Life Changing or Career Building?

Education is a pain in the butt. It’s fun, satisfying and rewarding being taught, but in a class of students there’s always be a few who are unhappy with how things are being taught, or what they are being taught. I really don’t envy tutors in the slightest. The decision making as to how to teach students, as well as what’ll be more beneficial for them in the long run must be incredibly difficult.
Fundamentally, in my opinion it narrows down to providing the motivation and support to inspire a student to learn themselves – none of this spoon-feeding high school crap. It’s a large leap, but incredibly beneficial to everyday life.

Now a journey into the life of little Rachey-poos, or twinkle-toes, whichever.. A-level psychology, we were literally spoon-fed everything. One tutor would write down the entire lesson on the board, we’d sit the entire time copying his notes and expected to learn them that way. He was good at distractions and motivational life speeches, but giving us the motivation to go away and learn the notes? Not so much..
Another would give us a workbook per topic we did. Lessons would consist of filling in up til a certain page through copying from a book, then homework would be to do the same. Not learning, not motivating, not inspiring.
The third changed too many times I can’t remember how each of them taught – the other teachers  would joke her chair was cursed, as each tutor was either went on or was returning from maternity leave.

In reality – there isn’t necessarily any “choices” with teaching methods and providing the correct knowledge at university.. that was worded wrong. Correct knowledge is needed.. brain fart moment. But the providing of basic and fundamental technical knowledge is an essential part of learning – learn and master the basics, and from there you can manipulate and learn more from them. However, with a course such as Game Art learning “soft skills”, this referring to our personalities and personal traits, how we come across, is important to employability. We’re game artists – the majority of us are hermits drooling at the mouth when faced with stressful situations. We need to learn to be human for once in our lives. Once again – basics, which we can develop on ourselves. No one knows what skills we’ll need in the future, so only us as students can prepare ourselves for that by taking in the fundamental basics.
Education doesn’t solely rely on the tutors, and in modern days I feel they get a lot of beatings in regards to student grades and attendance – a tutor can only do so much, they can’t piggy-back us across the grade threshold because we tried and did a pretty picture. If we can do better, there’s no point pussyfooting around it.

Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers, whilst others claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background – a tricky dilemma as to what to focus on. And once again, I answer this by repeating myself – the sudent-tutor relationship relies on both parties participating to help one another. Show us the basics of each, then it’s up to us to seek out further information, or hell, just ask.