Classrooms and Other Venues

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by: Sigurd Rinde

Stumbled over a theme close to my heart – "Most classroom learning sucks" posted by Kathy Sierra at Headrush.

Not only did it appeal to my parenting side and to the "ahh, remember those days in school" of a former troublemaker in school (me), it triggered a headrush (duh) of dual modes applicable to more than two different educational approaches.

Perhaps the issue raised by Kathy is more than a classroom issue, something that applies to everything we do and face in our daily life?

Let me suggest a few choices:

Learning vs. Teaching
Connect vs. Gather
Converse vs. Preach
Pull vs. Push
Be or to Have (Thanks to Eric Fromm)
Act vs. React
Attract vs. Seduce

Teaching being teacher preaching,  pushing knowledge and the poor recipient gathering, having and reacting to knowledge. All right side of the opposites.

Learning being connect with and pull knowledge, be and act – and converse with the teacher, who BTW has one task – prepare the environment. All left side.

Have to admit, I think the left choices are closer to humans, makes us happier, better, smarter, prettier.

But what about us, the grown-ups, outside the classroom? Are we oriented towards the right side or the left?

Ask somebody "who are you?" or "tell me about yourself". Does it not prompt a "I’m the vice president of…"?  A title is nice to have, but what might you be?

Tell your friends at the next party that you just came in from a spot of running/cycling. Is the next question "how many K’s did you run?" or is it "was it nice?"
Bet it’ll be about how many miles you have logged, not so much about how it was being there.

Being male I have to admit to laziness, hormones, and the prospect of being seduced, but attraction makes me more at ease, happier and makes my day. Or week. Or month. Or life.

Is the organisational hierarchy at your job designed for pull or push? Hmm, strategy, orders, directions tends to come from the top… does it make you happy?

Is your organisation connecting to customers or gathering them? Does your sales manager talk about sales numbers and how to increase number of customers or does he talk about how he/the company connects to the customers and how that can be strengthened? Wonder what customer would be the content one, the number or the connected and included?

Did I mention advertising? Or selling? Or the classic PowerPoint presentation? Or…

Maybe it’s time to act outside the classroom, not only react to the classroom?