Thursday, May 17, 2012

GODDAMMIT!!!!!

I'm playing a game called SWTOR.  It is a MMO.  It is my first MMO.  Of course being something new of the which I knew nothing about, I started out wiping like a window cleaner.  But after practice, practice, and of course practice, I fine tuned my DPS, I learned to steer my AOE from any CC, I balanced my heals with energy output, learned to maneuver my toon between mobs without pulling any aggro, and figured out what to need and what to greed.  I still have a lot to learn and a lot to consume, but I have gotten on my feet.

I can't claim all this progress as my own.  Many hands helped me open many doors.  But what tickles my curiosity is not the how I learned, or the with whom, or the why, or the what.  I don't care about any of that because that is all useful for just me.  I care about the one thing that every single living thing shares in our many learning endeavors.  I care about Where.

I didn't go to a classroom and listen to a teacher explain what LFG means, or how to tank.  No single person taught me anything about where or how to spec.  I didn't learn from listening.  I learned from living.  Where?  In the MMO world you doofus!!!!  I made my world the MMO world.  I learned to understand the tech differences between a Sorcerer CC and an IA CC not by reading about it, but by, in the heat of battle, experience the failure of not knowing, thinking about it, talking about it, and figuring out what the possible answer could be, testing it, examining the result, and then learning.   You tell me which way is more effective, but more importantly more enjoyable. 

So why do we all hoard into universities, and listen to pompous pickle heads talk about how they think the we should learn what we like?  Why do Language academies flourish like the salmon of Capistrano when all they do is drill contextualness grammar into children's head with a jackhammer?

I can think of an answer for each of those questions, so don't post comments like "well we need a degree from a university to prove to a company we are worth hiring"  or "well our children need to practice English so they can pass the entrance exams and get into good high schools and colleges", because if you do, I will just ask "Well why do we need a degree in the first place?  Why is there a test in the first place?  And if you answer to those questions is anything besides "business", you should go back to school.

Business has taken the goal, the JOY, of learning, and packaged it into a pretty box with a price tag that reads something like "your parents entire marriage (or at least the fun part of it)" or "Your entire early adult life"      (depending on what culture you belong to.)

 As long as babies can become fluent in a language before they ever step foot into a classroom, there will never be a reason we should.

You see, i wouldn't be so heated about this subject if that victims of it chose to be victims (guess that why they are victims).  The victims of this learning holocaust are young kids who are forced to go to school because their government tells their parents they should, or teenagers who are forced to go to language academies because their culture tells their parents they should, or young adults who are forced to go to a university because their family tells them they should.  The victims are all people who grow up with a distaste, salty hatred for learning before they even understand what learning is.  they equate studying with a whip, and reading with a dark looming shadow.

If they came out of this vacuum sealed pressurized pouch of pain with an practical idea of how this world worked and a substantial amount of experience to sustain their first few steps into the real life, then I would have no complaints.  Suffer a little to learn a lot.  nothing wrong with that.  BUT THEY DON'T!!!!  It is ridiculous.  the average human learns absolutely nothing from every second spent in a classroom that they can actually apply in the world.  Why?  BECAUSE A CLASSROOM ISN'T THE GODDAMN WORLD!!!!!!  yet we make our entire education system out as if it was.  I can tell you all day that touching a hot stove will burn you, but you will never learn until you feel its heat, and experience its pain.

The idea of a school had to have been born from good intentions.  Why would I let my loved ones suffer through the same things I did when I can share with them my knowledge and maybe help them bypass some pain.  that is beautiful, if that is how it was today then i would have nothing to say.  but it isn't.  today is full of people who want the world to recognize their knowledge so they make kids buy their books and prove to them they understand with tests.  HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT THE WORLD!!!!!

My logic says, if you want to learn how to survive in this world, you have to learn IN this world.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that all I am saying would be whole-heartedly agreed with by the very people who teach in these universities.

3 comments:

  1. People love the idea of school because of its safety. Its a safe place to go to learn. You can't make a mistake at school. There are no wrong answers. The problem is, if the previous statements are true, that you can't make any right choices either! You can't learn form your mistakes because you don't make any.

    We need more apprenticeships!

    General educations are good for opening our minds to POSSIBILITIES but they give no real world applicable skills.

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  2. I guess me as a teacher, right in the middle of this education system that's gone to the dogs, have an overly emotional attachment to it. I work at a school that supports the present form of education, that being with books and grammar and "learning", and I feel so emotionally dead teaching this way that I haven't been able to see anything good from it. but your comment provides a very valid point of view. Schools can open our eyes up to possibilties, IF OUR EYES ARE WILLING TO OPEN!!!! That is my biggest issue. if my students wanted to see the beauty of learning, than I would love to teach them!! but teaching under this current system is like digging your own grave. I think about my next class and I just shiver and shake inside from the cold lifeless feeling of experience. I know how I want to teach and I have on many occasions tried to create this environment in my classroom (one time I got flashcards of various foods, arranged the desks to resemble a street lined with shops, and had half the class be vendors and the other half be customers in a market, the students LOVED it. they didnt even feel like they were speaking English for reasons I am now starting to understand, NOW IMAGINE if I could take those students to an actual market and have them interact with actual vendors!!! how much more of an experience that would be!!!!) but the classroom is so restricted. keep your voice down, dont get too rowdy, no fighting, and it quickly rips the student of any imagination after just a couple of minutes with the exercise. Language is unique from learning other subjects because language's purpose is to be a tool for the most basic of any human need....survival. so the methods used to learn our first language were undertaken with those basic needs as a focal point. only as we grew up and learned more about who we are and what we liked did language take another form, that of entertainment. so as an adult we have an advantgae over ourselves when we learned our first language. we can now learn our second language in both the survival and entertainment aspects..........i just had a fart.

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  3. Recreating the street market. I Love that. It makes me wish I were a teacher of any subject so I could find ways to teach like that. Wait a minute...I am. I teach at church AND I'm a father...plenty of opportunities to teach.

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