Hello Dr. Nelson,
Thank you for your comment.

I am still ruminating about what Sara said, but I am inclining towards agreeing with her (to some extent).

My responses, to the various facets of your comment, are as follows:

1. I don’t see education and job training as synonyms either. For me, education is the process of gaining “minimum” skill sets required to be qualified for “any” job in the industry. Job training is acquiring skill sets geared towards the specific job that an employee is either currently in or is going to start shortly.

2. All jobs have been invented and a colossal amount of these jobs are going unfilled (https://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-go-unfilled-as-the-economy-expands-1533677955). The big reason they are unfilled is because there aren’t sufficient number of qualified workers. I am not cognizant of a job, students might be currently studying for, that hasn’t been invented yet. (There might be some, I am saying I don’t know any)

3. I am not certain I construe the last part of your comment — I will discuss more about it with you after/before class.

Additionally, the meaning, of “learning”, “teaching”, and “education”, depends on individual field of study — an aspect that hasn’t been given much prominence in all of the discussions.

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Thank you for your comment, Minh!

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Thank you for sharing your great thoughts on this topic. I agree with your point about different perspectives of students and teachers to tasks and that would be the reason that students tend to multitask or mindlessly finish their assignment or study. About the basics of each discipline; however, I think mindful learning is comprehending the reason behind rules and basics. Also, I believe even the basics of each major can be questions if you first learn them profoundly and then look at them from a different point of view. In sports, it may cause to establish a new subcategory in that sport or even create a new sport with innovated rules! That is what happened in quantum physics and classical physics.

Great post! I really like that you point out how the ‘just google it’ culture is interacting with the fundamental understanding of education and how we teach. For me, I think if you define understanding and knowledge by the ability to memorize then the ‘google it culture’ must not sit very well with you. I imagine we have all had that class or teacher – no equation sheets, no fundamental constants, no anything – where your entire assessment was your ability to memorize xyz. I think there are some benefits of making students memorize things, for example it forces them to maybe think deeper about why an equation is what it is, but personally I do not prescribe to the idea that this is how knowledge should manifest itself. Memorization doesn’t always equate to understanding, and in my opinion being able to ‘google it’ removes a lot of the superfluous need to download facts, constants, equations, etc. into our minds and opens up the ability to focus more on critical thinking. As you also pointed out, it significantly speeds up the process of accessing new information and fact checking.

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Oh, I agree. Even though I’ve read it so many times, the trickster Odysseus is one of my favorites. I just didn’t want to read it again for the fourth time in such short order (high-school-plus thinking). And this is along what what Ray & I were bouncing around: how can we make it more engaging so people will see the value? I didn’t want to read The Hobbit as a middle-schooler – I thought it was stupid. But somewhere in my late 20’s, I began reading it once a year. I even read it out loud to my wife, because she had never desired to read it. She fell in love. It took a while, but we finally found value. Can we do that with our ‘basics’ and show our students how valuable these life-enriching moments are? Because seriously, if I can have a convo with my doc about how to fire-harden a spear so you can take the eye of the cyclops, while staring at her abstract painting of Bilbo Baggins during my physical, I’m going to be in heaven!! Thanks for the comments and the gentle directional nudges. I’m enjoying the exploration of these ideas!

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These are two good points — it would be great to discuss how we could (A) let students get a glimpse of the benefits before they decide to jump ship and (B) communicate how empowering taking responsibility for your own learning is in a way that students will take seriously. Sometimes it feels like there’s got to be a middle ground between idealist and realist.

Additionally, do we have to accept that some students would rather be spoon fed instead of actually learning? How do we respond to those students?

I feel like the scary thing about implementing this (and one of the reasons some professors try and then go back to their old ways) is the student response. It’s easy to take it personally when students opt out. Sometimes, students are opting out for valid reasons (schedule conflict, advisor wants them to take another course, etc.) but we don’t necessarily see that on our end. I feel like my first assumption would be “I’m doing a bad job”.

That is also not plausible since each state is affected by the federal system. Additionally, any state, with similar population homogeneity as Finland, wouldn’t have nearly as much resources as Finland does.

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Thanks for reading the post, Sara. It is fascinating to see that this is being practised in your field.

Thank you for your great comment. That’s true that not being able to focus on one subject can make a master of none.

Thank you Rathsara. I hope teachers could change their attitude toward students by not expecting the same result from all and considering their potentials; as the very first step in the improvement of the education system.