Subj : Re: Teaching (was: Re: Responsiblity)
To   : JOE MACKEY
From : Kurt Weiske
Date : Thu Nov 18 2021 07:09:00

-=> JOE MACKEY wrote to GEORGE POPE <=-

 JM>    That goes for most any subject.  You have to have a love of any
 JM>    subject to be a good teacher.
 JM>    Some just read from the book.  Poor teachers.
 JM>    Others will make whatever the subject happens to be come alive.
 JM>    Good teacher.

I struggled with math all through high school and college; I ended up 
getting into computers because I flunked a math class my senior year and 
needed another class for credit. The only class taught semester by semester 
was computer problem solving, as it was called.

I went to a small private college, and had a calculus teacher who would keep 
office hours for as long as people needed him. Gave insane amounts of 
homework, and had an love of math that rubbed off. He was one of the first 
people to practically apply computers and technology; we could use step 
programmable calculators for everything in the class and learned how to 
automate everything. His vision was that in the future, computers would do 
all of the graphing and "heavy lifting" and we'd be freed to do the thinking 
and creating. He was right.

We had a month-long semester between fall and spring semesters. You could 
take one course 5 days a week, 4 hours a day and get full credit for it. 
Some people got creative, like a french class in Paris. He took a handful of 
kids on his sailboat out of the San Francisco bay and sailed for a couple of 
weeks using sextants and HP calculators to navigate.

My statistics teacher the following year read the book verbatim in a droll 
monotone, stopping only to draw sloppy diagrams on the chalkboard.


.... Find a safe part and use it as an anchor
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