Letter to us students

Some rules to make your learning a pleasure, adventure and efficient.

1) Beware the classroom, you prefer the seminar.
2) If your teacher has important information, he can share it on your private student blog.
3) CutnPaste is standard procedure.
4) Show your links! This is important in communicating among students and teachers.
5) Pencil and paper still work

These simple rules and a bunch of professors somewhere nearby, then you can do as well as any other academic form. If you can't get to labs, then get internship credits.

Better teachers, smaller classrooms make a difference

Reports Eric, with a difficult last name, at Economics of Information.  OK, that is a start.  Then there may be a solution in which fewer days in smaller classrooms with better teachers performs better than five days in crowded classrooms with mediocre teachers.

In other words, get the kids out of the class room more often,  replace the classroom with a seminar that meets less often and fill the difference with information technology.

Three days a week is sufficient

Mish talking about the four day school week in Illinois:

Not one person mentioned the real [budget] problem: bloated administration costs, union salaries and union benefits for teachers, bus drivers, and janitors. Instead they are looking at saving heat and electricity one day a week. Good grief.

My take:

With technology and personal study, students are better off with a three day week, on an irregular schedule to meet in a seminar for each class once a week. We have a budget problem because advancing technology has discounted the babysitting function that teachers perform.

Using trained teachers to perform babysitting for the parentless kids is a waste.

A Good Take on Education

Posted by Andrew J. Coulson. Take away:

The whole idea of imposing a single set of age-based standards on all students rests on a false premise: that children are identical widgets capable of being dragged along an instructional conveyor belt at the same pace, benefiting equally from the experience.

We can take the better approach of individual study today because we are aided by information technology.