Re: Re: Pay for Learning LO1430

Barry Mallis (barry_mallis@powershare.markem.com)
30 May 1995 14:30:56 -0400

Replying to LO1402 --

To Ivan Blanco about pay for learning LO1402

WOW! Did you hit a raw nerve when you observed that
Still, paying for knowledge is for the most part a utopia, because we
don't have the "tools" to measure knowledge. Thus the reliance on
performance, and not on potential!

I taught students fourteen years at every level. From early on in my own
grade school life I wanted to be a teacher, and so I was very happy to
contribute in the classroom. Apparently I did a good job at it based upon
the reviews and evaluations of colleagues, supervisors and, most of all,
students.

But I left the profession when it couldn't support my growing family. And
I grew jaded over the years by the way in which incompetence and
incompetents peppered the teaching profession. Little could or would be
done about it. There was no MEASURE that would successfully address the
vague, foggy notions of product output--the student. Teachers were, in my
own experience, in a world unto themselves, rarely questioned in areas
where ego combined with content and delivery (form) for the edification of
students. Administrators were inured to this situation. Master teachers
were not recognized explicitly. Bell curve nicely rounded? Great!
Students attending classes, bodies in the classroom? Nice! Potential...?
Huh? Oh, that's too ephemeral a consideration. A teacher can't be judged
by that.

Anyway, I could rant on, but I won't for the sake of the poor reader. I
will say that the personal spleen vented here does in fact have a
connection to performance, potential, learning and organizations in the
business world. Our education system in the US has been in upheaval for
years now. The problems AND the successes perforce filter into the
workplace. But there, in the workplace, walk the people who lived through
our "education system" and survived. What do we suppose their memories of
learning are like? How do such memories affect their disposition toward
idea synthesis, toward risk-taking, toward honoring of ideas?

We live in an anti-intellectual country, IMHO. Not unintellectual, but
against intellect. I believe some of the burden is borne by our education
system.

The task we have in this group of correspondents is among other things to
find the chink in the wall so that work and thought may be shown to
benefit the individual as well as the organization; and that heart and
mind are best served by systems which honor ideas communicated. much good
will follow in this uncovering.

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside!
-Rumi

--
Barry Mallis                                 "The world is the closed door.
Total Quality Resource Manager     It is the barrier.  And
MARKEM Corporation                  at the same time it is
Keene, NH 03431                          the way through."
bmallis@markem.com