I disagree. You can gauge your interns' level of knowledge *while* having a lesson plan, and an insight on why it merits teaching in the first place; just showing up for a hard-arranged tutorial completely unprepared and willing to just 'wing it' because you totally think you know your stuff and can't be bothered to prepare a structure, let alone a topic, just doesn't cut it.
If you *really* want to ensure you don't tread on previously covered ground, you prepare a couple of topics, and allow the students to choose. You don't just show up with coffee.
Also, seriously, there was no *actual* need for the smug retort at the end there really, was there? What are we, twelve?
In all seriousness, there's an epidemic of clinicians who haven't done a day's worth of formal teaching-skills education in their lives, who suck in teaching as a result, but think they're hot stuff because they know their medicine well. And when the clinician is unable to transmit his ideas, the students / interns get blamed instead. To bring it back to the original article, it's worse than "just read the code", it's more like "just read the code that's in my head".
It is not the responsibility of the student to fix a broken lesson plan. For fuck’s sake, the entire point of having a teacher is that they know what the students need to learn and the students don’t!
This. I've lost count of the number of times as a medical student when I showed up in a pompous consultant's teaching session, (arranged with great difficulty, no less), and the first sentence was "So, what would you like me to teach you today?".
If I knew I'd have gone and read about it myself rather than waste time here with you, thank you very much you arrogant prick!
Religion and reality don't mix.
Am I missing something in your comment?
I don't see the role of religion here, or an insinuation in the article that there is religious motivation behind this.
The story is about the Saudi government wanting to contain outgoing information relating to its handling of an epidemic, and researchers criticising this attitude as dangerous to public health beyond Saudi borders, and drawing links to SARS etc.
Yes, it so happens that this epidemic has been kindled by the fact that there is an influx of people on a religious occasion, but it might as well have been an international proctologist conference as far as I care; I just don't see the religious link to the government's attitude to misinformation that you seem to be implying.
If anything, your comment smells more like a pre-programmed knee-jerk reaction rather than some sort of informed and well-constructed argument against religion. Talk about irony
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"