teaching

Teaching adults is so different from teaching teenagers. For one thing, most adults who sign up for courses / educational programmes do so because they actually want to learn. The intrinsic motivation is there right from the start. Also, most adults tend to be more disciplined than children and teenagers, and, again because they are there to learn, they are on the teacher's side. This makes a big difference.
.
So much of teaching young people (children, teenagers) is about pastoral care, discipline, and motivation. i guess it really depends on what your definition of 'teaching' is. One nice thing about teaching adults is that you get to focus on the intellectual development (or, more broadly, the development of whatever skill it is you're teaching). It's rather cool -- to be able to break down the learning process into a series of discrete steps, and to build up your students' skills / knowledge, stage by stage. It's quite fascinating -- thinking about how the mind works, how we learn new things, how we piece together our understanding of the world around us.
.
In other news. Maybe some day i will have to write a long rant here about the outsourcing of parenting to paid professionals and the toll it takes on children. But it's too complicated an issue to write about in just one blogpost. Someone (not me) should write a book.
.
.