Times Table

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As an instructor, a very long time ago, another instructor and I were teaching a one week course. At the end of the course, it came to be the vast majority of the class had a failing average. One test was worth 50 percent of the grade and it encompassed all they were "taught". We basically talked about everything done during that week to troubleshoot why the performance wasn't as we expected. We placed the blame squarely on our shoulders and it was up to us to rectify the situation. The content was reviewed and deemed proper, the tests reflected the content, so we discussed our observations of the students during the lectures.

What we found was the students had their heads down, trying to write everything we talked about, vice participating using other senses.

This lead to these two improvements.

- We gave them a written list of lesson objectives

- We kept their focus on the presentation by essentially giving them all the diagrams and salient points in their handouts. They still took notes but only what they needed to solidify their understanding.

My wife used a similar technique by recording all the lectures to cassette and I would transfer them to digital for her. That way she could fill in her notes by listening to portions of the lecture a second time. Now with digital recorders, you eliminate that step, although some post lecture processing would include eliminating environmental background noises.

My wife mentioned that story to a professor when he asked why she was taping the lectures. It was so she could pay attention and only jot down the main notes and participate in the class more. He understood what she meant immediately and started handing out the slides, so the students could focus more on the presentations and participate more vice having their head hung low while attempting to write notes. After all when using power point presentations, creating the handout of slides was a mouse click away.

Not everyone learns in the same manner. The empirical data is readily observed in the homework section of this forum and others that have a homework help or similarly named section.
 
JoeJester said:
Not everyone learns in the same manner. The empirical data is readily observed in the homework section of this forum and others that have a homework help or similarly named section.
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Very true. You have visual, verbal and kinesthetic or a combination.

Your right, the student is spending all the time writing, possibly with poor handwriting trying to catch up.

This is why when I read the class book, I would spend my time wring on a "flash card" what I thought might be a good question. Then every waking hour that I could, I would go over the flash cards. 4.0 GPA in another college after a nearly total failure in another.

I spent my time "guessing" the important questions. My memory is mostly kinesthetic.
 

Hi Joe,

Yes Pareto's principle, that is the one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I came by the 20/80 figure by observation in our company before I found out there was a well known principle.

The way it worked was that there was 20% of the design engineers who could design, the other 80% were either involved in some peripheral activity, like safety, reliability, through life costs (TLC) and so on. They were the useful part of the 80% though. The part that caused havoc were the designers in a design function who didn't have a clue and were not prepared to learn.

The way that a project would go would be that the non-designers staffed a new project. They specified the system diagrams, ordered the parts, wrote the design specifications and so on- everything going swimmingly. But the chickens came home to roost with the first designs. They did not perform. At first it was stated that the task was very difficult and there would be endless meetings about progress etc. Finally the situation got so bad that 1 of the 20% were called in to review the situation. We relied heavily on sub contract staff, especially for software, and very often the reviewers would be from a trusted sub contractors. Ouite soon, they produced a report which essentially said, start again. A team would move in and the original person would become some sort of technical manager with no real function except attending meetings and talking a lot. Within 6 months say, the design had been built and proven and the design team would move on. The original person was now in a wonderful position; he was now responsible for a successful design- he would probably get a pay rise so he could buy another suite.
 

We had a comprehensive training operation, typically giving month courses to military users for the new equipment we had delivered. There was all sorts of managers and procedures involved and some wonderful liaison meetings. But come the time for the actual course at the last moment they got into a panic and called Jimmy James in. He was an extraordinary fellow who only slept a couple of hours a night. He would scuttle around the factory collecting information and rearranging it to be clearly understandable. Each pupil would have a data pack and the course was well structured and paced.

All the other members of the training department had high grades with their own offices. Not Jimmy; he had a desk in the lab. I used to keep on at him to get promotion and better pay, but he was too nice a person for that. I was on site once and the military technicians said that they used Jim's training notes for fault finding rather than the official documents.
 
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I'l bet he still has his job and is still dishing out rubbish to the students. The problem is that there is no corrective feedback.

I was investigating a house for purchase two years ago. It was by a rhyne is an area known for flooding, so I hired a specialist surveyor to establish the risk of flood. He charged me £600 UK for a beautiful report full of boiler plate and lists of societies this chap was a member of. The report said that there had been no flooding in the known history of the area. I paid the £600 and proceeded with the house purchase. One afternoon while I was looking the place over, the next door neighbor dropped by to say hello. We got chatting and it turns out that the area had frequently flooded, the last serious flood being in 1989 when the water reached halfway up the ground story. Further more, none of the houses in the area could get insurance for flooding. When I went to see the surveyor about this he was quite unrepentant and said that his maps didn't show any flooding.
 
