Experential Learning And Teaching And Surviving Life

My last post on how deficient I think our education system is in really teaching life skills has been further augmented by students commenting in the national newspaper today about how irrelevant many of the subjects they are studying are.

One girl wanted to be in public relations while another wanted to work in the media field. They can't see how calculus has anything to do with their future jobs other than for would-be future engineers and even then.

How is an educator to know or feel how it is like the lives their charges lead if they have never had the experiences. Broken homes, abusive, uncouth and violent family members, living in constant insecurity when threatened with being thrown out of the home, the pain of body piercing and tattooing, unfair treatment in the corporate world and more or even being stung by a bee, breaking a back and coping with grief and depression. Even hoping to die.

All too often, education is associated with imparting technical, vocational and academic skills. This is the easy part. More difficult is the part where practicality and relevance can be linked to say, how algebra could be used in everyday living. This has more to do with academia than technical or vocational learning. I have illustrated in one of my early blogs a simple example of how this can be done. The example of dining out at a fast-food joint and deciding between a set meal and a ala-carte menu using algebra.

Much more than mere rote-learning, exams, grades and ccas, are other equally if not more pressing aspects of educating our students how to survive life.

I am not asking that all educators go through the whole works here which would mean purposely subjecting onself to a bee sting or to a fractured spine. But it would lead to more empathy, understanding and compassion, wouldn't it , if we have walked in someone's mocassins?

It would be even greater if educators can then draw on these experiences to teach survival and coping skills to their charges.Skills which are not just banking on divine intervention alone but human effort to at least pull through the ordeals.

Survival skills on how to argue based on sound reasons, facts and logic to ward off unfair treatment and practices anywhere, be it in the workplace, in business or in the dealing with any body-politick. Skills to observe, understand and think through so that we are not cheated or placed at the mercy of mercantile greed and excessive consumerist exploitation. Skills to protect ourselves both as producers and consumers.

Even more so, skills to keep our human pride, integrity and self-worth flying high and to realise that we cannot allow economics (money and especially economically-powered individuals or corporates or whatever) to over-ride or overcome sane human conditions and treatment.

Skills to protect lives and limbs, being street-smart, savvy and just being able to get round life in one piece.

Education has to be the dismantling of one's religious, gerontological ,gender, sexual, racial, national, educational and economic status and to just relate and look someone else in the eye as a fellow human being.

It is even truer that each of the human binder or divider just enumerated has its certain unique traits and therefore to render human inter-relation possible, it is even more important that all such affiliations and biases are done away with.

To me, the ideal world will be one where it is a person-to-person interactivity minus all the above. The interactivity will be one based on the universality and binding forces of sports, music, food, hobbies, education and the like ( I could be wrong here, these could divide for sure).

I can give you many instances of how biased the society we are living in is. Imagine for a brief second, a man holds another's hands or smooches. Would a "predominantly hetero" (or is it more bi-sexual) world be able to accept this? Or how a strictly straight 'family nucleus" has the right to own a piece of public housing but not gays. Gays are not even considered a 'family nucleus" in the first place.

Not to mention, how Daniel has tried hoodwinking me into paying him what should rightly have been his utilities. I have obligingly without question paid 97 odd bucks the first month just based on the one bill he showed me claiming to be a pattern he has been paying $80 or $90 a month all the while.The arrangement was to have me foot what is over and above that.

For just the two of us living in a 5 roomer, 197 odd bucks is way too much. I have been making enquiries all round and some comparisons thrown up are like (1) $160 odd for 4 pax in a 5 roomer (2) $140 odd for a family of 4 in a 5 roomer. All in the 100 odd range.

The second month bill is $145 just for the two of us. I don't stay in very often but he does. I am a weekender at most and even then. He is on the computer, the air-conditioner and television. I use the fan option on the air-conditioner but for the second month, I switched to the manual fan. If the meter readings are correct, it can only mean that he is eating up the electricity consumption.

He should have shown me a couple of months or even past year's consumption pattern to show that the $80-$90 was indeed so. But I had taken his word on good faith. But i can't continue the second month like this, knowing full well what the real situation is. The $80-$90 was probably true when he doesn't stay in which he recently didn't. Like I say, he has someone to fall back on. Maybe his parents or someone.

But that second month bill wasn't justified because he was in all the time. The third month, yes, he wasn't in some of the time.

Ah the stuff life is made of. It makes me wanna puke and belch most of the time.