permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

So many different subject headings are cropping up, it's a little hard to
know what to label my responses. I'll take a bit of a shotgun approach here.
First, I want to agree wholeheartedly with what my buddy Larry Santoyo says;
I particularly enjoyed

> Never have I heard from the person who just went through the energy
> outputs of organizing a course, to go on to ask for less money next
> time!

That's the real world speaking there.

D.A. Riley wrote:

> Perhaps we can find an cooperative method
> to select, and support, a crew of PDC teachers to tour
> the countries offering no-fee PDC training.

Interesting idea. I'll be there would be grants or some kind of finding to
pay the teachers' wages. But it's not just the teachers that need support.
At each course site, money would have to be raised to compensate those who
prepare the site for the course, and for the materials (showers, toilets,
kitchen, classroom) or pay the venue for use of same. Then there's food and
lodging for participants. It's quite an undertaking; only 1/3 of the fees go
to teachers. Like Larry says, free is not sustainable.

On 3/8/05 4:04 PM, "Lisa MacIver" <lisamaciver8@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I find it interesting that there is so much discussion about the
> certification of instructors and the number of days in the course,
> but little about anything being required of the students, other than
> their presence for those days (and the design project).  As long as
> essentially everyone passes just by being there, I'm not sure the
> PDC means anything at all.

All it means is that the certificate holder has been exposed to the ideas.
It's just an introduction, and it means about the same as saying you¹ve
passed Biology 101--you have been introduced to the ideas but you're not
much of a biologist yet. A PDC is essentially a pass/fail course. The
instructor has a very good idea of who has a grasp of the material, since
the format is so intimate (at least in most courses, which are less than 25
people). And the design project, the way I was taught to do it, really
reveals who gets it and who doesn't. I have withheld certificates from
people who I don't feel have put much energy into learning the material.

Pc learning is more like graduate school than elementary school: there are
few tests, and it's up to your advisor/mentor to decide whether your work
measures up. But I agree that more objective standards would be an
improvement. (In grad school, too, if your advisor hates you, you're in
trouble!)

Toby
www.patternliteracy.com