The Journey of I, Dream, the man...

longman said:

I would be interesting to know if any readers of this on the spectrum had similar concerns about lecturing/teaching style.

Hello again Longman, in my experience, monotonous monotone monologues both fail to inspire or engage my mind. For example, a history teacher I had used to speak for either 1 or 2 hours dictating to us with absolutely no interaction at all. I recall absolutely nothing from Mr Bland (ironically that was actually his name).

Because of my difficulties reading, I thoroughly enjoy watching lectures, but also think it's important to have visual aids or a visual presentation to aid my understanding. I also think that the use of rhetorical questions, or actual questions such as "raise your hands if you think..." to engage students minds is nigh on vital to ensure thoughts are actually passing through their heads.

I'd also be interested in your thoughts on an idea I had in the 90's. Whilst discussing with a teenager something he'd been taught in physics as "fact", I'd pointed out an unanswered question to the "model" (I forget now what it was), however it suddenly came to me that instead of teaching children rigid dogmatic "beliefs", our species could evolve quicker if we taught children that which we do NOT know... does that make sense?

The most recent example was a wonderful documentary I watched last week titled "the Big Bang Never Happened". Nasa's own photographs from Hubble raise serious questions on Red Shift and quasars. The Astronomer who started doing further research into this proposing a "non cosmological red shift theory" (presenting what appeared to me as compelling evidence to back up his claims), seemed to think he was going to receive a Nobel prize or something, instead he was told "you can't use our telescope any more" and lost his job.

As I mentioned to IntenseWorld earlier in this thread, the phrase "Science: always in error but never in doubt" seems sadly true to me. Back in the 80's and early 90's the debate was going on whether there would be a "Big Crunch" or whether the expansion of the Universe would continue infinitely getting colder and colder. When their maths and measurements suggested there was not enough visible matter to hold galaxies together in the fashion observed by gravity alone, they merely tweaked the "model" by inventing "Dark Matter", just to "balance the books" so to speak. Later when they decided to measure the deceleration of the expansion and discovered it was actually accelerating, they had to tweak the model again by inventing "Dark Energy". So now we're at a point where the Standard Cosmological Model suggests that around 96% of the "observable universe" is NOT observable, neither can the theory be tested... so I would ask, at what point does one say... "Hmmm.... maybe our model is broken beyond repair and we need to start again"?

Your thoughts from being through academia would be appreciated Longman.

longman said:

I would be interesting to know if any readers of this on the spectrum had similar concerns about lecturing/teaching style.

Hello again Longman, in my experience, monotonous monotone monologues both fail to inspire or engage my mind. For example, a history teacher I had used to speak for either 1 or 2 hours dictating to us with absolutely no interaction at all. I recall absolutely nothing from Mr Bland (ironically that was actually his name).

Because of my difficulties reading, I thoroughly enjoy watching lectures, but also think it's important to have visual aids or a visual presentation to aid my understanding. I also think that the use of rhetorical questions, or actual questions such as "raise your hands if you think..." to engage students minds is nigh on vital to ensure thoughts are actually passing through their heads.

I'd also be interested in your thoughts on an idea I had in the 90's. Whilst discussing with a teenager something he'd been taught in physics as "fact", I'd pointed out an unanswered question to the "model" (I forget now what it was), however it suddenly came to me that instead of teaching children rigid dogmatic "beliefs", our species could evolve quicker if we taught children that which we do NOT know... does that make sense?

The most recent example was a wonderful documentary I watched last week titled "the Big Bang Never Happened". Nasa's own photographs from Hubble raise serious questions on Red Shift and quasars. The Astronomer who started doing further research into this proposing a "non cosmological red shift theory" (presenting what appeared to me as compelling evidence to back up his claims), seemed to think he was going to receive a Nobel prize or something, instead he was told "you can't use our telescope any more" and lost his job.

As I mentioned to IntenseWorld earlier in this thread, the phrase "Science: always in error but never in doubt" seems sadly true to me. Back in the 80's and early 90's the debate was going on whether there would be a "Big Crunch" or whether the expansion of the Universe would continue infinitely getting colder and colder. When their maths and measurements suggested there was not enough visible matter to hold galaxies together in the fashion observed by gravity alone, they merely tweaked the "model" by inventing "Dark Matter", just to "balance the books" so to speak. Later when they decided to measure the deceleration of the expansion and discovered it was actually accelerating, they had to tweak the model again by inventing "Dark Energy". So now we're at a point where the Standard Cosmological Model suggests that around 96% of the "observable universe" is NOT observable, neither can the theory be tested... so I would ask, at what point does one say... "Hmmm.... maybe our model is broken beyond repair and we need to start again"?

Your thoughts from being through academia would be appreciated Longman.