Michael Sokolov wrote: > > To me it doesn't matter whethor or not you have a teaching credential as > in a piece of paper, but it does matter whether or not you have the > ability to teach, which I maintain is separate from knowing the subject > matter itself. >
As a professional teacher, I completely agree! Someone told me a long time ago that the best way to learn something was to try to teach it to someone else--- and that's definitely true. BUT, the ability to teach something, anything, is as much a specialty as the subject matter you are teaching (embedded systems, in my case). And that's what the credential part that you are referring to is all about, or at least should be. While it's true that I'm a professional teacher, I'm not a credentialed one so I can only speculate as to what you actually learn when you pursue a degree in education :). I've had to learn by rote, research and experience the skills that any teacher needs to know--- on top of mastering my subject matter. That's taken me almost a decade. Things like putting together the "scope and sequence" for complicated material isn't always intuitive. Or the subtle psychology behind the learning process itself. And it's been especially difficult for me to learn to communicate as a teacher, rather than as an engineer. Somehow, I've managed to do well enough. But I've seen a lot of disasters over the years, and even participated in a few myself unfortunately. If I were to find myself an opportunity to teach full-time instead of about half-time as I do now, the first thing I would do would be to go get some training in education. Even after doing something that resembles being an educator for so long, I'm confident that I could still learn a thing or two. And I'm also certain that what I don't know about teaching is preventing me from being even more successful than I am now. Just my $0.02, but since I'm someone who has been doing embedded systems development for almost twenty years, and been teaching that subject matter for a decade, I couldn't resist the urge to chime in... b.g. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
