Theory v. Practice
- Thread starter Gaze
- Start date
Two words: Teacher Training.
I can't stand how so many teacher preparation programs focus mainly on theory and forget that practice is crucial!!!
Edit: Ok so that doesn't exactly answer the question but that's the first thing that came to mind when reading "theory v. practice."
I can't stand how so many teacher preparation programs focus mainly on theory and forget that practice is crucial!!!
Edit: Ok so that doesn't exactly answer the question but that's the first thing that came to mind when reading "theory v. practice."
I was trying to think of one, but I'm just going to second this one. This is SOOOO True.
My wife went to Columbia for a teaching degree. Supposedly the 'second best" teacher's college in America. She was teaching in an inner-city classroom in Harlem, and would go to her advisor to ask for help with students. The advisor, an expert in "Urban Inner-City math education" would shrug. She had never taught in a school! She just published papers.
Or her science teaching teacher, who mostly told stories about his ex-wife for an entire semester.
They've gone so far up Theory Road, they don't even know where they are!
My wife just laughs when people interviewing her get excited about her degree. We've realized since then that a lot of state schools have better teacher's ed departments.
Millions of dollars in grants and papers... yikes.
Ugh.
So true! I was just telling my friend the other day that even if Teacher's College (Columbia University) was to offer me a full scholarship for my Master's, I wouldn't be too excited about it. When it comes to education and a lot of other areas in life, theory is not enough. You need to see it in practice and put it into practice yourself to understand it and know how to teach effectively.
First thing that came to my mind was political ideology. I used to be a libertarian socialist and I had a view of how the world "should" be. If everyone in the world was just like me, my theories would have worked just fine, but people are different, and now that I've realized that I focus a lot more on the practical and I try to keep my idealism in check. I basically dumped having any political opinion after I realized I was wrong, but thats hard to do, Aristotle said "man is a political animal" after all. But now I try to see both angles, there are benefits to both capitalism and socialism. Its like feeling vs thinking or intuition vs sensing, neither are right or wrong, just different.
blunt honesty. good in theory.. very different story in practice.
also, communism. and completely free markets.
also, communism. and completely free markets.
I'm not sure about either communism or free markets, because they haven't even been tested in practice. So it's hard to claim that they don't work as good as in theory. Nobody knows. What I know is that these definitions are certainly quite old; have been coined in very different times, and probably can't even be applied meaningfully today. So I wonder why people even use them. Nobody even knows what the said words are supposed to mean at the moment.
University faculty who get tenure for publishing and not capacity for teaching, especially in human service fields (education, etc.). Not giving university faculty any training or support in learning how to teach doesn't seem like the greatest thing in practice either.
There are helicopters that blow out the propellers before the ejection seat is launched.
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