TpT is the world's first and biggest online open marketplace where teachers connect and share, buy, and sell original educational materials.
Our community of over 4 million teachers has generated almost $150 million in materials sold, with several star teacher-authors earning hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.
That process of drinking the soup and learning what to swallow and what to spit out is an incredible learning experience. That is a skill and comes from trial and error, reading everything, and trying things. And you are training yourself in that process and mindset of learning on your own.
Agree though that learning best practices is difficult without some guidance and working with others.
I agree, I think it's an absolutely necessary learning experience.
Just not at the beginning.
Maybe that's because I'm a CS major and have dealt with so many smart people who's learning paths were derailed by the self taught plan advocated here. They found a local maxima (in my experience it's often procedural php or eclipse driven java) and won't move off of it because it seems impossible and the benefit is intangible and by definition difficult for them to understand. Pretty perfectly described by PG's Blub Paradox essay.
There's a reason the "standing on the shoulders of giants" metaphor is so prevalent in the programming world.
That is the point of this post, to get them over the fear, to give them the confidence to do it.
Having a personal tutor can accelerate the learning process dramatically. Even if you can teach yourself, you can learn faster if someone just tells you the answer. But, you can also just do it. And, the process will teach you the benefits of being precise with your searches and that if you know to use the work "toggle" rather than "switch back and forth", you'll get to the answer faster next time (though, you'll get to it both ways and you'll learn a lot while you're reading).
I was fortunate enough to have great engineers accelerate my learning but I also did a lot on my own and that process gave me a deeper understanding and taught me the right mindset to now continue improving on my own forever.
I propose that we are running into a very studied phenomenon in teaching: expert knowledge vs novice knowledge. The expert sees stuff as simple and straight-forward that causes confusion in the novice -- because the novice doesn't fully have the framework with which to understand in place yet.
To get to a point where googling and reading can be really effective (for most people... there are some who can just naturally pick something up) it helps to have someone work one-on-one with the confusion that may otherwise be insurmountable. Not just accelerate learning, but in fact, enable it at all.
There is a very real problem in teaching at all levels where research will show that using new methods and alternate course progressions help students get it faster, but the experts in the subject matter will veto it because it is not the way they learned or presents things in a way that seems too round-about from the expert point of view -- ignoring the difference between those who have the framework and those who need to get the framework.
Empowering teachers to empower others
TpT is the world's first and biggest online open marketplace where teachers connect and share, buy, and sell original educational materials.
Our community of over 4 million teachers has generated almost $150 million in materials sold, with several star teacher-authors earning hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars.
We're hiring in every area, including developers and designers: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Careers
If you want to understand us and our community, this Facebook post says it all: https://www.facebook.com/TeachersPayTeachers/posts/101529499...
Here's a recent story about us on public radio: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learningcurve/te...