Training and a Note to Self

I'm sitting in a class at the local city college, keeping my MS Access toasty warm, watching teachers teach and students study.

I've done my own bit of teaching software applications, not Access, but fairly complex programs to a wide range of levels of users, not completely unlike this scenario. I hope I do not teach in this way.

As an example of what I would consider a poor method of learning is the kind of rote intructions we are following with the regard to pivot tables. I know how to create a pivot table in Access and Excel but the majority of the class do not. I'm nort sure the majoroty of the class know what a pivot table is or what it does and the teacher is doing nothing to explain.

The teacher simply instruts the students to go to database tools, view the relationships, add the junction and additional tables, create the links between primary keys, but doesn't explain why, she simply keeps repeating that this is difficult stuff.

Obviously its difficult(-ish), but there's no need to make it more difficult to remember steps by not explaining why these steps are taken. There is no way to better way to prevent students from missing steps than explaining why a step needs to be taken and what the effects will be on future steps should a step be missed.