Should Electrical Tutors at FE colleges in the UK be mandated to complete a minimum of 1 week per year working in industry?

An interesting idea, and one that highlights a problem with scientific and technical education more generally; namely that a lot of teaching is approached as a stand-alone academic exercise, and the link to the real world is left for the student to make (not always successfully.) Having worked at a university, albeit in the last century, I often wondered how well it prepared students for the world they were about to meet, where real engineering problems don't turn up neatly packaged as pure mechanical problems on a Monday morning, pure maths on Tuesdays etc, but they are taught like, that by different people who never seem able to make their coverage of topics align.

Even at school it is rarely explained that the division between subjects is an arbitrary convenience for teaching and timetables- the muscles in the cat don't know or care if they are trigonometric, chemical or biological, but in reality to fully understand how one moves you need to stay awake in all 3 lessons. Similarly there are many events in history affected by geography, and the whole of physics is just there to describe the world/ universe, and the whole of maths is just there to predict it - you can't even sit in a chair without requiring Newtonian mechanics to work, even if you don't realise you are doing so.

I support the idea of getting those who teach, at all levels actually, to go and see how what they teach is really used. There are many ways to do this, not just by work experience, as it improves the quality of the essential similes and metaphors, as well as making it more relatable - 'you'll be able to use this knowledge to do XX' makes a lesson in  'XX' seem worth staying awake for.

Equally I can think of plenty of lecturers who I'd not want working on any real job, or at least not without some fairly close supervision.... I'm less sure about FE, but I suspect there is an element of the same. 

I'd certainly not limit the idea that 'getting out there is good'  just  to electron wrangling or indeed just to FE. Anyone who can say 'training and education' in one breath has probably not understood the distinction and there are often large gaps between them and then even wider gaps between either, and the world they are supposed to be describing.

Mike.

An interesting idea, and one that highlights a problem with scientific and technical education more generally; namely that a lot of teaching is approached as a stand-alone academic exercise, and the link to the real world is left for the student to make (not always successfully.) Having worked at a university, albeit in the last century, I often wondered how well it prepared students for the world they were about to meet, where real engineering problems don't turn up neatly packaged as pure mechanical problems on a Monday morning, pure maths on Tuesdays etc, but they are taught like, that by different people who never seem able to make their coverage of topics align.

Even at school it is rarely explained that the division between subjects is an arbitrary convenience for teaching and timetables- the muscles in the cat don't know or care if they are trigonometric, chemical or biological, but in reality to fully understand how one moves you need to stay awake in all 3 lessons. Similarly there are many events in history affected by geography, and the whole of physics is just there to describe the world/ universe, and the whole of maths is just there to predict it - you can't even sit in a chair without requiring Newtonian mechanics to work, even if you don't realise you are doing so.

I support the idea of getting those who teach, at all levels actually, to go and see how what they teach is really used. There are many ways to do this, not just by work experience, as it improves the quality of the essential similes and metaphors, as well as making it more relatable - 'you'll be able to use this knowledge to do XX' makes a lesson in  'XX' seem worth staying awake for.

Equally I can think of plenty of lecturers who I'd not want working on any real job, or at least not without some fairly close supervision.... I'm less sure about FE, but I suspect there is an element of the same. 

I'd certainly not limit the idea that 'getting out there is good'  just  to electron wrangling or indeed just to FE. Anyone who can say 'training and education' in one breath has probably not understood the distinction and there are often large gaps between them and then even wider gaps between either, and the world they are supposed to be describing.

Mike.