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Ok. Welcome back, everyone.
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And me too.
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So, I just came back from Boulder, where I gave - let's see - eight talks.
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Uh, I was on 7 panels, and gave one separate talk. Most on education.
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And one of the talks, was on teaching how to think, or what to think.
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So there were three panelists, one professor from Berkeley,
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in the astronomy department, who's also a renowned teacher,
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and then an investigative journalist, and then I spoke,
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and we all said something for about ten minutes
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I talked about the history of education and why it's difficult to change
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educational institutions and educational practices
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and what the original purposes of the schools were.
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So, some of the material I'll talk about in the second to last lecture,
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on political barriers to educational change, uh, and, I then also, before this
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whole session I described to the reporter for the Daily Camera,
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which is the paper in Boulder, a bit about what I was gonna say.
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And I talked about some of the material I've told you already, about the
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multiplication table. So, if you remember, the multiplication table, when people get brain damage
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in the arithmetic area, they can't do addition anymore, but they can still do the multiplication table.
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And when people get brain damage in the language area,
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they can still do addition, but they can't multiplication anymore.
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And that's because, multiplication generally is learnt as pause [sound of writing on blackboard]
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So when you see it, you think of symbols in math, but actually the way most
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people learn it is six times nine is fifty-four.
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Then, you have to learn [sound of writing]... you have to memorize yet another fact.
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Nine times six is fifty-four. Oh. And then you have to learn yet a new fact, called, that
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these two facts are related. When, actually if you understood the meaning,
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they would be just one fact.
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So, now you have to memorize all these linguistic sentences, and
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no surprise, when you get damage in the linguistic area, that kind of multiplication table goes away.
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So I said to the reporter, yeah, what we really need to do is teach multiplication, and math, in a whole different way.
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So the reporter, uh, you know, she understood everything, and said
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"Oh, that's really interesting, you know, I'm actually studying education myself, and I have children,
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and I'll try to apply with my children, and in the teaching that I do."
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And I said, "Oh, great." So then, I gave my talk and then the moderator asked everybody, "well
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does anyone on the panel want to say anything to anyone else."
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So Alex Philapenco, from Berkeley, he stood up and he said,
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"Well, I agree with, you know I agreed with, everything Sanjoy said,
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except, he was quoted in the paper this morning as saying we shouldn't
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teach the multiplication table. So, that whole discussion, which seemed
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to be completely understood, just got condensed into one sentence. So now,
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I didn't actually have to say very much in response, because the second panelist,
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as I mentioned, was an investigative journalist, and what she was talking about
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was how you have to be very skeptical of what's in the media,
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so all I had to do was look at her for a bit, and then everybody started laughing because,
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the point was clear, but then I explained to everybody else
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what I'd explained to the reporter. So, that's by way of saying that education is a complicated
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subject, but the audience understands a lot more than the media does,
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which is one of the barriers to political change
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that, there's people who understand lots of individual points, but how do you
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assemble it into a coherent plan for change, well, you need forums for discussion
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and if ther reports in the media are, oh, don't teach the multiplication table,
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or, do teach it but do it with lots of drill, well, it's hard to get in a discussion
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of, well, actually, you'd like to teach it in a different way, where
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instead of memorizing this, you say, well, six times nine,
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[sound of writing on blackboard]
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is like six times ten, which is 60 minus six, which is 54.
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SO, there's no space for putting things like that into public discussion.
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And one of the purposes of classes like this is to do that.
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Uh, OK, so, today we're going to talk about
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lecture planning and performing. Uh, what we've done so far is,
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sort of the flow of the ideas in this class has gone as follows
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now this is the logicial flow, we did it slightly out of order, because it's the preperation flow, slightly
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different than the logical flow.
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So you work out your course goals or even your curriculum goals,
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And then, you decide how are you going to tell when you've reached those goals,
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with problems, tests, that's the way you operationalize your goals
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And then given that you have those kind of problems, well now you have a
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pretty concrete idea of what it is you're trying for, because you have concrete examples of it
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well, lectures, recitations, so I'll put etc. here
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what do you do with your contact time.
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So, this is what do you do with, this is, the overall structure, this is sort of at the level
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where it makes concrete sense, and this is, what do you do when the rubber hits the road,
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what do you do in lecture.
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So, last time what we did is we talked about interactive teaching,
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and there was, basically several time scales over which you could make the class interactive.
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The longest time scale was the wood blocks example,
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and I'll answer a question about that in just a moment.
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So now, continuing the theme of where the rubber hits the road,
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today, [writing sounds]
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so, now, how, now that you have some techniques, how do you
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assemble it into a lecture? And I use both words advisedly and deliberately,
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so plan, it is essential to plan and performance is essential.
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People forget that. They forget that lecturing and teaching is a public act,
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and, when they forget that, the lectures are flat. So, we're going to talk about the techniques
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for doing that, starting with the Walter Lumen lecture that you watched for today.