Marion Brady: When Face-to-Face Learning Is Impossible
Marion Brady is a veteran educator who has been trying to reform the school curriculum for many years. He persists.
He writes:
When face-to-face schooling isn’t possible
There’s no getting around it. Firsthand experience is the best teacher. If what’s attempting to be taught is worth knowing, it’s going to be complicated. And if it’s complicated, firsthand experience isn’t just the best teacher, it’s the only teacher.
That’s the main reason most adults remember so little of what they were once “taught.” Information delivered by teacher talk, textbooks and computer screens is dumped on kids’ mental “front porch”—short-term memory—but gets no farther. To be useful, information has to be interesting enough to be picked up, taken inside, and a place in memory found for it that allows logic to access it weeks, months, or years later.
That rarely happens. Most classrooms are purpose-built for delivering information, making it hard to create CONTINUE READING: Marion Brady: When Face-to-Face Learning Is Impossible | Diane Ravitch's blog