What Harry Potter can tell us about teaching styles

Great post from Dot Physics summarising "teaching styles" from Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix — when I first read the book I thought Dolores Umbridge's comments were pretty horrifying but, sadly, close to what's said in HE circles about the UK's National Curriculum and what the government's obsession with targets forces schoolteachers to focus on …

Sadly we're not immune: Learn-by-rote-memory is an easy/lazy approach for the lecturer, Learn-by-suffering is an ego-trip for the sadist, and whilst Harry's apparent workshop approach is better it doesn't work for every subject/topic — sometimes knowledge/information/curriculum needs to be learnt and experienced that has no practical analogue.

Meeting verbiage

Thanks to Swans On Tea for this morning's moment of amusement:

On Thursday I accumulated the datum that the phrase I might work better wearing lederhosen, but we’re just not going to find that out instantly ends the meeting.

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/4388

Don't you just love/hate (depending on side of fence) people who derail meetings with "amusing" absurd analogies, reductio ad absurdum arguments, etc., no matter how fallacious? In my experience the likelihood that someone will bring one of these up depends on the length of the meeting (long => more likely) or, of course, the ridiculousness of the subject from that person's p.o.v. ...

It's a useful tactic in one's arsenal (as a meeting attendee) and motivation for having short, focused meetings (chairs please take note! — academia is notoriously plagued by ouroboros-like sequences of long, pointless meetings that seem to exist for their own sake & no other purpose.)

IELTS not spell-checking own web

We were discussing the use of IELTS for PhD students so I was amused by the irony — stackeholders?!