Education
From The Encyclopedia of Pointless
When teaching someone, you quickly discover that there is no convenient indicator floating above their head that gauges how well they have understood your lesson. This presents the instructor with a problem. Sure, sometimes it is easy to tell a student has learned your lesson. For example, let's say you pour lighter fluid over your head and place a lit match on the wet fluid/hair mixture. Surely your student would learn from the screams of pain and suffering that such an actiion is a poor life decision. Other times it is more difficult. For example, after teaching a person to fish, there is no adequate means to gauge his increased expertise, since fishing is equal parts luck and skill.
How do we get around this potentially catastrophic barrier? The answer is as simple as proverbial 3.1415926535897932384626433832795. A simple interrogative can reveal much about the knowledge of another. In the simplest sense, it may entirely be "Now tell me what I just told you." In more complex situations, it may be "Now repeat back the three major steps of the process and at least two of their subsets." In the most complex solutions, it might even be "Please build off of what I have just taught you by constructing a laser powerful enough to destroy the moon." It may even be a series of these interrogatives, although this seems to be rare at best.
It is obvious that, being the smart cookies they are, educators were quick to adopt this inquisition to assure themselves of their teaching abilities, and these practices have been in place for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Even back when teaching was strictly a master/apprentice situation, the teacher still had to resort to an interrogative to provide personal positive reinforcement and also possibly insure that his student was ready for the next phase of teaching, which invariably had to do with red-hot sharp metal pokers.
In my travels both near and abroad, I have noted that educators have found a 60 percent transfer of their knowledge to be acceptable, if not preferable. Personally, I see this to be setting sights a bit low. After all, 60 percent is only a little better than your chances of catching a fish if you are moderately skilled. I see, for the future, the requirement for 90 or even 100 percent knowledge transfer. This will be facilitated, I believe, as brainwashing and mind-control allows us to directly affect the minds and emotions of youth. I look forward to a day when well-behaved students who find the concepts such as disrespect for authority, use of mind-expanding drugs, or failure to yield at a crosswalk to be totally foreign to them. Students who hang on every word their teacher utters about fourth-dimensional wave harmonics.
Of course, at the same time, I find it necessary to give breath to the other side of the coin, me being an equal-opportunity scholar and all. Some, not including myself, say that the 75 percent knowledge transfer deemed as "average" is far better than it need be. After all, they press on, people would be ECSTATIC if the government were effective 75 percent of the time, or if 75 percent of all trials came to the fair and just conclusion they should, or if canned tuna contained 75 percent tuna. Instead, our government bumbles along without even the ability to get their own names right, courts routinely imprison the wrong person, and many canning companies have given up on calling it "tuna", resorting instead to "Sea Smorgasbord, now with more Dolphin in every bite!" They go on to say that a 10% transfer of knowledge is more than acceptable.
To this I say balderdash. It's obvious that the only thing that holds this world together is the smart people, and if being right 10 percent of the time qualifies you as smart, the whole planet's going to hell in a hand basket. I see the examples of inadequate government and woeful (albeit tasty) standards for canned seafood to be places to improve, not examples of why we should all lower the bar of success to their level. In closing, I would like to just point out that teaching fairly and honorably is difficult and taxing to the mind and body, so the next time you see a teacher, say, "Why the heck did you ever choose a job that makes you work twice as much as you would for half as much as you should?"
