Teaching as an Amusing Activity

In Chapter 10: Teaching as an Amusing Activity, we read about how television is a type of learning. Postman goes on about how learning can be done outside of a classroom. He talks about the differences between learning from a television and learning in a classroom. A few differences that he talks about are how television shows have no prerequisites. This means a viewer can begin watching at anytime, even if he or she has not seen previous shows. Unlike TV, classroom learning often has prerequisites, for instance, one can't go from pre-calculus  right you calculus III. The student would be completely lost. Another point Postman addresses is that television has no perplexity. Unlike classroom learning, one does not have to study or remember anything that is on TV. Lastly, Postman points out that there is no exposition. You don't need to be concerned about hypotheses, arguments, or even discussions.

TV has opened up a whole new world of learning. This doesn't mean one should sit in front of a TV all day and expect to learn though. One thing that stuck out to me in this chapter was the line "the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns." My ag teacher in high school always told us the same thing. Kids would often complain and say things like "Why do I have to learn this? I'm never going to use it in life!" Mr. Hepburn would always say "You are right. You might not use it in life. It looks like a math problem to you, but you aren't learning the math. They are teaching you how to learn how to do math." He tried to explain that the math was not the important part of it. How we learned how to used our brains was what really mattered.