#1 daughter and the Good Old Boy came over for dinner last night. It felt enough like fall that I made scalloped potatoes with ham, plus a vegetable salad and fresh pineapple. It was nice having them over — lots of conversation and they brough their little dog to play with our dogs, so everyone had fun. The GOB and my husband shared stories about corporal punishment in schools back home — Laos for my husband, Texas for the GOB.
Earlier, #1 daughter and I had been talking about education. We have a client who offers classroom training for business, who is planning to shift over to consulting. He figures classroom training is going the way of the dodo. Information, he says, will soon all be online, so they’ll have nothing to offer.
I’m not convinced. I thought immediately of my Craftsy tailoring class, which I paid for and started over a year ago. I successfully cut out the project — and stopped. If I had taken that class with a human teacher, you know I’d have learned tailoring by now.
Or the tray above. I tried cleaning off the tarnish, on the theory that it could conceivably be silver, but it couldn’t be done, even with a lot of silver polish. At that point, I went online and tried to find out a) what it’s actually made of, b) how to clean it, and c) what else could be done with it.
I’m good at finding stuff online, but I couldn’t find that. I smeared some metallic paint on it and wiped most of it off, intending thereby to make the tarnish and staining look intriguing rather than just dirty. But I digress.
#1 daughter said that people whowant to learn will learn on their own and the internet has made it way easier than it used to be. People who have to be hauled through learning don’t belong in classes anyway.
I thought of my students, many of whom miss classes and one of whom slept all the way through class on Friday, even though we group work and pair work.
I suppose she could be right.
What about gym classes, though? Music lessons? I guess you could make the case that those things are more about coaching that classes, and perhaps that’s just why our client needs to change.