Expanded rules for Learning/Teaching

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by onetrikpony

I wouldn't choose to argue with you but I'd just point out that; per GURPS, Shotokan is a (HARD) skill, and I agree.

Sure. But my point is not that I progressed to a lower level than I would have in an easier fighting skill. My point is that I made, as far as I can tell, NO progress at all; and the fact that my teachers never suggested that I try for the first belt exam suggests that they thought so too. As for their capabilities, the senior teacher was Hidetaka Nishiyama, who I believe was 8th dan, and who had taught a lot of people, including the junior teacher; I don't think the explanation lies in his not being any good—especially when the fellow student who encouraged me to sign up made about one belt a quarter for quite some time.

In other words, my point is that different people will learn different things at different rates. Mathematics was a much easier skill for me to learn than martial arts; you seemingly found the reverse to be true. I don't think either of us can judge how hard different skills are by our own attempts to learn them.

[D10]

I really recommend reading Social Engineering: Back to School

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by onetrikpony

I've taught guys (and a couple of wives) to do what I do with fair competence in less than months and without full time supervision. Those things would be auto mechanics, construction trades and equipment operation.

How can you have taught all those things if you are a onetrikpony? Hmm? ;)

[EarthStone]

Ok, I've finally had time to thoroughly read through Back to School (hey, I was stuck at work for 9 days straight, not much time for extra activities) and I've got a few things to say about it...

Mr. Stoddard, that's a fine piece of writing you've got there. It thoroughly covers all aspects of the subject that I'd ever want, and gave me some ideas for things to add to my campaign. I highly recommend it to anyone running anything more than a hack-and-slash, give-the-innkeeper-a-gold-piece-and-ask-him-where-the-dungeon-is type campaign.

That said, I've got a bone to pick with you.

The entire reason I started this, created the now-aborted pages I posted in my OP, purchased and first-skimmed then-read, then-studied Back to School was to find the answer to the question, "Why would anyone ever pay to hire a teacher with skill better than 12?"

All the regular books give Teaching as either skill 12 = 200 hours or Intensive Training -also skill 12- (plus other things) = 100 hours.
A fast skim of Back to School shows that higher skill level gives the ability to teach larger class sizes.
Even a quick read of it says the same thing... unless you're making rolls as the teacher and crit success adds to the hours students learn, but also crit failures subtract from them. Doing the math, average rolls for skill 12 actually come out worse for the student.

Finally FINALLY, it took a thorough reading to find, buried on page 27, in a side box titled The Price of Instruction, at the end of the second paragraph, just before a chart talking about wages, a single sentence stating how having higher efective skill can add to the learning speed of students +10%, +20% or +40% for skills 15, 18, & 21 respectively.

Thank you for including that... and may your cat knock over a full glass of ice tea onto your keyboard for hiding it with such a high concealment roll.

My other disappointment (minor though it is compared to the first) is that you put no limit on the hours of study or practice that get the benefit of the teaching bonus (unless that too is hidden somewhere - I admit I didn't search for it as exhaustively as I did the other). A student could pay for a single one-hour class once a month and claim the teaching bonus towards his 149 hours of study the rest of the month. In my campaign at least I'll be limiting it to 4 hours study/practice for each hour spent with a teacher.

My players are located in the (second) worst part of the city where they've been taught mostly one-on-one (or one teacher with just them) as there are no schools of any type...
... Now to see about designing actual schools and academies in the other parts of the city that they might hear about and decide to go check out.

Thanks again for the great inspiration.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by whswhs

This idea, that "formal study" means that you have a teacher supervising what you do throughout your study time, is not what Back to School says, and to the best of my judgment, it is not what the Basic Set assumes.

The Basic Set puts a college semester at 21 weeks (unrealistically long, but let's grant it and do the analysis) and a typical course at three hours a week in the classroom. That's 63 weeks, far short of the 200 hours you need to gain a point. But the Basic Set lets a college semester course give you a point. If you go with 3 hours of work for each class hour, that's 189 hours; 4 hours of work makes it 252 hours—either of which is close enough to approximate 200 hours. But obviously you are not being personally supervised by your professor or TA all of that time, nor even sitting in a classroom with them! Therefore, the Basic Set must be assuming that if you meet regularly with an instructor, you are doing "formal study" even if the majority of your work is hitting the books or practicing, by yourself or with another student who's equally ignorant.

As for individual variability, I picked up a book containing a math review for adults when I was in third grade, and after reading that section, I could do arithmetic and some first year algebra (I didn't get quadratics that early). On the other hand, I had a couple of quarters of shotokan when I was in college, and at the end I had no more martial arts skill than when I started, and the instructor had never suggested that I take the exam for the first belt. Different people find learning different things easy or hard.

The GURPS rules are intended to be a gamable average. If you want more than that, the first thing I'd suggest is looking at the rules for how Talent affects learning.

Talent AND anti-talent too can both factor in this equation... The Misfit wont be able to fast talk even if trained by CIA spies

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Sure. But my point is not that I progressed to a lower level than I would have in an easier fighting skill. My point is that I made, as far as I can tell, NO progress at all; and the fact that my teachers never suggested that I try for the first belt exam suggests that they thought so too. As for their capabilities, the senior teacher was Hidetaka Nishiyama, who I believe was 8th dan, and who had taught a lot of people, including the junior teacher; I don't think the explanation lies in his not being any good—especially when the fellow student who encouraged me to sign up made about one belt a quarter for quite some time.

In other words, my point is that different people will learn different things at different rates. Mathematics was a much easier skill for me to learn than martial arts; you seemingly found the reverse to be true. I don't think either of us can judge how hard different skills are by our own attempts to learn them.

