A slight deviation from my usual posts and this time I am reflecting on the state of education, when I was a school student and the new digital era being revolutionized by the likes of Udacity, KhanAcademy and Coursera.
Every child goes through this phase, and its the decision that he makes, at that point, that may change the future course of his life.
Every child has a dream and every dream has some limitations, which are constrained by our imaginations and most of which are self created. As a child I always wanted to study and understand mathematics and its applications, but was never able to.
I never understood what my teacher was teaching, as it was a pure mechanical process. Put a formula, here and a formula there and you get the solution. They never made us ponder why things work the way it does.
For me mathematics was one of most dreaded subjects and also one which I loved most, for being one of the subject on my top hate list. Pretty contradictions, and that's what thoughts are.
I always wanted to master this beautiful subject, but never found a teacher. There were many teachers who used to teach, but none to educate. The most shattering thing for me with my math experience was when I was in my 5th grade, and I scored of 1 point out of 100 in my preliminary exams, because I never ever studied what was taught, because I never understood anything, and things never interested me.
And that 1 point, I guess could be because my handwriting was good at that point in time. That's what I thought (though that was not the case, because at that time my handwriting was terrible). So, you could now imagine the state of mind of a 5th grader and his hope with his further math education. (Hope my kid won't be reading this blog after couple of years).
Teachers are not bad, but their teaching experience faired very badly at that time. It's not there fault. There weren't simply any finishing school where teachers could polish their teaching skills based on different students needs. There are some good teachers who go out of the way to explain things, but my math teacher when I was in 5th grade was not one of them. Though, it may not be teacher's fault and they were doing a good job, as other students were passing the exams and also the students to teachers ratio was something like 1/65. May be I didn't had a mathematical bent of mind.
Somehow I passed these school exams, and luckily while I was in my 7th grade we moved to another city Kalyan (remote location in Mumbai).
Parents thought with a change in place, my attitude towards education might change. And to some extent they were right, though I was not very good at math, until when I was in 10th grade.
It was during my study in 10th grade, that I realized that math is a beautiful subject again and special thanks goes to my tuition teacher, Joy Sir (of St. Mary's classes, Kalyan), for beautifully explaining the subjects. And I did pretty well with math, from thereon.
The only problem and mistake I did was in my 11th and 12th high college , I skipped math and took up a useless secretarial course (as I thought during that time secretarial course for commerce student was more useful that math and all my friends opted for this subject) and that was one of my biggest educational decision mistake that I committed. From thereon, I lost interest in math, and somehow passed my mandatory first year math college course and was fully involved more than hundred percent devoting my time to computer applications. But somehow, this lack of mathematical education, always haunted and interested me.
And then came KhanAcademy.org. After about 15 years from graduating from college, I again fall in love with Math, but this time with a purpose. I don't want my kids, to go through the same process of lack of understanding and lack of awareness on the purpose of education and the role it can play to shape their future.
I want them to appreciate the subject not only math, but science, economics, history, law and others. I rather want them to experience the subject rather than learning by rote. And I am very thankful to these wonderful online academies who are doing a great job.
Now coming back to Udacity, they are special to me. Two new courses on statistics and discrete math is being shortly offered in the coming weeks.
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/st101/CourseRev/1
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs221/CourseRev/1
What better opportunity will I get to test and brush up my math skill (which is very negligible) from the finest professors in the world.
I have committed myself to complete both the courses in the next 7 weeks after it starts no matter what it takes me to complete and to get permanently rid of this math phobia. At least I will try.
I have tried many Udacity courses in the past couple of months, but never completed any. My purpose then was to learn things which I wanted and selectively watch courses that I like. And I am glad I did that. Almost all of Udacity's courses are simply great and 100 percent educational.
You want to learn programming, take CS101 and build a search engine. You are an intermediate programmer take CS253- Web Application Engineering and build a blog engine and wiki in the process, understand caching and other useful aspects of computer science. You want some advanced stuff, take CS387 - Applied Cryptography.
I guarantee you will love these courses. Even though the language of programming used is Python, but that is of least concerned as what matters most is the concept and ideas that you learn during this course.
Also, its always better to know yet another language apart from the language you program for your bread and butter.
Also, there are many more courses that are coming up and I am sure you will find your choice of course.
I will highly encourage other people who are on the same state of mind like me to try these courses out. Not only for yourself but for others around you, who may require genuine quality guidance from someone who has gone through this phase of life.
Hopefully education will not be the same again. Learnings will be fun and enjoyable. And that may be the precise reason why I like teaching and taking up some professional training activity from time to time, because I want people to understand the crux of the matter.
The key thing is to understand the foundation of any subject , polish your basic skills, learn to communicate effectively , write better, and you will grow into a exceptional professional in any field which you may choose to study.
Another thing that I will do is to blog all my learnings from this courses, as micro books on my upcoming website http://www.ownabook.org/
I hope my mistakes could be a learning points for the kids around me.
Happy learning!
P.S: This post in no way is trying to undermine the importance of teacher nor is addressed to any specific person. These are just my thoughts and my perception based on what I have experienced and thought of sharing. No hard feelings for any one. I love and respect my teachers and it was because of the support of some great teachers who had given me opportunity to try and work out things going out of their way that enabled me to get confident in my area of study.
