For me Saturday mornings used to mean, cartoon overload. Not anymore, not because I no longer watch toons, but because the ones on Saturday morning mostly suck. Nowadays this morning is for America's Test Kitchen or Cook's Country, whichever one is showing at the time. They are both are hosted by Chris Kimball on PBS.
I'm not always a big fan of what they're cooking, but I've a learned a lot from the processes & techniques they've utilized. I like cooking shows that give me methods, techniques & formulas more than ones that just give me recipes. Alton Brown's, Good Eats, used to be like this & it was really enjoyable. Later on Alton got weirdly gaunt & attitudinal.
That's my take on learning. People shouldn't focus on teaching trivia & factoids. They should focus on the hows & whys of learning. They should give people the tools to go out & continue their learning on their own. Teachers should instruct their students on how to be self-taught, self-evaluating & capable of continuing on past the typical classroom environment.
I taught Sociology. It was always more important to me that my students could construct good essays, perform research & present strong arguments about the topics being discussed in class. I was less worried about whether or not they could memorize the definition of a sociological concept or theory, than if they could apply the information they were learning. If you need to define something, that's what a dictionary is for, not to mention a library or the internet. Too bad, that wasn't how the university saw it.
I was more interested in teaching them methods they could take with them into whatever discipline they pursued. My superiors were interested in how many definitions they could spew out like a cheap slot machine. Any monkey can learn to memorize something. I wanted my students to be more evolved than your average simian. So please, give me more books, web-sites or TV shows that go pass the base information in such a way that I can continue to grow with it.
Cya
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