Teaching?

The other day I was with a group of colleagues, though I should explain that I retired sometime ago but still go in and hang about. We were discussing how to explain what we do when asked by by someone. Well person just dais he taught and I commented that I never said that because I didn't feel that I was a teacher and I just said that I am a mathematician. But people are not very clear what mathematicians do so we often just avoid the question.

This caused me to speculate as to why I don't describe myself as a teacher. Partly because as a university lecturer I didn't feel responsible for the students learning. The role was to assist in the learning process, to guide the students through material, some of which is quite hard to understand by yourself, but in the end it was the student's responsibility to learn. After all they are adults and should by the age of 18 be taking care of themselves, not depending on an authoritarian figure to tel them what to do. In some ways I am happy to show them what they need to do to learn but am not willing to hold their hand whilst they do it.

There is also the difference between training and education. One like all dichotomies which gets blurred around the middle. To simplify, training is showing someone how to do something without learning how whilst, in a parody, learning is why something works without learning how. Of course all good education is a mixture of both learning how and why. An example from maths is when students can solve a problem that involves finding an answer given certain data BUT when given the answer and some of the data cannot work out the rest. That is they can't reverse the process because they don't fully understand what is going on.

Camerons & the world of privilege

When David Cameron talks about inheritance, it all sound very plausible and reasonable. But read the small print and you see it is about wealth & privilege. What is says is if daddy is rich then so are you and hard luck if you are born poor.

If you are born rich you have to work hard to get to be poor, if you start poor you have to work hard to get rich. So David Cameron's Tories are just that, the party of wealth and privilege. Please don't be fooled into thinking that it is anything else. That is why he wants to cut public expenditure, it help the poorest in society not the rich; he should know, both he and his wife were born to rich , privileged families. Why should people like him want to be taxed and help the poor.