Wednesday 24 October 2012

Perchance to dream

There is an epidemic of simplifying and making things easier for students under the excuse of tailoring courses to their needs. It was very difficult for me to accept it at first and in so many ways it still is. I'm not saying some adaptation of material shouldn't happen. I even maintain that in some cases this adaptation should be immense, because the needs of the students are such that the material needs to be immensely adapted to them. But students should not have everything laid out and made ready for learning by heart - there should be a challenge and with it a chance to grow.

And every day is going to surprise you. Learning prepares you to cope with surprises, education prepares you to cope with certainty. There is no certainty. 

Says one of the speakers in Ericssons latest video on the future of education. I've found it here, at the Huffington Post's website accompanied by an article.



I guess this world needs a reminder: There's nothing wrong with a little failure, as long as you learn from it.
Shine everyone!
Do

2 comments:

  1. You know my point of view - it is similar to yours. Spoon-feeding our students is a terrible mistake, and shouldn't be confused with adapting available material. The latter is not only desirable but necessary. I think that students need to be challenged, and that doesn't mean challenging elementary level students with upper-intermediate tasks, but giving them a chance to use their brains and the unconscious knowledge of language in tasks which are sligthly above their level (or at their very level) but are not the type of tasks they are used to. Can you believe that there are teachers who give their students ready-made questions for tests??:) Where is the challenge in that? And where is learning in that?
    Have a nice weekend and thank your for yet another interesting post.;)

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  2. “That's what life is about: about daring greatly, about being in the arena.” — Brené Brown ;)

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