What do you want from a teacher?

[pmb]

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education. I'm pretty sure that having a teacher is essential to the learning process, but the contents of a lecture/class/lab/whatever now have to be ... what? Certainly different in some way - slowly dealing out facts in dribs and drabs is old school (hah!) and boring, ignoring those facts and zooming in to discuss implications and intuition is nice, but lends itself too readily to surface-level-only understanding.

The middle path seems like a nice compromise, with facts dashed across the board quickly and then intuition discussed aloud followed by homework assignments that require a solid understanding of the facts, but my own intuition is screaming at me that I am looking at things on the wrong axis somehow. Like I have divided everything into left/right and ignored some crucial up/down aspect that will simplify the whole matter.

What's the missing axis? What do you want from a class? Facts? Intuition? A bit of both? A check mark on your transcript? Are online classes consisting of prerecorded lectures a good idea? Would you go to school via podcast? Why or why not? What would the podcast be missing that more traditional schooling provides?

Answers that include how class should change in light of emerging technologies and trends like MIT's Open Courseware initiative will be given double bonus extra credit.

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Get your letters today! Many are still unclaimed! I may forgotten to link to someone who already did it; if so, please let me know. This is taking a while, so I think I will start stealing the answers that others have already provided...

Comments

[invisibor.livejournal.com]

Note: The MIT Open Courseware Initiative is cool.
Note 2: The MIT Open Courseware Initiative has no section on Education.

I've decided that the problem with schooling is the lack of an understood goal.

Schooling is the method by which we are differentiated into social class based on cognitive skill.
Schooling is the transfer of facts from one brain to another.
Schooling is designed to make people employable.
Schooling is designed to make people moral.
Schooling is a method for keeping teens and pre-teens out of their parents' hair until they move out.
Schooling is meant to instill proper social behaviour into students.
Schooling is meant to make great thinkers out of students.
Schooling is a means to combat racism.
Schooling is a place to eat lunch.

So, depending on what your student, teacher and society want, you use different techniques. Some work better than others for each of the goals listed.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Nice.

So you are saying that, in order to ask the question of "what is the best way to teach", we need to first settle on what we want the students to do/be/have. As a K-12 teacher these multiple conflicting implicitly-stated goals must be a source of great frustration.