Re: Natural talent...Ha! How about PRACTICE.

On 06 Jun 2007, Derek <derek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
alt.guitar.beginner:

Sean wrote:

Why is it that, given an opportunity to understand something in
more depth, some folks seem to lift up their pinafores and scream
"Eek!"? The distinction between learning and acquisition is not a
....
I gave up wearing pinafores a couple of years ago and scream Ack!
more than Eek!. I also have a Master's in Ed. I remember when we
were covering all this stuff in school, like learning processes,
terms like modeling, aquisition, etc were tossed around.

Basically, there are lots of theories on this stuff, and we are
trying to give language to processes we don't completely
understand. Kinda like IQ. It is hard to test for it when we
can't seem to agree on how to define it.

Ya, my biggest beef with a large segment of today's education system
is their treatment of the kids. They use all this fancy terminology
(and some of it on the kids) and treat them like they were some kind
of test tubes that fit into well defined molds. This gets doubly
amplified in the report cards that get sent home.

If they would just work with the kids like the human beings they
are, and stop trying to apply someone else's psychological analysis
and yet another's theories on everything they "observe", they might
actually make some real progress with the kids.

Instead the kids are on the receiving end of high level educated
talk, that makes them feel stupid or inferior. Especially when they
can't measure up to someone's dictated "standard".

Work with them as if they were your son/daughter/niece/nephew, and
forget all the other double speak and then see how hard they try.

I'm not suggesting that the other stuff has no value, but I do think
too much trust is placed there, when it is anything but an exact
science.

However, when I gave those tests for years, I was measuring
something, just not sure what. Same thing when administering
instruments to measure learning ability/disability.

I do believe that you need to provide some form of measurement,
whether it be tests or exams. But OTOH, I don't think I would make
far reaching conclusions, as some do from a small number of tests.

For example, IQ tests can be indicative on the positive side, but
that doesn't mean that everyone that did avg/poorly is
unintenlligent. I expect that Einstein would have measured poorly on
the IQ test that I recall taking.

Its like Trivia Pursuit. Give me a science/ electronics/ physics/
computers/ internet category, and I could do fairly well. Give me a
literature/ movies/ current-events/ sports category and I would suck
badly at it. I know this from experience. ;-)

Snark.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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