On 16/02/2010 23:06, François Chaplais wrote:
I have attended a few "académies" in my twenties. These where places where, for
a small price, you could make more or less elaborate drawings of a live (and naked, and,
mostly, female) model. There was a small heating engine close to the model to help her
staying still long enough for the public to do the drawing.
Unfortunately, the course of my studies (not to mention marriage) took me away
from these artistic activities.
While the word 'academy' may sound very posh (it, after all, is of
Greek origin), in Scotland it
has been used both for Elementary schools:
http://www.ancestralorkney.com/famousadventurer.html
and High Schools:
http://www.harris-academy.com/
although I have, sadly, missed out on academies filled with pulchritudinous
ladies desporting themselves in their birthday suits.
What interests me, François, is what you mean by "mostly, female" - I
suppose the
semantics are all dependent on how one sees the comma . . . :)
Presumably, the mooted 'revAcademy' should be seen as having a Grave
accent on the E
rather than ' a cute' accent as per naked young ladies.
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The problem, and it is a serious problem, is that most computer manuals
and online
teaching resources are no compensation for the presence of a real, live
teacher
present with you.
Another problem has to do with perceptions of what will be conceptually
difficult
for students, as different sorts of people at different stages in their
lives with different
educational backgrounds will find different hurdles to overcome when
they first
approach RunRev. It is impossible that any sort of 'academy' can be
everything for
all men (read 'men' as 'humankind'); so, of necessity, it will have to
go for a
"one size fits all" approach which may, ultimately, fit no one at all.
For the sake of argument:
At New Year, my father wanted to make a Venn diagram with
semi-transparent overlapping
circles for part of his degree he is doing. I introduced him to
Microsoft Expression 3 - thinking
that he would "be up and running" in a matter of 10-15 minutes. What I
had forgotten was that
my father, while being an extremely competent Chemistry teacher and
violin and viola player,
had almost no knowledge of what we might like to term "the common
interface elements" of
a graphics program. As a result I had to completely re-examine my
presuppositions about what
one has to put into a set of lesson plans for teaching any sort of
computer program that has a
GUI. While the whole process may have been extremely educational for me,
I think that my
father may have revised his opinion of my teaching abilities - downwards!!!
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