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You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15.

... and here we are with my weekly mind-dump about the past week of studying my Masters of Teaching degree. I'm just going to start with my usual gripe about online courses and how they can be better or worse depending on how they are laid or set up. Some lecturers and units do it REALLY WELL! Others are total crapola... Chaos layout, walls of text, no linking... dead links... stripping of file extension names... hard to find Zoom links that are scattered throughout the course material. Shitty shitty shitty... and it is even more hilarious when the lecturers are talking about "cognitive overhead" and all the rest of that sort of thing... and they are demonstrating the exact OPPOSITE of what they are SAYING! $@%^@$@%TGWRGWR%$@^@%$@$^WTGE%$&%#*^%#&@

Anyway, head explosion out the way... wait wait. Second head explosion. I'm supposed to have my two tutorials on Monday, and I'm fast finding out that I'm probably going to skip at least one of them so that I can listen to it on fast forward (2x speed), because... yes, it really is that much of a waste of time. The one that is really annoying is full of trivial or non-content... instead of clarifying things, things get much more confusing... and often don't need to be clarified in the first place, and then things that ARE IMPORTANT get glossed over and not answered. Bleah... I'm not getting that hour of my life back....

The Science unit had a really interesting video that we had to watch on the strange way that we set up our education system (among many other very much less interesting videos...), I'll just link it here for you to see if you are interested.

It is something that I've grappled with in my mind for quite a while now... the idea that students just move on from year to year, and being "held back" is a sign of failure with attendant social stigma... instead of a way to consolidate their learning. So, by the end of the schooling... most students don't really have strong foundations in their education, but have instead stacking each level on shaky foundations for the past 12 or so years. It is pretty odd when you think about it... and add to that, the idea that education isn't exactly done with knowledge and discovery in mind... but more to train workers, with easy metrics for our political/economic overlords to package and sell. However, education, knowledge and discovery isn't really supposed to be a commodity... or is it?

On the Literacy/Numeracy front, I'm finding it a bit of a struggle... I understand the core concept and the expanded Literacy and Numeracy ideas, but the amount of faffing and air-blowing that is in the course is substantial. I do think that Literacy and Numeracy need to be used and taught across subjects (not just in English and Mathematics classrooms), but content teachers don't have the time and space to teach comprehension and critical analysis... there should be some sort of specialist subject for that. I don't mean the English and Mathematics teachers either! As they have their own specialist content that needs to be covered...

... however, that would require funding. No one likes to fund real education that doesn't have the purpose of "real-life productivity".

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