twenty thousand fathoms under the sea
i haven't posted a top five teachers/mentors/professors yet, but i'm pretty sure at least one guy would be on it. mr kajfez, a high school teacher of mine, was great at what he did. he was a world history teacher. now that is a class that would bore the hell out of me in a high school age, because it's all about dates and names and countries i feel stupid for never having heard of until i find out that they only existed for a century a few thousand years ago. he didn't care about dates except for their significance regarding other dates. he wouldn't care if i didn't know when the that guy did that thing, unless the guy doing the thing resulted in some other guy doing something else. dig?
anyway, he also didn't really care for grades. he wanted to know that we got it. that we thought of something special and unique and original. he didn't want to judge our ability to write hamburger style five paragraph essays where the only significant aspect is that one sentence in the first and last paragraph; he wanted our ideas.
thus, he'd grade our papers on a fathom scale. "peter, the paper was a little weak, but woah! at least twenty fathoms." "peter, though your writing was solid, the ideas were nothing new. did you spend any time on this? moron. two fathoms. at best."
comments:
That. is great. I always knew I liked that guy
klcomp | January 3 @ 5:28pm
he never did that for MY papers...
maggie33 | January 4 @ 6:10am
Lots of "good" teachers are more concerned with the students understanding things and having new ideas about stuff than being able to regurgitate the facts. I guess that's fine, but personally, I hate this style of teaching. Because these teachers usually reward creative thought and fresh ideas with good grades and praise, but then they don't actually do things to help students develop the ability to think creatively and have fresh ideas. This is one of many ways that I have felt discriminated against as an uncreative person.
By far the best teacher I ever had for English/composition (who had many faults as a teacher and I would not consider a mentor) once said "the originality comes in the arrangement." Meaning: you do not need to bring your own original thought to your essays. (In fact, we were only allowed to use our own ideas in our essays after we had shown complete mastery of the analytic 5-paragraph essay form.) Originality is only required in how you re-arrange and analyze the text.
"Fathoms" is a neat way of grading though. :)
Poppy | January 5 @ 5:03pm
I liked it when House was giving out scores and gave everyone scores in different scales. 4 stars! 80 points! (At least I think that was House...)
Benji! | January 6 @ 5:51pm