Hugh Robjohns wrote:desmond wrote:It's the old give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish, thing...
Some people just want that fish, now, and being hungry later is a problem for future them... (hopefully someone else will give them another fish) :headbang:
How true -- and this actually lies at the heart of why I left the BBC in the last century.
We used to teach new recruits 'to fish' -- as in we taught them how stuff worked and why it worked the way it did, and thus, how to use it effectively and efficiently. And by extension, that enabled people to figure out, connect and use unfamiliar equipment and develop new operational techniques to meet unique program demands. That all took time, of course, and initial training was typically 10-13 weeks long.
When I left in 1997, the bean counters had forced that initial training down to just 3 weeks! In that time we could just about teach people where the fish was -- as in which button to press when someone said go! But gawd help them if the button was somewhere different on a new device...
And, inevitably, what 'the suits' discovered a few years later was that the department managers really struggled to find people with sufficient skills and knowledge to be worthy of promotion.
Sorry .. it still irks me... :madas:
You are spot on there, back of the net. For all my sins I ended up working as a part time uni lecturer (a not a bad gig that was) but over the years the teaching was basically downgraded to mimmickery as opposed to thoughtery eg they were taught....
1 + 1 = 2
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = 6
So I tried to get across the concept of x + y = z and the students looked at me like I'd just landed from the Planet Zog. I was told leave the x + y = z stuff out of things, of course the reason being getting higher pass rates so the uni could advertise 95% pass rate and the chancellor could get an MBE for outstanding contribution to higher education and of course 'nice bunce + lush expenses = luverly jubbly, cushty'
The university then fell in love with apprenticeships, the government throwing money at them saying 'vocational courses' were the new black, and 'more appropriate for the less academic' great I thought, till I saw the curriculum. There is this misconception that a vocational subject needs less cerebral effort - how wrong is that? Back in the day when I was an apprentice you were not only taught what tool to use but why it is used.
I don't know about nowadays but back in the day something like the maths for HNC Electronics tied you knots, certainly needed a much slicker intellect than if you were doing a BA in Finger Painting. In the end I just gave up trying to instil real problem solving skills instead of just making a flower pot out of lego and some sticky-backed tape and just took the money, any fool can work out if you're doing part time work for full time money it's better than a kick up the ass (to the nth degree) and it bought me a lot of kit
