Teaching (3 blogmarks)

The process of learning is more essential than the insight or abstraction that we encounter on the other end.

What I term the “monad tutorial fallacy,” then, consists in failing to recognize the critical role that struggling through fundamental details plays in the building of intuition. This, I suspect, is also one of the things that separates good teachers from poor ones. If you ever find yourself frustrated and astounded that someone else does not grasp a concept as easily and intuitively as you do, even after you clearly explain your intuition to them (“look, it’s really quite simple,” you say…) then you are suffering from the monad tutorial fallacy.

This last sentence feels really important as someone who likes teaching. I’ve found myself frustrated at times trying to teach something that now feels obvious to me. Of course, I’ve had the chance to struggle through to the light bulb moment.

How can my teaching be grounded in presenting learners with an effective learning path instead of a destination?

I came across this post via Justin Jaffary’s post on Divergent Histories.

Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students.

Each student submitted a draft of writing on a common subject and when the teacher presented all the titles in aggregate, you could see a plagiaristic convergence.

I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.

Via conputer dipshit

Quoting Dan Abramov

how something was invented is entertaining but not necessarily educational. i like to teach a fictional account of inventions where the inventor is you, the reader. good inventions have infinite pathways leading to them, and some are simpler than others. a case of fiction being truer than history