teaching technique

Coming to Terms
It's true for any subject that it's basically impossible to teach and learn about a topic unless there's a shared set of terms that everyone understands and can agree about what they mean.  I've thought about that fact a lot in developing a course for university students about watershaping, or what I'm most often calling "water architecture" these days. With watershaping as a subject, that sounds simple enough.  After all, we all know the meaning of "swimming pool," "fountain" and "pond."  Or do we? I'm not so sure anymore.  When I started breaking down our vocabulary for classroom use, I quickly recognized that the meanings of the words we use are anything but clear.  Indeed, the more I dug into this seemingly simple phase of curriculum development, the murkier things became.The difficulty I ran into was this:  Once I moved past the most rudimentary sets of terms and definitions and looked closely at the language we use to describe what we produce, it became painfully obvious to me that
Coming to Terms
It's true for any subject that it's basically impossible to teach and learn about a topic unless there's a shared set of terms that everyone understands and can agree about what they mean.  I've thought about that fact a lot in developing a course for university students about watershaping, or what I'm most often calling "water architecture" these days. With watershaping as a subject, that sounds simple enough.  After all, we all know the meaning of "swimming pool," "fountain" and "pond."  Or do we? I'm not so sure anymore.  When I started breaking down our vocabulary for classroom use, I quickly recognized that the meanings of the words we use are anything but clear.  Indeed, the more I dug into this seemingly simple phase of curriculum development, the murkier things became.The difficulty I ran into was this:  Once I moved past the most rudimentary sets of terms and definitions and looked closely at the language we use to describe what we produce, it became painfully obvious to me that