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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (171848)	10/4/2005 2:36:45 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Respond to of 281500

Neolib, on the subject of intelligence and school, I also have a couple of school anecdotes to share. I had the good fortune to take an undergraduate class from a professor named Thomas Mayer. He was, at the time, on a par with Milton Friedman and considered one of the top 5 monetary economists in the world. It was a small class and after the first couple of classes I overheard 3-4 students remarking that Mayer wasn't as smart as they'd expected and that the material wasn't too difficult. Mayer was so brilliant that he was able to take very difficult content and explain it in simple terms that almost anyone could comprehend. The same students went on and on about how intelligent another professor was. That professor could take any subject and make it incomprehensible. He did that with a great vocabulary, however, and a confident delivery that left them thinking he was a genius. I think too many teachers are like the second teacher and too few are like Mayer; they learn well and think poorly. It's long been my view that good learners/poor thinkers have a tendency to go back to the only place where they excelled, i.e. they go back into the educational system. Once there they reward disciple personalities and are unwilling or unable to recognize the product of those who think well, or think differently. Another anecdote; In my third year constitutional law class the person who was ranked first in our class and I had a break and she'd talk with me about the points I'd made that day disagreeing with our spirited professor. Often she'd end up agreeing with me and at the end of that semester she'd learned his views and, unfortunately for her, mine. She was a natural learner and she'd never had to discover that the best answer was the teacher's answer, right or wrong, so she probably wrote the test the way I'd have written it. I wrote the test the way she'd have normally written it. I ended up with the highest grade in the class and she ended up with her lowest grade in law school and dropped to second. Life isn't fair. g. Ed