On Fri, 29 Sep 1995 kent_myers@smtplink.sra.com wrote:
> Replying to LO2907 --
> I've observed that, in school settings at least, there is an obvious split
> between the open and closed presentation. There is also a split between
> students who prefer one or the other. I despised closed presentations. I
> remember one professor who lectured from detailed notes that he refined
> over 8 years of repetition. Other students thought it was great. I
> learned the most from a loosey-goosey professor who challenged us to
> formulate questions, expose ourselves, and find things out. I can't
> remember a word from either, but only one had a lasting effect.
Click! Your story, and the expressions "open" and "closed" presentation,
turned on the lights in some rooms I hadn't visited in years.
Open/closed is one of the fundamental polarities: like yin/yang. Suppose
that dialog and inquiry was a way of life for the students outside the
classroom; it would be entirely appropriate to make the classroom
presentation "closed": carefully and rigorously organized, comprehensive.
(I'm reminded of Aristotle; most of his extant material is of that sort,
and if you read it expecting dialectic and drama like Plato, it's a big
yawn -- but Aristotle _did_ write dialogs, encouraged every kind of
inquiry, and I suspect that in that atmosphere his carefully organized
lectures might have seemed like islands of calm structure and certainty in
the midst of chaos.)
But, as we all know only too well, if the students' activity outside the
classroom is devoted entirely to processing their reading material into
sentence outlines -- then the classroom presentations have to be "open".
Teachers have to be examples, right? Yes, emphatically.
But they also have to be counterexamples.
How could anyone play both roles simultaneously?
--
Regards
Jim Michmerhuizen jamzen@world.std.com
web residence at http://world.std.com/~jamzen/
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. . . . There are far *fewer* things in heaven and earth, Horatio, . . . .
. . . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy... . . | _ .