I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school.
I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.
Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.
As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.
I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.
I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.
Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.
A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.
I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.
I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".
We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.
I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.
Some of it was diagnosed ADHD (I was on Ritalin; I couldn't tell the difference, but my mom said it was huge; on almost every day I forgot to take it she would get a call from the school about my behavior), but much of it is something I still can't explain to this day.
I was a voracious reader, but if the book was assigned for school, I wouldn't read it.
Science was usually my best subject, but my personality clashed with my 5th grade teacher, so I spent one quarter of 5th grade just not doing it at all. As in when it was time for science, I read a book I had brought from home instead of participating. I did absolutely no work. I didn't even turn in the homework and I handed in blank pages for the in-class work. I received a D (the lowest passing grade) for that quarter, which rather confused me.
For 7th grade, I tested into Algebra, but at the time a teacher recommendation was also needed, and my 6th grade teacher declined to do so. I got a D in pre-algebra, with a B+ test-average being pulled down by my homework (or lack of it). I did however teach myself lock raking with a 5-pin lock that was on the file-cabinet in the back of the class.
I had the flu when I took the SATs so got what was (for me) a poor score. My guidance counselor told me that there was no need to retake, as no schools that wanted a higher SAT would take me with my GPA as low as it was.
It took me 11 semesters and two summer sessions to finish college with a 2.2 GPA.
Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.
I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.
I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.
Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.
I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)
St. Olaf College for those wondering.
Different people grasp things at different rates.
I am 30 now and I realized that it was very much of ADHD symptoms. I am just an edge case of college education.
However, by genetics and mathematics we know that in every classroom, there are tons of “edge cases” from different perspectives.
But, I think teaching skills, juuuust like any other skills can be taught and improved. So if we want good teachers and educators we need to build them up, not just relie on a few good ones to carry the day.
I personally reject the notion of competency in this as a matter of "giftedness", as something you either have or don't have. I think it's something you cam build. It's something you can teach. But you need to specifically aim for it.
…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.
> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence
What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.
So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.
I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.
There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.
If the really gifted are documenting their lessons and publishing the framework other really good teachers can pickup where they left off.
Having those curriculums in a standard format would go a long way to making components interchangeable and remixable.
Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)
But I believe your point is great — we usually focus on average vs non-average student, and you are absolutely right that we need to focus on an average teacher just the same: what is the most effective way for a possibly non-motivated, less capable teacher to provide instruction with?
you either struggle to pay the bills and teach -- a thankless job, often -- or you take those gifts and double your pay working in industry.
This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.
Before jumping to conclusions, maybe ask for context too? In particular, this was a high school for gifted math kids, and what I learned through regular classes let me pass math uni entrance exam in the top 10 (out of ~500 students) with no extra prep and even easily pass a couple of semesters of uni math with almost no prep (I took exams for two semesters after the first semester). My (lack of) working habits did catch up to me after that.
Also, for 4 years in two uni degrees, I did not get such a good teacher ever again, and there were a few who were easy to get great grades with.
Perhaps you can give some benefit of the doubt, though?
“Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.
I've responded to them directly what that got me (like great uni entry exam scores with literally zero prep for a maths program, and a couple of semesters of exam passing with minimal prep for a maths/CS/physics majors).
On top of that, I am talking of this almost 30 years later — perhaps I have some perspective and I am not a fresh out of school guy who just loves getting off the hook easy?
This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.
And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.
The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.
I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well rounded education is important, but it's still a lot of stuff that a lot of students don't want to do.
Graduate school is more fun, and in some senses kind of easier (for want of a better word). Sure, the work is "harder" on an objective level, but by the time you've made it to grad school you're probably studying a subject that you think is interesting, so you don't mind powering through the hard parts.
At least that's how it was for me.
That is the problem. It should not be forced. People naturally love learning and its a matter of facilitating that. Not going into details here as I have recent comments on this and other threads:
I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.
I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.
Kids aren't just a blob of flesh that will some day become an adult. People don't take them seriously as individuals, but they should. That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.
> I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.
My kids learned to read without being forced. They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards. As far as they were concerned it was guessing game. Then on to reading books together designed for more whole word recognition, which is reading guns stories. I wrote a blog post about it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/educating-lucy-learning
> I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.
You can explain to a 14 year old. My kids had been out of school for years at that age and I had not had to force them to do anything. A teenager is perfectly capable of understanding that in order to achieve somethings they have to do other things. If they want a particular career you explain that as well as the interesting things they have to do some less interesting things. If they want to study a particular subject to a higher level they have to meet entrance requirements.
> You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.
Sometimes, but rarely with learning. The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.
