Bloody teaching Critical Thinking
So, I did some weekly entries on the teaching course website before I went down to Wellington. Came back to find the response 'I am very worried about your commitment to this course, these entries do not meet a satisfactory standard.'
One of the entries asks for 10 Socratic Questions in one of my main subjects. Now, though I am a guy with a Major in Classical Studies, I've always hated Socrates and avoided him where I could (I'll go through it all so hardcore before I use that part of the curriculum you have no idea don't worry). So, I don't really know what it wants from these questions.
So, I thought maybe I'd missed something. But no, lots of searching revealed that in none of the study material I've been provided related to this part of the course outlines what they mean by Socratic Question.
Is it just me, or should a distance learning course tell you what it means by something when it asks you to do it? Or should I guess and waste time going back and trying again? And when told off because I didn't know what they meant, would it be possible to get more instruction than 'These must be redone?'
I mean, if I get a student to redo something, I'm going to make sure they know what wasn't right first, hopefully by prompting them to figure it out, which is much harder to do via distance.
This also goes to one of the other parts of the course that I actually did the first time round last year. About the thrid weekly task was to create an introductory course for two months of Classical Studies. I outlined the things I thought would be best to cover first and got told off for not giving a class by class outline of what aspects I would cover each day of the two months. They said that I hadn't given them even the skeleton of a Unit Plan, which is indeed what the task asked for.
None of my courses at that point had explained how they recommended putting together a Unit Plan, certainly not the only course that was asking me to actually attempt one. Why, that would be like unto madness, lunacy I say!
Eventually, near the end of the semester, the English course asked us to do one and, by that point, we were comfortable with the weighting to give parts of the curriculum and even had ideas for individual lessons and were thus able to create a fairly decent Unit Plan. Classics by this point was asking me to describe Grrek Pots, as if the teacher is going to be unable to take a second and glance into a little datasheet for an obscure number b.c.
You have no idea how close I am to giving this the heave ho, so damn annoyed...
One of the entries asks for 10 Socratic Questions in one of my main subjects. Now, though I am a guy with a Major in Classical Studies, I've always hated Socrates and avoided him where I could (I'll go through it all so hardcore before I use that part of the curriculum you have no idea don't worry). So, I don't really know what it wants from these questions.
So, I thought maybe I'd missed something. But no, lots of searching revealed that in none of the study material I've been provided related to this part of the course outlines what they mean by Socratic Question.
Is it just me, or should a distance learning course tell you what it means by something when it asks you to do it? Or should I guess and waste time going back and trying again? And when told off because I didn't know what they meant, would it be possible to get more instruction than 'These must be redone?'
I mean, if I get a student to redo something, I'm going to make sure they know what wasn't right first, hopefully by prompting them to figure it out, which is much harder to do via distance.
This also goes to one of the other parts of the course that I actually did the first time round last year. About the thrid weekly task was to create an introductory course for two months of Classical Studies. I outlined the things I thought would be best to cover first and got told off for not giving a class by class outline of what aspects I would cover each day of the two months. They said that I hadn't given them even the skeleton of a Unit Plan, which is indeed what the task asked for.
None of my courses at that point had explained how they recommended putting together a Unit Plan, certainly not the only course that was asking me to actually attempt one. Why, that would be like unto madness, lunacy I say!
Eventually, near the end of the semester, the English course asked us to do one and, by that point, we were comfortable with the weighting to give parts of the curriculum and even had ideas for individual lessons and were thus able to create a fairly decent Unit Plan. Classics by this point was asking me to describe Grrek Pots, as if the teacher is going to be unable to take a second and glance into a little datasheet for an obscure number b.c.
You have no idea how close I am to giving this the heave ho, so damn annoyed...