patience.

i believe that one of the main qualities a teacher must have is patience.

and an ability to answer the same question over and over again while talking to an adult (the student) who is not willing to even try and understand the answer to the question that has been posed.

patience. and an ability to deal with repetition. and the desire to help a student learn through his or her inability (or lack of care) to understand the material.

sometimes these are difficult qualities to possess one-hundred percent of the time.

but we keep marching on. (and answering the same question each time it is asked).

'lecturers posting notes online "harming" bookshops.' (really)?

i teach college. i post notes online. and although i would love to drop the requirement for my students to buy standard textbooks… the administration will not allow such a move on my part.

but what this all really gets at is that each teacher has their own spin on a subject. their own way of getting across certain material. and there is no one textbook that will get it right.

i agree in saying that college students should be able to navigate the waters of research. find out more information about a given subject. but the reality is… they are (at some point) also asking for a teacher’s help in this voyage.

and notes have the ability to act as this aid. (especially in a community college setting).

infoneer-pulse:

University lecturers posting course notes online are “harming” academic booksellers, and the posts can also deter students from reading around the subject, the chairman of the Booksellers Association’s Academic, Professional & Specialist Bookselling Group (APSBG) group has said.

Iain Finlayson’s remarks were made after it was revealed that The Bookshop at Queen’s, which serves students at the Queen’s University Belfast, will close after 53 years of trading, citing online sharing of notes as one of the reasons for its financial demise.

Tim Smyth, manager of the Queen’s bookshop, said the bookseller wanted to close before it “fell below the line”. He also blamed internet competition and free sites such as Google Scholar and Wikipedia for a decline in custom. He said: “I don’t know how [independent booksellers] can do it anymore. Certainly the academic model has reached a tipping point now: it is unsustainable.”

» via TheBookSeller.com

a novel idea. (and yet not new at all).

how did you learn? how did you grasp the concepts that your students struggle to understand and retain today?

my guess. through play. through actually exploring your world. through seeing how materials worked together to create something new.

and yet in the classroom of today we have essentially taken this aspect of learning away from our students. we have told them they must ‘learn’ through reading (but not truly seeing).

we wonder why our students are failing… but maybe we should wonder why we have abandoned a practice that was working.

personally. i believe that my students (at a technical college) need this type of learning. they are caught in an endless cycle of developmental education where they (try to) scrape through in order to finish their programs. they need something different. something that will work. something other than a lecture about how 2+2=4. they need to see this. to understand that they use inequalities everyday (or at least every time they pay for something).

we need to be active. they need to be active. to see the reality of how math is occurring in every facet of their lives. it is time for change.