Dennis Nelson (NELSOND@ny-smtp.army.mil)
Mon, 26 Jul 1999 10:01:02 -0400
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 10:01:02 -0400 From: Dennis Nelson <NELSOND@ny-smtp.army.mil> Subject: Is teaching learnable only through experience? -Reply
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Bob Leamnson wrote in part:
" I wonder then if there is *anything* that potential teachers need
instruction on. ... "design learning experiences which reflect authentic
world experiences." This sounds good, but isn't possible. No harm is
done when, for purposes of discussion and analysis, we separate
teaching from learning and consider these for what they are, separate
activities carried out by separate people.
"The suggestion that training, for any service, should concentrate
on the recipient and not the practitioner seems quite wrong to me.
Were I in a plane and had the choice of air traffic controllers--one
trained to be concerned with my health, needs, and goals in life, or
one trained to land airplanes--I know which I'd pick."
Is life really one or the other? Can we isolate things, just for
discussion?
I wish I had learned at a younger age that all events in life are part of
both a whole and an individual continuum. There isn't war and peace,
there is a line that extends from ultimate or ideal peace to ultimate or
complete war. There is no separation. There is a line from the ultimate
or ideal learner to the ultimate or ideal teacher. There is no separation.
War and peace, learning and teaching all are part of our whole world,
and each of our individual makeups. When we separate parts of the
whole or one end of a continuum from the other end, the emphasis on
the actual impact of what we're doing erodes as we focus only on the
impact in the small area on which we want to focus. If it's okay to send
our children off to war, or to other teachers, than why not just send
them off as soon as they are born? If we are supposed to keep them
with us, perhaps us is in constant contact with us and only those others
with whom we have developed what we might call close family ties. If
children first learn by working side by side with someone close and dear
and whom they trust (and can ask why thousands and thousands of
times) perhaps that is how we are supposed to learn (and teach).
The main point here is that any concept we have, we need to take it to
the minimal extreme and the maximum extreme before adopting the
concept, before someone else takes it to the extreme.
The main point for our discusssion, specifically, is that if we are born to
learn directly one-on-one from people who are to as individually as
possible nourish, protect and help us grow, perhaps that is how we are
to learn from and train others, also. If true learning and training are our
purpose, it must be so. If our purpose becomes to supply cannon fodder
or assemblyline automotons, or service industry helping hands, then
maybe some other system is correct.
Dennis R. Nelson
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