As I near the completion of my graduate course requirements and consider the academic route, I am attempting to critique my teachers to understand what and how I would improve the teaching of engineering courses. I often wonder if some of my teachers have ever asked the simple question of how a human being actually learns. I went ahead and Googled it, of course, and found a few interesting items.
The following quotes come from this forum:
http://www.thinqon.com/topic/why_do_people_like_to_3And the general question posed was: Why Do People Like To Learn and How Do They Learn Best?
Below is a nice quote by a user called Francis Engel:
"The thing that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been learning how to observe. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience it first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view. After that experience, I'll understand what the solutions have answered; but sometimes it will allow me to innovate learning faster than the classic means."
And also by Aggie:
"Perhaps I take an overly simplistic view on your question but in my personal experience, learning is the often frustrating process we go through to arrive at understanding, which to me is about the best endorphin high there is...the connections connect, the light goes on and suddenly it is the amazing power to comprehend and control the cause and effect of what is happening in the world we live in. It seems humanity needs control, or all is chaos and we're helpless, so we seek power and control over whatever our focus is, whether it is ourselves, our finances, the human spirit, other people. You name it, it comes down to having the power to control our circumstances to gain shelter, food and comfort initially, and then beyond. I think we are hard wired for it. Wisdom, I think, is what we hopefully gain from an understanding of the consequences of our use of our power to control. In other words, if understanding is the endorphin rush that pushes us to test the limits of our power, wisdom is the brake that keeps us from rushing over the cliff."
I appreciate in the first quote the idea of needing a practical understanding of the situation prior to fully utilizing the value of theories. The second is just an interesting idea that I have thought about, but never tried to put words to.
Below is a nice quote by a user called Francis Engel:
"The thing that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been learning how to observe. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience it first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view. After that experience, I'll understand what the solutions have answered; but sometimes it will allow me to innovate learning faster than the classic means."
And also by Aggie:
"Perhaps I take an overly simplistic view on your question but in my personal experience, learning is the often frustrating process we go through to arrive at understanding, which to me is about the best endorphin high there is...the connections connect, the light goes on and suddenly it is the amazing power to comprehend and control the cause and effect of what is happening in the world we live in. It seems humanity needs control, or all is chaos and we're helpless, so we seek power and control over whatever our focus is, whether it is ourselves, our finances, the human spirit, other people. You name it, it comes down to having the power to control our circumstances to gain shelter, food and comfort initially, and then beyond. I think we are hard wired for it. Wisdom, I think, is what we hopefully gain from an understanding of the consequences of our use of our power to control. In other words, if understanding is the endorphin rush that pushes us to test the limits of our power, wisdom is the brake that keeps us from rushing over the cliff."
I appreciate in the first quote the idea of needing a practical understanding of the situation prior to fully utilizing the value of theories. The second is just an interesting idea that I have thought about, but never tried to put words to.
It seems that, in a rush to meet the accreditation criteria, teachers focus upon merely getting through a list of concepts, rather than focusing on ensuring a clear understanding in any particular area. I can see where one might think that exposure to many ideas has value, yet I question whether making that the only metric is for good the students. Particularly for engineering, how does showing people a laundry list of "things some engineers do" ensure that they will be good engineers? You really only learn how to be an engineer by actually engineering things. Period. Sadly, I have met undergraduate students that actually think they are good at engineering after completing their upper division courses. That actually scares me, as they are likely the most clueless. Can you imagine driving a car designed by someone like that? Truly frightening.
Then if school is not the place for training, is it fair to place that expectation on industry? And does industry know that that expectation has been placed upon them? If not it would be a great source of frustration and I think it is for many corporations. I know firsthand that they place interest in recruiting students that have large amounts of internship and project experience. Somehow though there is value placed in having a degree, so they haven't totally lost hope in the value of education I guess.