Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Before I continue with my regularly scheduled description of my ongoing classes, I would like to get off my chest some of the conclusions that were arrived at during the recent learner-focused
Seminar, especially since it contains some ideas that may be a bit dangerous for the students to get hold of, so I can’t put them in the learner-focused version of this journal.

One of the intentions of the seminar was that in the interest of having their conclusions challenged and revised when doing analytical work, there was a suggestion that the teachers should not just require, receive and rate experimental reports from the student in a one-way procedure.

Instead, just like in some English or Communication classes, the submission should be returned to the student with the teacher’s comments, and a revision expected from the student.

This would go on for a period of weeks, maybe indefinitely, until the student’s work is satisfactory (to whom? The teacher or the student?).

So instead of having quantity of work, there is just one requirement that is edited and edited until some level of “perfection”. But that shouldn’t take the whole term, because it is also expected that the student should be able to repeat the feat with more or less the same level of success when a similar task is given.

In the same way that our facilitator (he refused to be called a speaker) dragged out our first few sessions alternating between activities and answering his questions about the activities (“what exactly did I do with your observations?”), we are supposed to sacrifice a broad scope of topics tackled for being able to give the students a firm background in critical thinking.

In other words, it’s not just teaching the students how to fish, but in giving the students the right tools and methods they can use to be able to learn for themselves how to fish.

Another possible change in the curriculum is adding a open debate among the students to science and other technical subjects, again focusing on their reasoning used to be able to arrive at their conclusions. Why was interpretative dance rejected?

Session 1065’s report got accepted with no revisions. Class dismissed.