RE: RE: Education (Was Re: Techwriting After the Boom)

["GeneK" <gene -at- genek -dot- com>]

No, it's merely the way the sciences are most commonly
taught, and why most people find them so dry.  Science is
fundamentally an attempt to explain why things work the 
way they do, and "theory" is how those explanations are
expressed when the things one is attempting to explain
can't be tested in practice.  Teaching abstraction before
using extraction to provide context results in a lecture 
hall full of dozing students.  I mostly slept my way 
through an entire semester of Modern Physics in the days 
before Star Trek; today I know teenagers who actually
understand the basic concepts because they wanted to know
what the characters on the show were supposedly talking
about and went and looked the subjects up.

Gene Kim-Eng


------- Original Message -------
On
Mon, 9 Jun 2003 13:55:51 -0400 John Posada?wrote:


Mark...I don't agree. I think what you mean by abstraction, I think of
extraction. I can teach something in the abstract without ever relating it
to a concrete.

Isn't that the whole idea behind any of the theoretical sciences? 


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