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The "Michel Thomas Method"-whatever it is

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Peregrinus
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 Message 33 of 37
23 September 2012 at 11:10pm | IP Logged 
@emk,

Thank you for sharing that summary and your analysis of ToI, and for saving us the time of looking into it ourselves :).

The question that comes to my mind is how applicable it is to a broad range of academic subjects and grade levels. For example, it seems hard to visualize such a teaching method being used to teach a lot of math and science topics past overall concepts and where they start to involve a lot of setting up and solving equations. How would ToI deal with students who were the "problem" when the subject is differential calculus?

Thus the theory may have limits when extended to higher levels in any subject even when it might be useful for beginner learners. Which may explain why MT did not extend his method to a full-fledged course designed to take one to a high level, though MT may have thought after his advanced course it mainly was just a matter of learning vocabulary.

Well OP has provided us with some entertainment at least for a weekend.


2 persons have voted this message useful



Peregrinus
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United States
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Speaks: English*

 
 Message 34 of 37
23 September 2012 at 11:32pm | IP Logged 
Leurre wrote:

But goodness I've never seen such waltzing around.



I have. In various political, religious and pseudo-science demagoguery. The point is to not expose the end at the beginning so as to slowly suck people in and get them to expend time and money and then feel like they are part of it so when a far-fetched conclusion or dictum comes around they won't immediately head for the exit. As an example, a certain science fiction writer and his creation of an evil galactic emperor comes to mind.

What the OP lacks in his spiel is the promise of how this might help the individual change his or her lot in life for the better individually or at least nationally. A more vague higher good of mankind alone is not quite sufficient to suck most folks in.

Also I would like to comment, even if it is somewhat of a personal attack, that OP is moderately clever in his language in using "cuz" and profanity and the like intentionally. It likely disguised the fact that he is not particularly well-educated or all that well-read outside a handful of topics of interest, and thus covers up errors of writing that otherwise would stand out. He acts like he is talking down to the bottle rocket folks, but really he is just not trying to talk up anymore. He intuitively knows an obviously blue-collar crank talking about academic subject matters may not appeal to a crowd of mostly university educated folks, or at least people who have self-educated themselves to that level.

And it is not the subject matter that education teaches that is important, but rather the mindset and critical thinking process. Such a process must necessarily be suspended in some degree for crankery to succeed. The shame is when cranks take over a subject that could be of real interest, which emk mentioned in speculating that the hype drove people away from ToI.

Edited by Peregrinus on 23 September 2012 at 11:34pm

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hrhenry
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 Message 35 of 37
24 September 2012 at 1:22am | IP Logged 
Peregrinus wrote:

And it is not the subject matter that education teaches that is important, but rather
the mindset and critical thinking process.

You know, every few months or so, we get someone new here claiming some revolutionary
new learning method that'll have us all where we'd never dreamed to be before, only to
disappear a few days later.

That's really all it was for me. Bottle-rockets and blue-collars really had nothing to
do with it. And I don't really care if he was more or less educated than me - I
continue to believe that everyone can learn a language with or without extra education.

If he had spelled out exactly what it was he was planning to develop (and presumably,
sell), I might have been interested to learn more. But, like all these types of
announcements, this was as vague as any other.

R.
==


Edited by hrhenry on 24 September 2012 at 1:22am

5 persons have voted this message useful



Owen_Richardson
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 Message 36 of 37
24 September 2012 at 6:41am | IP Logged 
Peregrinus wrote:
Also I would like to comment, even if it is somewhat of a personal attack, that OP is moderately clever in his language in using "cuz" and profanity and the like intentionally.


Yeah, that IS an ad hominem attack, and yeesh, I talk like that because I personally find a mix of acrolectic and basilectic features funner to read (alright fine those terms were technically originated for use in the context of a creole continuum, but you get what I mean).

Point is, when I use a hoity toity acrolectic word or construction, I use it correctly, and my sentences are parsable. I DO tend to pile up a few too many clauses and parenthetical asides into a big run-on mess, because I've been trying to pack ridiculous amounts of details into each sentence, but they are fundamentally parsable.

