Day 12
Up: 9:09am
Left for Work: 10:34am
Video: Malcolm Gladwell - What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce
Young minds are clay to be molded, that is true, but the importance lay not in the capabilities of the minds to be molded; rather, it lay in the hands of the "artist" or teacher. The ability of this teacher to shape the minds is dependant upon a learned skill set. I'm not necessarily talking about teachers, and I'm not nevessarily talking about a degree, but they are the obvious topics of this conversation. The ability, the choice, of the teachers to acknowlege and utilize learning types is far too often forgotten, and children are suffering as a result. I'm not even laying blame on teachers, but there is a fundamental fault in the foundation of the education system.
Malcom Gladwell talks about his friend, Howard Moskowitz, who - and I'm aware of the superficial triviality of the topic - rovolutionized the world of pasta sauces by saying, "There is no such thing as perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces." That next decade, Prego hit an utapped "chunky sauce" market, and increased their margin by 600 million dollars. Moskowitz accomplished this by simply acknowleging one key concept: you cannot take a blanket approach to peoples' needs! Just by saying that there are people whose needs are not being met, Moskewitz found a while new market and significantly increased the success rate of the company that hired him.
This idea could, and indeed should, be applied on a mass scale in our education system. Perhaps, the only reason student A finds success where student B suffers is resultant of the curriculum being catered to the learner type that student A is. I went to school with some very intelligent people who had never done well in school. Why is this? Some of them, sure, don't "apply temselves", as the teacher-favourite phrase suggests, but some of them try and
cannot. This problem needs to be addressed not as a matter of intelligence (or lack thereof), but of what the
contralable contributing factors are! You cannot control certain factors such as home life, learning disabilities, or ignorance, but we can pique the interest by clustering learning types, and putting less strain and importance in the grading system and actual grade levels (grades 1,2,3,4,5, etc.). This is by no means a perfect concept, but I hope, at least, it makes people think. Ramblings of a passionate person can hold a lot of truth. I hope... :)
