ruins of ancient Greece that he wrote a book titled The Greek Stones Speak. On the other hand, I’ve been told of a lady who disparaged Athens Greece by saying that it was simply a collection of old rocks and rubble.