We had a crazy old art teacher at our school- he was a good artist but a hopeless teacher and communicator. He was also very irritable. Of course, this made him fair game. One time he had made a load of ornaments to auction at the school fete. It was a big deal and the headmaster was involved. One of the chaps in our art class, Chris, was a clown par excellence. I just could not do any work when he was around for laughing so much. Chis and the art teacher just did see eye to eye and the art teacher was always picking on Chris. After one particularly bad tirade Chris had had enough so when the teacher wasn't looking he cranked the temperature of the furnace to full blast. The next morning there was mayhem because all the ornaments for the school fete has turned to dust.

Another time we were supposed to be making pots but most of us made Spitfires, cars, machine guns, motor bikes, etc. The art teacher went ballistic and ran around the class room smashing our creations with his fist. Chris then built a massive castle out of clay, complete with portcullis, castillations, and archers- it was a real work of art. When the art teacher spotted this piece of medieval architecture he went mad an ran across the art room and smashed Chris' castle with a huge blow from his fist. Boy you should have seen the mess- Chris had filled the castle with water.
 
Plato (or some Ancient Greek) is said to have lamented: "The youth of today are going to be the death of us all...".

Also something to the effect that the educational system, and I quote, "sucked".
 
cowboybob said:
Plato (or some Ancient Greek) is said to have lamented: "The youth of today are going to be the death of us all...".

Also something to the effect that the educational system, and I quote, "sucked".
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When we quote Plato or another wise person we only assume that what they meant is the same as what we think. The simple truth is that none of us is capable of comparing educational methods or systems. We can't even tell which part of our children behavior is due to education and which due to genetics.

Most people receive their education during most of their life from many sources. There are many great people in our history that didn't do well in school. Teachers like the obeying kid and hate the kid that is smarter than they are.

The main role of schools is to train kids to the rules of society, like military training. The secondary role is to keep the kids during the day while the capitalist uses the parents to make him rich.
 
cowboybob said:
Plato (or some Ancient Greek) is said to have lamented: "The youth of today are going to be the death of us all...".

Also something to the effect that the educational system, and I quote, "sucked".
Click to expand...
Nigel Goodwin said:
That have been similar sentiments found on Roman tablets found at Vindolanda up near Hadrian's wall.

https://www.vindolanda.com/
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There is nothing new under the sun really. The silly thing is that we continue to make the same mistakes over and over.

One major worry is that the great societies of the past all came to an end by taking their eye off the ball. The great Roman empire dissolved into a mire of decadence. And the Visigoths completely vanished due to infighting. General Motors went from the biggest most successful business in the world to an organization for financing the pensions of its previous workers. I see the platoons of people living of the state in one form or another, both in the US and GB as a worrying sign. I'm not only talking about the people directly on the dole, some of whom need support, but the people like my surveyor, the two careers officers previously mentioned and the 80 percenters.
 
Here is another example for Pareto principle;
80% of serious arguments in this forum are carried out by the 20% of the forum members, the British.
 
zahwi said:
Here is another example for Pareto principle;
80% of serious arguments in this forum are carried out by the 20% of the forum members, the British.
Click to expand...
And 100% of your statistics are made up.

John
 
KeepItSimpleStupid said:
Very true. You have visual, verbal and kinesthetic or a combination.
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There is an often quoted pyramid, that describes the retention of the material.



I found out recently, there is a dispute on the study mentioned above, but, from my observations, this is pretty close to reality.

I once talked to one of my charges a decade after he attended a course I designed. He attended the course a few years after the designed course. So our talked occurred about 15 years after I last taught the course. I taught about 28 class sessions after the re-right I did over the Christmas holidays. The final performance exam was to find the problems in the system (we inserted 10 problems) within an hour. We discussed the symptoms and the problems those years later. I was surprised that I remembers them after 15 years and equally surprised that he remembered them after a decade. The course was lectures, practice by doing, and immediate use within a day or two of the lecture. The course was a computer controlled receiver, with the computer being the PDP-8/e. It was a three week course that taught the Operations, Maintenance, and Corrective Maintenance of that system. I still have my course book in the garage. The course was re-written mostly because I hated hearing, and using, the phrase "it's in the software." I sat in on one course, taught two sessions, one was jamming that three week course into one week. With all the inquiries I got from the students I knew the course needed serious work, so my drafting table and typewriter was heavily used for the two weeks during Christmas and New Years, but the course was ready for the first class of the new year. A couple of classes later, there were additional improvements mostly at the recommendations of the students feedback.
 
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How interesting- if more instructors were like you it would be good
 
JoeJester said:
There is an often quoted pyramid, that describes the retention of the material.
Click to expand...

I certainly agree with the 90%, as a Martial Arts Instructor we encourage students to help teach the lower belts - this helps to foster a community spirit, but also continually refreshes techniques learnt earlier on.

Also, teaching something needs a greater understanding than just 'doing it', you have to understand why you're doing it in order to explain it, and often you'll find improvements and changes to techniques to help specific people.
 
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