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by Hoff
5684 days ago
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Thinking like the instructor/presenter/seller quite clearly, though also remember to think like the student/purchaser, too. You're clearly familiar with running the process line and incremental improvements for yourself and optimizing your work, but are you equally comfortable being the widget that's being processed within the assembly line, and whether the widget is getting the best value? My trip down that educational assembly line was seriously and mind-numbingly unpleasant, and I can only imagine what it's like with all of the current standardized-tests model. Looking back, what we were taught and what we learned for those tests was sufficiently ridiculous and, well, wasteful. We didn't learn that most of what we learned would be outmoded, that the tools we were taught would be gone, and that memorization was far less practical than learning how to research. As a presenter, I don't want to repeat that for the folks I am teaching. Though thankfully, I don't have to teach to standardized tests. As an instructor, you're selling a service. Are your students buying? |
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A valid point. There are many ways of learning though, and if you want instruction and materials personalized to you, those are available -- albeit at a much higher cost. And there are other, self-directed methods of learning that are a much lower cost than either method (e.g., going to a library, doing research online, etc.). [Aside: who pays the cost is a separate issue, but someone must pay it.]
Given that society is constrained by scarce resources, I think that re-using tests is a perfectly reasonable allocation of resources for many teaching situations. Other materials are re-used regularly, such as textbooks, and there's nothing personal about that. Would you say that using the same textbook as someone else turns you into a "widget"?
It's unfortunate that your educational experience was so unpleasant. My K-12 experience seemed quite wasteful as well. But I think that has more to do with incompetence and laziness. Doing more personalized teaching requires more teachers, which means they will have an even harder time attracting enough quality talent, and an even harder time firing bad teachers. That doesn't sound like a net win on quality to me, even if it is more personalized.