Thursday, February 12, 2009

teaching and typos

Max Marmer » Blog Archive » Changing Education: M.I.T. Takes Big Step in Right Direction: "Effective teaching needs be consistent with how the brain actually learns. Absorbing the breadth of information that needs to be covered actually would be quite easy if the key concepts are communicated effectively first.

The way to understand a vast set of information is not to go through its entirety once and hope to miraculously the unconscious synthesizes a pattern.
A much better method would be to first commit to learning the underlying pattern. Most of the information should now snap into place as most of the other ideas are just variations of the same pattern or require only one additional step. But this is a major departure from in my experience how most teachers teach. There’s almost no flexibility in class because teachers have a fixed amount of curriculum they after to cover."

from my email:-

Hey Hugh,

Thanks for linking to me. I realized that paragraph contained a number of errors.

Can you repaste this re-edited text:

Effective teaching needs to be consistent with how the brain actually learns. Absorbing the breadth of information that needs to be covered actually would be quite easy if the key concepts were communicated effectively first.

Don’t try to understand a vast set of information by going through it in entirety once hoping the unconscious will miraculously synthesize a pattern.
A much better method would involve learning the underlying pattern first. A lot of the information should now snap into place as most ideas in a class are just variations of the underlying pattern, and only require one additional step to achieve a deep understanding. But from my experience this is a major departure from how most teachers teach. There’s almost no flexibility in class because teachers have a fixed amount of curriculum they have to cover.

I think the typos are totally unimportant because the sense is clear in context