Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why should we have to defend teachers?


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Posted by RD on September 09, 2002 at 09:34:07:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why should we have to defend teachers? posted by Doug on September 08, 2002 at 00:33:52:

A point comes to me now that I'm reading while awake.

I never spent one minute trying to "extend my vocabulary." I read lots of books, and in so doing my vocabulary grew all by itself, with no special encouragement from me.

Where I agree with Ken concerning the importance of educational processes is that by understanding them, teachers have a good idea of what steps to take that will do things like build vocabulary, but without seeming to. Most successful teachers learn how to do this even if they didn't take education classes, and I suspect that most education classes don't spend as much time on learning techniques as they spend on behavioral psychology and other possibly false surrogates for common-sense teaching practices.

It goes back to the objectives. Teaching techniques, which should be the topics of education classes, are a means to an end. If that end is wrong-headed, the techniques that serve that end will solve the wrong problem. If that end is a broad education, in the sense that I have been describing (and that I believe Ken, for example, would support), then the teachers first have to know the material. If they don't know the material, any amount of training on educational processes is a waste of time, it seems to me. There must be a balance, tempered by a hierarchy of importance favoring the subject material.

R "who thinks he has finally just about wound down on this topic--the great joy of all" D


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