Re: The school game

Richard Long (rlong@DAEMEN.EDU)
Mon, 12 Aug 1996 15:31:37 -0400


Eric,

Come now. Sure, Pirsig says,

>"The best students always are flunking. Every good teacher knows that."

but to accept that as a given is a trick itself. Many of the best students
make an A, and probably any of the those who flunk are not good students.
And I certainly don't believe that thwarting is necessarily the same as
being creative and productive. Students I think know this, too, just as
many of them know that they can play games with teachers who resist being
authoritative.

If education is a game, then it should be played to the student's
advantage, but that doesn't mean the student makes the rules because the
rules created by the student will likely be the game the student already
knows how to play: avoidance, circumventing, and, worse, resistance to
creativity. An example is to write what you already know about a topic than
about implications of what you know about the topic.

Richard

+-----------------------------------+
Dr. Richard Long
Writing Coordinator, Webmaster
Academic Computing, Daemen College
[716.839.8290] [rlong@daemen.edu]
http://www.daemen.edu/pages/rlong/
+-----------------------------------+