I've never met a professional who doesn't lament the incapacity or percieved stupidity of thier clients. Obviously some of those professionals are nasty spiteful human beings who hinder rather than help but for some of us it's just venting and it doesn't detract from our ability to provide what people need. Now Than is either a moron who's in teaching just for the money and the and to feel intellectually superior or he's expressing anxiety mixed with flippancy, not unprofessional just honest really and if we can't rant a little to our peers in a safe environment where can we? It also struck me as self referential, Than has described himself as being a 14 year old in a mans body a number of times over the last few posts so I thought of it as a coping strategy / term of endearment rather than a slur.
The whole "if they don't want to learn you can't make them" thing is a little bit of a mis-apprehension, in School I had terrible confidence issues and had no real faith in my ability to produce good work that coupled with lazyness landed me in middling to low classes. To explain in Scotland we had a foundation, general and credit class system with a distinct syllabus and some cross-over in intermediary classes. I was in a general class for English and foundation classes for both maths and German but once teachers took the time to look over my work and see that I wasn't stupid or lazy they, the ones that cared at least, spoke to me and took away some anxiety and said that it was a shame to waste talent and that I was failing them and myself and they needed to see me do better, my work drastically improved after that. The only downside what that with German and Maths the way the system worked there were huge barriers in learning a level up in a what was by that time a limited timescale so I didn't do as well as I could have if I'd been given free access to all of the teaching before hand, English was easy though. The other thing that was a major stumbling block looking back was my mothers atitude, neither she or her parents plced much value on academic achivements so her personal inability became mythologised into 'we as a family don't do maths and we're proud of that' a bit like Spartans but infinately more crap. I suppose that boils down to 'look for the student behind the familial detritus.' if you want them to pay attention perhaps making a series of machininima exploring the application of mathmatical principles to solve issues versus just being a dumbass would help.
The other thing is that we have a compulsion to learn, whether it's academic or junk culture humans constantly consume information so it's really not true to say that if someone doesn't want to learn they won't learn they're probably just learning about something irrelevant to the environment they're in. It's a matter of finding what the key is to get them to enjoy learning about the things that take them forwards, for me it was about confidence and feeding ego but it's different for all of us. The current school paradigm is great for mass dissemination of information but just by nature it stifles a huge amount of the potential for personally tailoring a students education and developing thier abilities. I know that sounds a bit pompus and I really ought to come up with my view of an alternative but I'm not immediatley sure for one thing and for another I was taught using an imperfect system so my ability to abstract has been stunted. (That last part was slightly tongue in cheek but there is a school of thought that describes that sentiment, I'm too busy to refresh myself on the ins and outs of it though)
I agree with KMD I use maths all the time and I've had to teach myself or re-learn a massive amount of things I didn't learn or otherwise didn't engage me at School, life would be easier in a number of small but important ways if I had knucled down a bit .
