Gordy...Great stuff and reminds me of my 40 years of teaching in Special Ed.....
How are YOU going to be EFFECTIVE with THAT student ?
..and yes , all the material is out there and a group should be formed to amass all this information...According to Jim sounds like some work has already begun on this... how can I help?
Peter
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[GH] Peter...
You are already helping as we proceed with our messages.
I highlighted a simply worded important statement in your entry. This gets down the specifics of the teacher, the student, and the effectiveness of performance.
Gordy
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[GH] One of the great values of a study group such as ours is that we are not locked to a single point of view. No "party lines" here.
We deal with points and counterpoints which allow the reader to make informed opinions which hopefully will work for him/her .
Michael Heritage comes forth with one such counterpoint as he cites a "real World" experience:
Oh Boy, this is my fourth attempt to reply to this thread. I suspect some of us poets are having a few problems with the idea of having to pseudo psychoanalyse our pupils.
Jim Vale has come nearest to expressing my feelings. We teach fly casting. We can make it as simple (and effective) as possible or we can make complicated enough for a physicist. Personally I have found the simple approach the most effective. I believe most of us are quite intuitive enough to alter our approach depending on circumstances.
Several times a year I am part of a team that spends a day giving 15 minute tuition to casters of varying abilities, many of you probably do the same. How do you go about deciding on an approach based on their character? You can't, you dive in and give them the best you can with the limited time available and hope you have managed to give them something useful when their time is up. How about the situation where you are giving a group lesson, do we split them into character groups before we start and then tailor a different approach to each group?
Mike
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[GH]
Mike...
You bring us down to Earth as you call attention to the differences between "Ivory Tower Pedagogics" and the "Do it this way" approach of what has been labelled, "direct teaching"
For practical reasons including time constraints and the learning differences between the students of our casting classes most of us are somewhere in between as we teach. Very different from the teaching of students in a school or university where most of the learning group is made up of students at roughly the same academic level.
We who are experienced with hosting fly casting workshops at conclaves often try to sign up a group of participants who are at pretty much the same grade by specifying levels such as "beginner", "intermediate" or "advanced" in our course descriptions. In actual practice, however, we invariably find that we end up with a widely diverse group representing various levels despite our efforts to the contrary. Many who sign up for these workshops have little or no appreciation of their own levels of expertise.
We change that when it is important to do so as we host specific workshops such as the Master Prep Workshop or even workshops for instructors.
There is also a vast difference between teaching strictly didactic subjects which involve no physical participation or accomplishment and those which do. The latter can be divided into those which involve a low level of mechanical performance as driver instruction and those which demand a high degree of physical performance such as sports including golf, skiing, and....yes... fly casting.
Some of the most effective teachers of fly casting in the World are those who use plain language, humor, and a bit of "tortured physics" as they teach. They get the job done efficiently. "The scientist learns from the poet !" That's the bottom line.
Gordy
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