FF, point taken about nerds. But what about people who would like to be nerds but are more-or-less average? Not everybody who wants to learn is actually mentally equipped to be a wiggin-wonder.
Typically my students were adults on a "second-chance" educational jag. Most of them fell into the unqualified labourer/housewife-since-school category. Also, typically, the educational system had failed them in some important way during their first time around the block and they came into our courses with little or low self-esteem and belief in their ability to succeed. Many of them started out only marginally literate and numerate. We had some extremely well-taught summer holiday courses for these people which taught them enough for them to get by during the first semester. Often enough, the reason they were there was that they were forced by the social welfare system to "retrain" if they wanted to keep their welfare payments. IT appealed to a lot of them simply because working in IT was moderately well-paid and (this was important) carried a reasonable amount of status.
"Bring me your redundant ditch diggers and I will transform them into computer techies!" was the Poly's (very much paraphrased and extrapolated) slogan.
And I loved it.
But on the other side of the coin, we also had a leavening of people who had taken "useless" qualifications at some point in the past. Undergraduate degrees in the phenomenology of religion and its ilk are not exactly career-enhancing major choices. One woman of about fifty, who is now a friend, had a PhD in music. The degree and 50p were getting her a can of Coke. Another student who comes to mind was an RN psychiatric nurse. A disillusioned social worker. We had several retired policemen. One priest. We also had "kids" who had come straight from an academic degree in business or nursing or physiotherapy or whatever, who also wanted a qualification in IT. Most of these people were well-educated and articulate and were "nerds" in the gentle sense of the word. They wanted to learn, could learn and enjoyed the process, especially the give and take in the classroom.
By the third year of the degree programme, they had all, to some extent, learned to get along with each other. The first year was dynamite. The bright people raced ahead; the second-timers floundered. The first year of our degree was, like most degrees, full of received wisdom, with little room for individuality. Rote learning, memorisation. Given that our academic year ran for 32 weeks as opposed to the university's 26 weeks, they effectively got a year and a quarter's tuition, and the course was intensive. No wandering along to lectures once or twice a day if you felt like it; miss a class on our course and you might well miss the whole point of that module. I once arrived in a lecture theatre towards the end of the academic year to find that the lights were dimmed and a copy of that Hodgson cartoon "Please may I leave the room, my brain's full" on the overhead projector.
As lecturers with consciences, we had to find ways of bootstrapping the second-timers who were, of course, failing miserably, despite extra tuition from us and lots and lots and lots of formal tutorials. We tried all sorts of devices with varying degrees of success. But then we hit on the idea of study groups. Put two of the second-timers with two of the others and let's see what happens. These weren't project groups, you understand. They weren't forced to join them and no one could make them stay. Initially everyone was reluctant. The better-educated students felt that working with the second-timers would hold them back. The second-timers felt that it was all a bit demeaning, because we made no bones about why we thought the groups were a good idea. But they tried them and I still remember the thrill I got when I saw the results. One of the second-timer students who had arrived at the poly fairly evenly-balanced (with a chip on each shoulder) suddenly turned himself right around. From failing everything abjectly as a matter of course, he began to get comfortable passes. No cheating, no prompting, these were straight tests. Improvements by other students were perhaps less dramatic, but were both very substantial. From a 33% failure rate at the end of the second year the previous year, we went to a 10% failure rate. Instead of many of the second-timers dropping out or being booted out, we suddenly found that we had to increase the resourcing for the third years courses, because we had nearly twice the projected number of Year 3 students.
The next year, they organised their own study groups. Which study group they were in actually began to matter to them. They began to "bribe" the bright sparks to join their groups. Obviously, some groups did better than others. Just because you know the material doesn't mean you can pass it on. But nearly all of the second-timers improved. It worked, and that's all that really mattered.
Incidentally, the guy I mentioned above who did really well because of the study group is now a highly-paid IT manager ...
