Second that Work

I also wanted to drop a note today to express my liking for the responses that have been made to this week's Workshop.  There is a great deal more focus this time around than there was last week, though I am concerned that many are understandably reticent to step forward and make a suggestion.  That's not at all unusual in any course on any subject, as the class quickly understands that the teacher is serious about the material and is unhesitant in offering criticism.

My opinion of most teachers has not much improved

since 1980-84, when the above was a familiar meme. And

I'm not that fond of the level of education demonstrated

by many of the "students" of that era, either.

I had it pointed out to me last week that I am "not a professional instructor."  To me, this has always been one of these strange, querulous things about human prejudices.  We were most of us, as members of western society, subjected to a magnificent parade of spectacularly poor instructors, by far the balance of teachers and professors whose acquaintance we shared, and every one of these accredited and counted as "professional."  Any honest memory that we have about our experience with the education system tells us that the bar for becoming a professional teacher was very, very low.  And yet, because a few teachers greatly excelled, and gave us a reason to care about some subjects, the whole profession is raised up and put on a pedestal that we are all supposed to pay lip service towards, as though the very fact of being paid somehow transforms these prickly, ill-humored, ill-natured petty classroom tyrants into pillars of society.

As I've written 11 years of material for this blog, most of it in a vicious, iracible tone, and all of it being instructive, reaching a point where I am, in fact, paid to write, I'm unable to specify any difference between myself and a so-called "professional instructor," except that my readers have the agency to stop attending my classes, they have the freedom to stop paying me, or some have the freedom to take part without paying at all, and I'm not actually in charge of helpless, policed children who I am sure would gratefully take part in a classroom with me than they would with any of the Mrs. or Mr. So-and-So's that I was exposed to as a four-foot-tall defenseless boy.  Teachers who, I might add, successfully polluted my subconscious with a considerable number of neuroses and paranoias that I will likely take to my grave.

And so, as a teacher, I will speak this clearly to the participants in the Workshop thus far.  Well Done.

Well done on making some changes in your thinking and well done in taking a new tact with your ideas of dressing the dungeon room.  Well done in stretching yourselves.

Friday is fast approaching and I would encourage readers, including those who are only reading, to step forward and second, or "like," the material that others have presented, if you are inclined to do so.  It is very hard to put something out there and not have it approved of; let's be certain that if something falls short, it is because it deserves to do so, and NOT because a reader hasn't freely expressed their happy approval.

Give these workers some support!  They can use the confidence.