Introduction to decision‐making for graduate entrants

There is a lot of talk about participation and the discovery method of learning, but I have not found many people who actually put it into practice. I got on to my present line just by sitting through lectures and being bored: lectures which I had arranged myself and to which I was pretty sensitive. I used to hear the decibel count of coughs and shuffles mounting as the lecture went on, and I saw the glazed eyes and absent expressions multiplying. Yet I knew that much of what was being said was valuable. I got to thinking that there just had to be a better way of putting over the information. Then I noticed that the best parts of the lecture coincided with the illustrations, when the speaker used some practical example to explain his meaning in terms that everybody could understand. It came to me that perhaps I could take similar illustrations and build them up with realistic data so that course members could work their own way through them and discover their lessons for themselves. I did it, and it worked, and the exercises I build I now call models.