We are all role models whether we want to be or not. The question is if we are good role models for our students and what they take away with them. This ties into mentoring which many of the post have discussed this week.

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I believe that emotional EQ could be stated as empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Empathy is important in life, not only academia.

We are people, not thinking machines. I believe that the answer to many of your questions lie in worrying less about efficiency of knowledge passing, and more focus on the environment it is taught in and its intentions.

Does emotion mean to be uncivil?

I think that emotion is a connection or ties to a thought and by being attached to it, this thought means more to us. Being emotional in education simply means to be convicted to the ideals or ideas that you hold close. This does not mean you lose control when in discussion.

Much of architecture is a critical dialogue about the design work presented. You could imagine that students who cannot disassociate themselves from the work could be offended. To have you work judged by your peers in what is technically a public display is nerve-racking.

However it is the context they you place on the emotion that is vital. Designers are rather opinionated and convicted by nature, so being able to state a design critique in a civil manner helps others to see its merit. Just because there is no outward emotion does not mean the idea is flimsy or weak. There is often quite a bit of experience and thought that goes into it and that you believe in its merit.

Great post! I really like how you relates the Kong Fu panda and putting together what we’ve learnt in the semester. It makes a lot of sense that the secret ingredient is ourselves. We need to start from our authentic teaching self, and then explore deeper and further until we finally develop our own unique but useful teaching method. Thanks!

I think it is a little bit of both. Some of learning is memorization and retention. With the ability to access information non-critical information can be found when needed.

For design you have to have a list or group of precedent examples and ideas that ground your place in the discipline and your design work. For here the process of how you ought to design takes over. This process is what makes every design unique even though the examples might be the same.

Hey,

Take a look at this blog too by Willie: http://williefcaldwell.com/blog_gedi/confessions-of-an-over-educated-high-school-dropout/

The comments there will be helpful.

Well said.

I have a story, that while it did not take as much courage to find my own path as yours, I have left most of my education to chance.

I picked my discipline based on the flip of a coin. History or Architecture? It landed on architecture and about a decade later I am near finishing a doctorate in architecture. Near the end of my undergraduate career I flipped a coin again asking it if I should go to graduate school or not. It landed tails – graduate school here we come.

My research has simply been opportunities in things I found fun. Doors opened to these because I asked if I could, and should I. My teachers placed trust in me and allowed for the development of a personal curriculum in these graduate studies, of which many classes were actually not directly related to traditional architecture.

I do imagine what could happen if students could develop their own learning paths. I feel that this will come out of asking question to society such as how to feed a growing population, how to sustain quality of life, and where do we see our place in the world and how do I fit in it? Imagine a degree in water, in food, in whatever, derived from the questions a student has for many different disciplines. That I think is the future of our educational system.

I feel that it is less about being in touch with an artistic side, and more about being balanced in inquiry and resulting knowledge synthesis. You can drop out of school and study Zen Buddhism, but if you are not driven and inquisitive you will simply fall to the wayside.

It is the conviction to your set of ethics and ideals that define who you are as a person. Galileo’s was to them mind and its ability to observe and to stick by his knowldge of physical science. However there is a piece that is missing still: luck.

Luck is when prior preparation meets opportunity. Both of your examples prepared long and hard before becoming successful. This leaves us with cultivating the balanced approach to understanding and learning combining with the process of such inquiry.

This is a great thing to remember as you move further into a discipline as teaching is not limited to academia. When you move into the profession there will be the need to teach others a task or a new responsibility or through management be able to express the needs of a client of a process of implementation.

The last sentence caught my attention. We will always need educators. Research has shown that non face-to-face learning environments are inferior for knowldge retention and engagement. The question is how the educator will respond to a larger and better connect student populace.

I believe that the difference lies in mentorship.

We, as part of society, do not really have a commonly acceptable alternative to college. For some reason going to a trade school or a community college is somehow seen as inferior. The cost certainly is less. I think it will develop as a question of means as “college” gets to be simply too expensive for many students.

What the college experience lacks for many students is a connection between the educator and the student. This is compounded by the enormous class sizes and then the long “slog” that many of my undergraduates describe their education. But what they find a design or project that engages them it is as though you could never get them to leave.

The flicker in their eyes when a student gets a concept and sees how it applies to the profession in studio is what keeps me going. What keeps them going is when you engage them as an equal and then provide them guidance to the next idea, the next part of their longer line of inquiry into the profession.

I believe that we can teach our students to no longer need us, but rather I would say we want them to trust us and in the advice we can give. What Einstein was getting at was teaching the process of knowledge gathering, its synthesis, the development of new knowledge for the discipline, its subsequent advance, the development of “truth”, and the accumulation of wisdom from applied intelligence and knowledge. That we do this in the lens of our “truth” and ethics.

You will learn your job in the first couple of years. What keeps you from getting bored is what we are trying to teach in college.