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Some days ago the path to learning a trade or profession was to become an apprentice. Whether you wanted to become a dentist, cook, or pilot, you found specialists in your field of interest and joined them as an entry-level assistant. Over many years, with enough aptitude, determination, and luck you might work your way up to becoming an expert. Eventually you could take on apprentices of your own, passing onto future generations the skills you learned and extended.
An apprenticeship is learning by doing - the gold standard of education. A thousand days of continuous exposure to PowerPoint slides about fixing the cavity in a tooth is no substitute for actually taking care about the patient's tooth in your office. Books and PowerPoint slides might help with dental treatment theory, which will be easier to understand then when the patient is real and the pain is real, too. The combination of theory in class and practice in labs or in the field has been embraced in almost every discipline.
To get a pilot's license, for example, one must spend time in ground school and in actual flight, and as well as passing both a written exam and a flight test. Prospective doctors spend countless hours in class followed by sleepless days and nights in a residency program actually treating patients.
Even for students who will not spend any time in laboratories after graduation, lab work is used extensively to extend knowledge and experience. Labs enable students to learn by doing in a controlled environment that is often not possible in the field, without the long-term commitment of an apprenticeship.
Labs along, however, may have some shortcomings. Time is always tight and there is often more emphasis on getting the right results than doing any real experimentation. Studying a process that takes a long time to occur cannot be done effectively only in a lab.
To avoid the limitations of labs yet still achieve learning by doing, RTEK 2000 instructors persuade students to complete the homework assignments. The homework allows students to experiment!
An apprentice develops intuition over many years by trying thousands of ways to do things and learning from his or her mistakes. Some of those mistakes produce the fortune that leads to advances in the field. As Albert Einstein said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
Intuition is what we really hope to develop in RTEK 2000 classrooms. By following just the books and step-by-step written lab instructions the students won't develop intuition. They have been told for years to follow the book, but not to develop intuition, not to find the one right answer. We don't religiously follow the student manuals, but try to open the minds, forcing to analyze rather just memorize.
At RTEK 2000, we establish our goal toward not only information transfer as it is but rather developing curiosity, enthusiasm, and the desire for knowledge in our students. It is why our graduates will not only survive in the real corporate IT environment but will flourish.
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