What your teacher didn’t teach you

Hi, let’s start by meeting each other, I’m Ramon Gilabert, a last year student of Electronic Engineering and a full time iOS developer working in Norway.

The purpose of the article is to show you why the old school teaching system should end to let other systems emerge.

My education is finishing now, it would be time for me, if I wasn’t working already, to start looking for some training, start looking for businesses that want to risk it taking a student with no experience in electronics. And although I’ve spent my last 3 and a half years of my life dedicated more than 8 hours a day into the field, why don’t I know anything about it? Or let me rephrase that, why couldn’t I take a project right now in electronics? Of course the answer is, because everyone needs to learn how to do things before jumping into them. However, after so many afternoons and nights spent in my degree, I would expect for me to be able to jump into projects, be able to discuss electronic related things, but I’m not. Why? Because of the lack of practice.

As said before, I am an iOS developer that took a course one summer and started to make a network out of it, started to contribute into Open Source, started to build apps for small friends and after about a year, I started working.

How could I, after a course of 2 months be working at a company, putting way less hours into one field that, instead, has become my passion? The answer to the question is easy. Practicing, learning by doing, getting my hands dirty into maybe dark topics that taught me a lot.

“The education we receive is what will drive us into the world.”

With this, what I’m basically saying is that teachers should stop reading the movie scripts, and start making those movies instead, take over the internet, start making a community out of it.

Based on the data from the National Center for Education Statistics in 2010 there were 98817 schools in the United States. That means at least one course of American History for the period 1900–1950, that means two classes as a mean for that course. That means 197634 classes with 30 alumni in every class, listening to one, or two teachers talking about one thing, and the same thing only. Instead, why don’t we take the best teacher in the United States or in the world, and make him make a movie out of the American History between 1900–1950, record the best class he/she’s ever done and put it to the kids, having teachers to support it, to help those kids improve, to help those kids getting their hands dirty instead of making a reading of a book out of every class, let the teachers answers kids’ questions. Wouldn’t that be better?

Also, why should we take a class as we understand it today out of it, why should kids sit down, listen to a teacher talking about one thing that happened 200 years ago and that the kid doesn’t even understand why she’s learning? Why instead don’t we make the kids do projects out of history for instance, let them choose between multiple projects an ideas, periods or facts that drive into the same conclusions, let them experiment with it, be creative, make relations out of every project, learn how to search for things, look for things or how to write things down.

“When you are involved into a situation in which you care, you learn.”

By experimenting, learning by doing or by choosing what we have more interest on from a range of projects, then de facto we become small experts in that small thing that we will present to our friends and colleagues in the class, and, to not disappoint them, as we are responsible for that small part of the project we’ve chosen, we become involved.

Isn’t that better, easier and funnier? Why should we make kids, or people at university memorize how history is to throw it into an exam and forget it forever, having to study it for long nights with coffee or RedBull. Wouldn’t it be better to show them how fun it is by making them create the project, letting them be curious, ask questions, grow as a person by making relations with others, by learning how to work with other people, by being better at changing or adapting themselves into our changing world, because let’s face it, our world is changing so fast and everything happens at a huge velocity, there’s an accident in the 5th avenue in Manhattan and one second later there are pictures in Twitter, ten minutes later there are posts on Facebook, and the day after there’s a Medium history. And with that, I want to mean that, changing that fast means that we need to adapt, we need to be able to learn new programming languages in development, or be able to implement that new software in our company because the old one just got outdated, or even learn a new language because we just got a job offer in Japan.

But how are we going to be able to do all those things in a natural way, if we were taught to just study one thing a computer does better than us, remembering. Of course we will be able to do it, at least maybe some of the people will, but it won’t be natural.
 
We have to start showing our kids, and the people that is still studying countless hours how to adapt, how things can change preparing them for the real world, for the new era where things go with 1 second delay after it has happened. We cannot tell a person that she is going to be a business administrator forever, because she is probably not going to be, and we have to take chances, we have to learn from those chances.

It doesn’t make sense anymore to have to study 4 years to get a title you don’t know how to defense because you were not taught with the practical part of the story, you were just suppose to know the theories of it. It doesn’t make sense for our kids to spend 8 hours in a class listening to a monologue by a teacher, but rather, be in the class making projects, having fun practicing things and then de facto, learning.

“Education is the architect for the future of our planet.”

As a disclaimer, I’m not saying that all the hard work from people dedicated to study new methods in education is wrong, I just talk from my experience, I’m not a person that is saying that degrees don’t make sense anymore, I like the idea of a title for the responsibility that gives you in a Medicine field for instance. But I’m that person that thinks that, learning the theory out of something for 4 years, without you practicing with real stuff, facing real problems, normal people cases, doesn’t make sense anymore in a world that it’s becoming more and more specialized.

The doctors know that already. Would you seriously let a person that just become a doctor to operate you if you knew that person was a 10 in theory, but with no experience in the matter? It doesn’t make sense right? They practice their craft since day 1. Why don’t we, in all the fields applicable, then?

“We’ve been forced to become robots that try to beat computers writing, counting… Why don’t we do what computers can’t instead?”

Let’s learn the basics in a year of electronics for instance and then let’s specialize into hardware, let’s say mobile phones, let’s become the best at mobile phones, practicing with new trends, getting our hands dirty.

However, some people might say — But what happens if there are no mobile phones anymore? Then, I would look for another alternative, read the world as it is at that moment, know the opportunities available, choose where to go from there as it was a small project I had to do for university. We have to start small, build our foundations and then get bigger from there, because the world as we know it can change tomorrow and only the ones who adapt will be the ones who succeed.

We cannot pretend to choose what we want to become when we are 20 and actually be that, that’s so hard to predict, so hard to say, that has changed. New markets, new technologies and new opportunities emerge every day. Take chances.