[atoav]

Yes, but as an university level educator I have to stress that the vast majority of students suck at understanding what they will need to know to be good at the juicy bits that interested them in the first place. Our task isn't just to teach them what they are interested in. Our task (among others) is to prepare them for a life after university in their profession(s) while giving them the practical skill of learning new subjects themselves. For example: Nearly nobody wants to do the math stuff, but nearly everybody will profit from knowing it after the fact (at least in the field I am in). Education is more than knowledge, but if we talk about knowledge it is the systematic accumulation of interlinked ideas and concepts that after a few years turn someone who had no idea into someone who can excell in their field. Nobody who likes to work on cars likes doing taxes, but nearly everybody who lives off working on cars will need to know how to do them. So the question will be, can a society afford to teach people only the fun bits?

I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.

But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.

[win311fwg]

> I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside.

While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?

[beej71]

> something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world

I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.

[atoav]

Yes, this is what I meant University is both academic in the sense that it is about research for the respective field(s), but it is also in a very real sense the last educational institution for many students who end up outside of academia. I am not saying that academic rigor needs to be replaced with a self-help group, what I say is that we can look for win-win-situations that help both in an academic sense and are practical outside of academia.

Of course I can't catch all of my students deficiencies (alone for the reason that I can't discover all), but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal. As a software developer I have met people who worked a decade in the field, did good work and they haven't heard of a fundamental concept in networking before. Everybody has their gaps, even people I worked with who are the most knowledgeable people I have ever worked with sometimes have gaps in basic stuff. Maybe your former teachers neglected them, you never really had to apply it, or whatever. Normal.

Good teaching means you quickly recap the required knowledge before you apply it. I can't recap simple arithmetics, but if we need integration or trigonometry I will recap in a beginner course.

An important aspect of University is that it is more free than school education. That means it teaches people to organize their own learning to a much higher degree (which you also may need after you graduate or drop out). If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.

[win311fwg]

> but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal.

Absolutely. Which is why we've built a society where helping others close those gaps is natural and considered to be part of a life-long process. Again, it is great that you are playing your part, but you'd be doing the same if you were standing beside someone on an assembly line. It is not clear what the significance of university is, unless you are simply biased by it being central to much of your experience?

> it is more free than school education. [...] If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.

Which is why youth life doesn't end at school. In fact, school is supposed to be just a small part of that existence. We encourage them to do things like babysit young children, get jobs, etc. where hitting a wall and shattering is plain unacceptable and even catastrophic. This forces them to quickly get up to speed on how to learn and feeling like they can learn when things get real.

It is inevitable that someone will end up living a completely sheltered life and miss out on those fundamentals, but compelling them to first un-shelter themselves is what university entrance requirements are for. If you are regularly seeing students both sheltered and accepted into university, our fundamental assumptions about university have broken down and we need to step back. You working hard to offer a bandaid is noble, but not a good solution.

[atoav]

I guess in my case it has to do with the aspect that I am teaching Media Technology and Electronics in an Art university. The students studying here are the 5% that made it through the selection process, but math and physics aren't typically a big part of that.

Meaning it is kind of like teaching a language in a engineering school: sure it is needed, but you can't just go all hardline on your requirements if you teach that class, otherwise you're going to lose everybody, because someone who studied engineering may have done so precisely with the background that they were bad with languages during school.

Same here. Art students are generally not the abstract maths type (although there are exceptions). My goal is to teach them at least that maths can be a very good tool in their belt if they want to know how things will work out before put into reality.

I still try to demand a lot of the students and they will certainly leave better educated than they entered. I just have to do it more in a boil-the-frog-way, presenting math as a way that allows us to avoid having to do unnecessary work or spend unnecessary money. This works pretty well.

I could of course also do it like my predecessor and just do a lecture on the physics of light, writing down equations nobody will understand and then have 90% fail and curse at my existence. But I don't really see the point of why I would want to do that in terms of the outcome.

[win311fwg]

That is what I am getting at: Your circumstantial situation of working in a university is not the driver of your actions. If you were working on the assembly line at a factory and noticed those standing beside you lacked some kind of knowledge, you would equally work with them to fill in their gaps. That is the person who you are. The reality is that education happens everywhere, all the time.

Perhaps what you are trying to get at is that those who identify as students in a university are generally already open to learning? It is unlikely they would be there otherwise. Whereas of the people on the assembly line, only some will accept you trying to teach them something. Fair to say that the reality is also that not everyone wants to learn.