Every child goes through this phase, and its the decision that he makes, at that point, that may change the future course of his life.
Every child has a dream and every dream has some limitations, which are constrained by our imaginations and most of which are self created. As a child I always wanted to study and understand mathematics and its applications, but was never able to.
I never understood what my teacher was teaching, as it was a pure mechanical process. Put a formula, here and a formula there and you get the solution. They never made us ponder why things work the way it does.
For me mathematics was one of most dreaded subjects and also one which I loved most, for being one of the subject on my top hate list. Pretty contradictions, and that's what thoughts are.
I always wanted to master this beautiful subject, but never found a teacher. There were many teachers who used to teach, but none to educate. The most shattering thing for me with my math experience was when I was in my 5th grade, and I scored of 1 point out of 100 in my preliminary exams, because I never ever studied what was taught, because I never understood anything, and things never interested me.
And that 1 point, I guess could be because my handwriting was good at that point in time. That's what I thought (though that was not the case, because at that time my handwriting was terrible). So, you could now imagine the state of mind of a 5th grader and his hope with his further math education. (Hope my kid won't be reading this blog after couple of years).
Teachers are not bad, but their teaching experience faired very badly at that time. It's not there fault. There weren't simply any finishing school where teachers could polish their teaching skills based on different students needs. There are some good teachers who go out of the way to explain things, but my math teacher when I was in 5th grade was not one of them. Though, it may not be teacher's fault and they were doing a good job, as other students were passing the exams and also the students to teachers ratio was something like 1/65. May be I didn't had a mathematical bent of mind.
Somehow I passed these school exams, and luckily while I was in my 7th grade we moved to another city Kalyan (remote location in Mumbai).
Parents thought with a change in place, my attitude towards education might change. And to some extent they were right, though I was not very good at math, until when I was in 10th grade.
It was during my study in 10th grade, that I realized that math is a beautiful subject again and special thanks goes to my tuition teacher, Joy Sir (of St. Mary's classes, Kalyan), for beautifully explaining the subjects. And I did pretty well with math, from thereon.
The only problem and mistake I did was in my 11th and 12th high college , I skipped math and took up a useless secretarial course (as I thought during that time secretarial course for commerce student was more useful that math and all my friends opted for this subject) and that was one of my biggest educational decision mistake that I committed. From thereon, I lost interest in math, and somehow passed my mandatory first year math college course and was fully involved more than hundred percent devoting my time to computer applications. But somehow, this lack of mathematical education, always haunted and interested me.
And then came KhanAcademy.org. After about 15 years from graduating from college, I again fall in love with Math, but this time with a purpose. I don't want my kids, to go through the same process of lack of understanding and lack of awareness on the purpose of education and the role it can play to shape their future.
I want them to appreciate the subject not only math, but science, economics, history, law and others. I rather want them to experience the subject rather than learning by rote. And I am very thankful to these wonderful online academies who are doing a great job.
Now coming back to Udacity, they are special to me. Two new courses on statistics and discrete math is being shortly offered in the coming weeks.
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/st101/CourseRev/1
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs221/CourseRev/1
What better opportunity will I get to test and brush up my math skill (which is very negligible) from the finest professors in the world.
I have committed myself to complete both the courses in the next 7 weeks after it starts no matter what it takes me to complete and to get permanently rid of this math phobia. At least I will try.
I have tried many Udacity courses in the past couple of months, but never completed any. My purpose then was to learn things which I wanted and selectively watch courses that I like. And I am glad I did that. Almost all of Udacity's courses are simply great and 100 percent educational.
You want to learn programming, take CS101 and build a search engine. You are an intermediate programmer take CS253- Web Application Engineering and build a blog engine and wiki in the process, understand caching and other useful aspects of computer science. You want some advanced stuff, take CS387 - Applied Cryptography.
I guarantee you will love these courses. Even though the language of programming used is Python, but that is of least concerned as what matters most is the concept and ideas that you learn during this course.
Also, its always better to know yet another language apart from the language you program for your bread and butter.
Also, there are many more courses that are coming up and I am sure you will find your choice of course.
I will highly encourage other people who are on the same state of mind like me to try these courses out. Not only for yourself but for others around you, who may require genuine quality guidance from someone who has gone through this phase of life.
Hopefully education will not be the same again. Learnings will be fun and enjoyable. And that may be the precise reason why I like teaching and taking up some professional training activity from time to time, because I want people to understand the crux of the matter.
The key thing is to understand the foundation of any subject , polish your basic skills, learn to communicate effectively , write better, and you will grow into a exceptional professional in any field which you may choose to study.
Another thing that I will do is to blog all my learnings from this courses, as micro books on my upcoming website http://www.ownabook.org/
I hope my mistakes could be a learning points for the kids around me.
Happy learning!
P.S: This post in no way is trying to undermine the importance of teacher nor is addressed to any specific person. These are just my thoughts and my perception based on what I have experienced and thought of sharing. No hard feelings for any one. I love and respect my teachers and it was because of the support of some great teachers who had given me opportunity to try and work out things going out of their way that enabled me to get confident in my area of study.
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