Unlike a couple of your sentences, which ended up, though short, as a bit of a word salad.

But I certainly don't believe that means you're STUPID, because you're obviously NOT. You're just writing in a hurry, and sadly don't believe I merit the effort of you rereading what you're about to post to make sure it's intelligible. And you just ignored my polite implied request for clarification. =[

As a matter of fact, I rather suspect you're just skimming a lot of what I say, because you certainly seem to be ignoring key points that I'm sure I made quite clear.

Quote:
It likely disguised the fact that he is not particularly well-educated or all that well-read outside a handful of topics of interest...


Actually, that's sort of true, and I won't deny it.

Quote:
... and thus covers up errors of writing that otherwise would stand out.


But that is, as noted above, NOT true. I've made fewer things that could fairly be called "errors" than YOU have. (Ie, something that obviously doesn't quite communicate what the author intended it to and, without the context, would be impossible to interpret to the intended meaning, or to any specific meaning at all.)

But I can easily restrict myself to a fully "proper" style when I have reason to.

Quote:
He acts like he is talking down to the bottle rocket folks


I am not talking down to bottle rocket enthusiasts. Some of my best friends are bottle rocket enthusiasts. :P

I am simply trying to make clear that if that's the limit of your interest, *then you are not my intended audience*.

I have a buddy who is teaching himself languages (mostly Latin and Japanese right now) who HAS read TOI and is working on applying it in conjunction with anki and various automated card-production tools... When he has a nice finished product, maybe I could ask him about distilling it into a format that can be shared with his fellow bottle rocket enthusiasts.

THAT you probably would be interested in, if he ever wants to bother sharing it here.

(From one of our convos, about "htlalcoatl":
Him: [that] forum isn't particularly meta, so discussions of principles behind methods doesn't happen much.
htlal is so un-meta, they still have a sizeable "ugh spaced repetition sucks" faction.
Me: and some people who consider rosetta stone a good investment?
Him: Don't think so.
They aren't *that* bad.) :P


And yeah, I haven't made a clear, introductory explanation of:
- Exactly what the Theory of Instruction is
- How it explains the "MT Method's" significantly above-average success
- How the TOI could be applied to create lessons that are far BETTER than MT's
- And yes, go much *farther* than MT's

I haven't done that, because writing a good introduction to a complex subject, for an audience that might *think* it understands it already, but *doesn't*, is a PROJECT, which will take time and careful thought. THAT WOULD BE A DIFFERENT THREAD, SOME TIME IN THE FUTURE.

Instead, I started this thread just to get a feel for people's thoughts and feelings about MT. What pre-existing understandings do they have that I could build on? What pre-existing MISunderstandings do they have that I would have to correct? How much do they care about the subject period?

But then you hijacked the discussion by googling up something I wrote for someone else, somewhere else.

Fine, my fault, I shouldn't even have MENTIONED that I had interesting information, and was thinking about writing an introduction to the subject.

[sarcasm]Because CLEARLY the only logical conclusion is that I was trying to drum up hype and suspense by going all. "Ooh! Ooh! Iiii got a seeeecret!" rather than, ya know, checking how much my potential audience already knew and how much they cared, before I started on the *considerable project of writing a clear and concise introduction to a subject with difficult and involved technical details*.[/sarcasm]

...I'm hoping that highlighting things in bold might make you less likely to just skim and ignore key points, but I'm not holding my breath.

Look, man, I *do* understand where you're coming from.

Education is a broken field, dominated by prestigious cargo cults. You may have read Richard Feynman's hilarious-but-so-sad-that-it's-true example of the textbook review committee that, in its pluralistic ignorance, gave ratings to blank books? XD

So it's a field where you'd EXPECT nonsense that should have been thrown on the garbage heap long ago to keep hanging around (that's the same heap with n-rays in it, by the way).

Eg, "Learning Styles", which STILL haven't died despite stuff like the 2008 Association for Psychological Sciences Panel's critique of the subject.

