Poor teachers or poor students?
Based on the number of questions that say: “I’m taking a photography class and I’m totally lost/confused about f-stops and shutter speeds and how to use the meter” or some similar sentiment, one must wonder if the person teaching the class is that poor of a teacher or if the person taking the class is that poor of a student.
You may think I’m bragging here but I honestly believe that if I know something and you want to learn it I can teach it to you. From 1976 to 1982 I taught a basic photography/darkroom class – 3 hours for 6 Friday nights. It was intense – my students processed film at the 2nd. meeting.
Perhaps the people I taught were more motivated. I doubt it was because of my teaching ability. A lot was likely due to only having 8 to 10 students.
Addendum:
I taught mechanical drawing (drafting) at the 8th. & 9th. grade level for 2 years in the public schools.
No doubt there are some poor students, but I can say from experience that there are poor teachers too.
I recently did my second photography course. The first half of the course was bitterly disappointing for me, as the lecturer was masking his lack of content in the course by padding it out with jokes and long talks about his holidays which had no bearing on photography.We were learning nothing. In one three hour lecture, the only photographic content was 15 minutes on focus, the rest was his gibberish. It got to the point where I was intending to put in a formal complaint.
Suddenly it turned around, the content improved dramatically, he stopped the constant unfunny jokes. It was so dramatic that we could only presume that he had received a warning, so someone must have beat me to the complaint.
At the completion of the course, he suggested to me that I spend X dollars to do his photoshop course. I’ve seen his website (so have some of the others who frequent this section) and I can tell you that I could teach him a few things about photoshop. He does some very bad select color and some dodgy burning, that’s about it.
This guy runs course after course. Yes, there ARE bad teachers.
Film Photography – Darkroom Introduction
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