Originally Posted by Social Engeneering: Back to School pag 6

It’s generally fair to count skill rolls during adventures as
“under stress.” This includes default rolls, which can let you gain a new skill while adventuring. However, if you can keep trying without costs or penalties, aren’t under time pressure, or receive a bonus for extra time (p. B346) or favorable circumstances (p. B171), you aren’t under enough stress for such rapid learning.

So, bonus CP can work like intensive learning.

As for the capacity to learn, Talent and Anti-Talent (Power Ups 3) cover that

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by EarthStone

Ok, I've finally had time to thoroughly read through Back to School (hey, I was stuck at work for 9 days straight, not much time for extra activities) and I've got a few things to say about it...

Mr. Stoddard, that's a fine piece of writing you've got there. It thoroughly covers all aspects of the subject that I'd ever want, and gave me some ideas for things to add to my campaign. I highly recommend it to anyone running anything more than a hack-and-slash, give-the-innkeeper-a-gold-piece-and-ask-him-where-the-dungeon-is type campaign.

That said, I've got a bone to pick with you.

The entire reason I started this, created the now-aborted pages I posted in my OP, purchased and first-skimmed then-read, then-studied Back to School was to find the answer to the question, "Why would anyone ever pay to hire a teacher with skill better than 12?"

All the regular books give Teaching as either skill 12 = 200 hours or Intensive Training -also skill 12- (plus other things) = 100 hours.
A fast skim of Back to School shows that higher skill level gives the ability to teach larger class sizes.
Even a quick read of it says the same thing... unless you're making rolls as the teacher and crit success adds to the hours students learn, but also crit failures subtract from them. Doing the math, average rolls for skill 12 actually come out worse for the student.

Finally FINALLY, it took a thorough reading to find, buried on page 27, in a side box titled The Price of Instruction, at the end of the second paragraph, just before a chart talking about wages, a single sentence stating how having higher efective skill can add to the learning speed of students +10%, +20% or +40% for skills 15, 18, & 21 respectively.

Thank you for including that... and may your cat knock over a full glass of ice tea onto your keyboard for hiding it with such a high concealment roll.

My other disappointment (minor though it is compared to the first) is that you put no limit on the hours of study or practice that get the benefit of the teaching bonus (unless that too is hidden somewhere - I admit I didn't search for it as exhaustively as I did the other). A student could pay for a single one-hour class once a month and claim the teaching bonus towards his 149 hours of study the rest of the month. In my campaign at least I'll be limiting it to 4 hours study/practice for each hour spent with a teacher.

Well, yes and no. You can claim the teaching bonus if you are engaged in "taking a class" and not "self-study." There isn't an explicit rule for how many hours you have to spend with a teacher to qualify. But the usual example is 1 hour in the classroom going with 2-3 outside to earn college credit. So the GM is free to apply their judgment and say "This particular setup counts as taking a class, but this other doesn't." I wasn't trying to come up with a detailed algorithm for calculating how many hours of what activity give you your 200 hours equivalent, because there are just too many ways to do that.

For example, there's the Oxford tutorial, which, if I understand it correctly, has you spend an hour in your tutor's study, go away, spend some 15 hours over the course of a week or two reading up on a topic and writing an essay about it, and then bringing it back for the tutor to spend an hour critiquing it. It actually kind of looked to me as if that was the equivalent of intensive training, but as an intellectual rather than physical activity. But I haven't experienced it, so I don't really know.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Deborah Jackson

To be a good teacher, you need a good education.

It depends on what you're teaching. At the very least, you need to know more than your students, but you also need to understand how people learn and retain information, as well as lots of different methods of making the information you're teaching comprehensible to people with various learning styles.

I've met pre-school teachers who I'm sure chose the profession because they enjoyed being among their intellectual equals, but they're usually fantastic at dealing with packs of 20+ semi-feral house apes 8+ hours a day without resorting to drugs or violence.

In GURPS terms, that's modest or specialized Teaching skill with a heavy dose of PS (Early Childhood Development/Childcare). At that level, it's not so much what you know so much as "teaching how to learn." Getting the kiddos to sit down, focus, and make construction paper collages without cutting themselves on the safety scissors or eating the glue eventually gives them the skills to sit in one place for hours doing math homework, or creating spreadsheets to automate the monthly TPS reports.

At the other end of the educational arc, a hypothetical Oxbridge don running tutorials is going to be fine-tuning an advanced, and presumably highly motivated, student's subject matter expertise. ("Read Blagg's "Early Hittite Paleography" to get a sense of what the late Bronze Age Anatolian scriptural forms were like, but ignore his historiography, which is dated and mired in Neo-Marxism.")

In those cases, you might have modest (sometimes negligible) Teaching skill, but high skill in the subject matter being taught. Dr. Oxbridge might be brilliant at teaching other brilliant people to be more brilliant, but he'll fall down badly at helping the less brilliant and motivated stay on track or improve, or even noticing when a student is struggling.

College instructors cursed to win teaching awards rather than grants will have high Teaching skill and will get most of their students inspired to pay attention, enjoy the subject matter, pass the course, and remember the material, but at the expense of hours spent in the office or lab grinding out professionally relevant material. That's Teaching at the expense of improved subject matter skill.

Dr. "I've got tenure, but my students come first," will be the rarest of birds with high skills in both Teaching and the core subject matter. There's always a wait list to get into their undergrad courses and grad students consider performing the most depraved criminal acts in order to get Dr. IGTBMSCF as their thesis advisor.

[JulianLW]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

It depends on what you're teaching.

I'm pretty sure the last two posters on this thread before you are bots.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by JulianLW

I'm pretty sure the last two posters on this thread before you are bots.

I would guess the last three. The first of those three looks more botlike than the two that follow it . . .