And it's a field where you'd EXPECT revolutionary discoveries to be largely ignored.

Nevertheless, you'd also expect to hear lots of CLAIMS of revolutionary discoveries, *whether or not there were any*.

So from your current epistemic state, you SHOULD be giving a very low a-priori probability to my claim that the Theory of Instruction is a Really Big Deal!

Which means that, to shift your posterior probability dramatically towards my claims being TRUE, you'd need to see some evidence that was VERY UNLIKELY to be there if my claims were FALSE, and VERY LIKELY to be there if they were TRUE.

Or more realistically, a lot of independent observations with conditional probabilities like that.

Well, I aint honestly an expert on all that Bayes theorem jibba jabba, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

And that means you need to PAY ATTENTION TO DETAILS.

But I feel like you'll just keep skimming and ignoring any key details I try to bring to your attention, knocking down every piece of evidence that shifts the probability towards my claims being true by using your low prior as a crude bludgeon, and then forgetting it and moving on to the next one, and using this as justification not to have to actually do any RESEARCH before you make such judgements and then in the end WHAT DO YOU KNOW, your posterior probability is unchanged!

And I'm NOT trying to convince you I'm right; I'm just trying to convince you that the chance that I'm right is at least high enough that, when multiplied by how much of a Big Deal it would be if I WAS, it's worth you making a bit of an effort to look into it a bit further.

Even though I'm NOT willing to be your personal waiter, bringing you each morsel of understanding on a silver platter, while you sit there spitting at me, if you're not willing even crack into any of the resources I've provided.

I mean, the TOI is a *scientific theory*. Ie, a theory in the *true technical sense*. It's not like anything else IN the field of education.

Did you READ the preface? It's only two pages, one, two.

And the book lays out a framework for finding an optimized way to teach *anything* to *anyone*.

Yes, even stuff like "setting up and solving equations", even though you find that "hard to visualize" (most creationists find evolution "hard to understand". So what?)

It's explained in "Constructing Cognitive Routines". But that's "SECTION VI" in the book, and starts on page *two hundred and ninety one*.

But you think emk's "blind man's directions to the gold field" summary of the AthabascaU module "saves you the time of having to look into it yourself".

Well I could show you how emk's summary, while not inACCURATE, is nowhere near being PRECISE enough to really give you an idea what the TOI actually IS, just by looking at the first point he noted.

emk wrote:
Group prompt-response format. The students sit around the teacher, and respond to at least 10 prompts per minute. Interestingly, the students respond in unison to every question.


Unison responses are NOT a defining feature of the TOI. They're used in DI programs because of a specific instructional problem you have to deal with in schools where, surprise surprise, you have more students than teachers.

For instance, say you're teaching a group of eight kids to read. You point to a word and say, "What word?"

Can you give each kid an individual turn? How on Earth would that work if you tried to to it with each exercise?

So they'll have to respond as a group most of the time.

So how do you tell if a kid is really reading, or if they're just copying what another kid is saying?

You get all the kids to respond on a signal (DI teachers most typically use "Get ready! *finger snap*).

Then you know that any kid who lags behind in responding needs more help.

But that's just a specific solution to a problem that occurs in a specific instructional context.

It's just simple logic.

But it's just one simple little logical point that comes up in a context of a system made up of a LOT of simple little logical points built on some basic axioms.

Does that help you get a feel for why emk's summary, while not WRONG, per se, certainly does NOT "save you the trouble" of reading anything yourself?

Certainly, you have NO obligation to read anything.

But if you DON'T read, then you WON'T understand, so don't you believe that you do.


And the thing is, I'm not confident that you've really been reading what *I've* been writing.

So basically, I don't know if there's much point in me responding to you directly anymore unless you demonstrate that you’re actually willing to LISTEN to what I say.

And I’ve certainly said enough for this post.

Edited by Owen_Richardson on 24 September 2012 at 6:54am

2 persons have voted this message useful





Iversen
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 Message 37 of 37
24 September 2012 at 12:44pm | IP Logged 
And for this thread.


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