217 Chapter one, 2016, rainy days: 9 (1/2)

'That was way too close.'

With a sigh Ulf finished explaining the last problem and looked at the club members present. It seemed they hadn't caught up on his mistake. He guessed that as long as they believed the discrepancy between his real knowledge and his graded knowledge was a result of moving from Sweden to Japan, he was safe.

They wouldn't understand anyway. 'Damn, most people involved in tertiary education won't for that matter.'

Content before methods, and methods before context, or else the student would inevitably fail to create new contexts in which to try analysis. That was why he had forced the walking talking sessions onto the club.

'And it had bloody better not be either the one or the other,' Ulf thought as he walked over to a third whiteboard.

The Japanese education system excelled at content and pretty much nothing else. The Swedish counterpart lay at the opposite end on a scale of criminal incompetence, with a stubborn focus on methods without any content to apply them on.

Even an idealised aggregate of the two lacked a systematic application of context, even though Ulf believed Sweden was slightly better off. Those who gained understanding despite twelve years of sabotaged learning tended to have an easier time to apply knowledge and re-evaluate that very application. At least compared to what he had experienced from cooperation with Japanese software developers.

”What are you thinking?” Noriko asked from nowhere, and Ulf became aware he had been caught up in a world of his own.

”I'm thinking I'll make you the best of the best,” he answered.

”Best of the best? In what sense?” Noriko wondered.

Ulf looked at his short friend, who had just taken a break from running through some essential data on Japanese history. Essential for the upcoming exams that was. As far as he was concerned it was worse than a monkey see monkey do approach. There wasn't even any doing involved. The exam would test their ability to mimic high performance parrots.

”Knowledge, competence and experience,” Ulf said to give Noriko an answer. He knew he sounded cryptic, but the kids in the club needed to learn how to apply methods to their knowledge before anything else. Some of them already had, and come spring term he'd start giving them case studies to apply those methods on.

With a bit of luck the brightest of them would accuse him of being a first class moron when their second year started.

”You always have those easy three step solutions to everything,” Noriko said.

'They're models. Verbalised abstractions, but you wouldn't understand.' Not yet at least, but I count on you to call me moron soon.

From the whiteboard he had left he heard conversations in broken English, a broken English that was a vast improvement over the atrocity they had displayed half a year earlier.

'I'll give you your results old goat,' Ulf thought. 'Two percent overall for the midterms and I think we'll get closer to five after the finals.'

Because he had promised Nakagawa improved test results that day, when he was scolded for the locker room incident over half a year earlier. While a five percent improvement wasn't much the club members only had half a year to adapt to his alien views on learning.