DerProfessor

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Question: do you have ANY professional experience and/or understanding of what makes:

1. good teaching? (I'm serious about this question. Teaching is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and there's been about 2,000 years of discourse on the topic. Where does your school stand? )

2. a curriculum that is not just another trade school that will place its "graduates" as cubicle drones? I'm also serious about this question. It's the problem that plagues MIT... that student who are trained in "hands on" subjects, like programming (Course 6) or Aero/Astro Engineering (Course 16) are "trained" to be workers, rather than leaders, by the nature of the heavy demands of the subject matter. Whereas, up-the-road (i.e. Harvard) undergrads are trained in philosophy, literature, history, and many other fields that teach them to operate (and thrive) in the world of humans, and so they end up in leadership positions (compared to MIT students).

Tough questions, I know. But how does "Make School" address this issue?

What do you mean by "needed"?

I'm a history professor; in most of my classes, I assign a textbook, but often don't "test" specifically on the material in it. So do you "need" the book for the class? Slackers would say no. Hell, most students would say no. So why do I assign it?

1. Students (mostly sophomores in love and seniors who have decided to slack off) stop coming to lecture; they'd be hosed for the final exam, except they have the textbook to fall back on. They need the book.

2. As a resource: maybe I have students write on Machiavelli's "The Prince", ferinstance...but they don't know anything about the era, and are afraid of writing something wrong-headed. Bad students turn to Wikipedia. Bad idea, wikipedia has too much useless detail and not enough focused interpretation. Good students (10% of a class) will actually turn to the textbook for background material, and write much smarter essays. They get As.

3. A very few students (maybe 1%) will actually do what I ask them to do--which is, to read the textbook before they come to lecture. The information will thus be already familiar to them, and they can really focus on and pick out the really interesting stuff. They sail through the final exam.
   Most importantly, these students are making the most out their education. (They're like people who pay for a gym membership, and actually go to the gym and get buff.) These students will do very, very well in life, and at whatever career they choose to follow. These students make my day... but they're also incredibly rare. Dunno why.

Yes, I agree with you. (and what counts as "placement" can actually be pretty broad...)

Did your personal experience change your politics? (like, left to right, or right to left)… Or do you not care much about politics?

The answer, though, is simple:

free permits.

(i.e. application process, that takes names of organization leaders, etc., but otherwise doesn't cost anything but a bit of paperwork.)