And no, something being useful and relevant does not make it interesting on itself. Even if you know it is useful you can just dislike having to learn it.
If you know its useful you are still motived. if you are motivated overall you will develop the discipline to get through what you do not find interesting and put the work in. it avoids situations like this from the first comment in this thread: "they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade."
Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.
I find it very frustrating that people just refuse to believe there cannot be a better way to do things despite all the evidence (many, many academic studies) and the experience of people who have tried doing something different.
> If you cannot compare costs per unit
You are missing the point. You can make learning to do these things fun so kids want to do it. They will find a need for basic arithmetic to do something else and learn at that point.
> do not understand basic biology
Why not? Lots of people do not know basic biology after going through the school system.
> or cannot compare evidence
Why would someone who follows interests not be able to compare evidence? Every field has arguments and requires evidence.
For all these, my experience (and the available more formal evidence) is that allowing kids to follow interests (with guidance, help, suggestions as required) leads to far better results than forcing them to sit through a rigid and boring curriculum.
I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.
But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.
While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?
The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action. And not from the school, from parents. Bad grades should result in punishment. It’s should be the parent’s job to find what motivates their kid to perform under those circumstances. Being grounded, withholding allowance, reducing screen time, whatever your child responds to. The entire issue is rooted in a parenting problem. The education system wants a silver bullet solution that can ignore that but it is pretty constant.
It its full generality that's probably true, but we probably don't fully appreciate how the classical school system kills interest. I've met many 6 year olds that were so curious about the world, you could tell them stuff about any subject and they would soak it up and ask for more. 2 years later, shaped by a school system that focuses on grading and pressure, and their interest in anything had tanked. It was very sad to see.
Maybe trying to avoid killing that natural curiosity would be a useful step in improving things.
> The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action.
I don't know if you forgot a negation somewhere. That's completely unsuitable to create interest, it fosters hate with a passion for subjects and school in general. I know it did for me.
At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.
I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.
Some families will decide to push harder, A's and AP classes are required, full effort in academics at all times. Some families will decide every assignment has to be completed and A's and B's with maybe an occasional C in a very hard class is acceptable and the student is left some bandwidth for social/non-academics. Some families take a simple pass/fail, as long as the kid finds a way to pass then they are good. So on...
The throughline is the parents are involved and monitoring the whole school year. Is homework being completed, how are your grades, talk to teachers when needed, etc. I feel this basic parenting is no longer common, parents want to blame the education system without taking any responsibility.
Sure we can incrementally improve education along the way, but we have to have a good faith expectation and base line of participation as a foundation or nothing will work.
Kids lose their curiosity because they witness their peers goofing around and not taking it serious. So if my friend's parents don't care and he's allowed to goof around instead of putting in the work, then I get a sense of FOMO or feel like a sucker for putting in the work. So everything devolves to the lowest common denominator. There's a lot more group dynamics and kids obviously don't know what is best for them, so adults really need to tell them what is expected. It's amazing how quickly a class elevates when you remove 1-2 distractions and likewise when the whole class is engaged and there is no distraction to begin with, it's ideal.
Just like you can only make your lecture so interesting, a parent can only punish their child so much until the child has nothing to lose anymore or their choice becomes boredom with effort VS boredom.
Both sides should do their part for best results.
This time of year there's always a wave of videos that hit the internet that are basically outraged parents that their kids are not passing the year or graduating. The fact they are surprised by this at the end of the school year is usually not a lack of effort on the school's part and I feel this is a good indication of how aware/engaged many parents are.
The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".
Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.
It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.
> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.
> [...] isn't interested in learning.
I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.
No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.
You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.
This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).
I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.
I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.
So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.
And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.
This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.
It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?
If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.
Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.
"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "
Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.
While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically?
When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based learning group nor the traditional schooling group - which performed better and by what metrics?
---
It seems silly to say "This group who was instructed to rote memorize material could indeed perform better on a direct memory recall examination." and then close the door on problem-based learning.
When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).
To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.
https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/no-explicit-instruc...
Why? At least for me, focused goals motivate more than diffuse ones. I could treat "the humanities" as a bunch of focused goals, but there would be a large number of them. That takes a fair amount of motivation.
Younger children will conform more easily to e.g. structured education, teacher / parent authority, and basically do what they are told/asked to do. But at college / uni ages, you're dealing with young adults, some of which are only doing an education still because it's expected of them by parents/society. Or even when they want to be there, the motivation to do the work may not be there. yet.
It's difficult because their brain is still at high learning capacity, so one has to capitalize on that. But they also have other interests, like sleeping until midday and spacing out for ages.
The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.
Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.
Unless it's changed since I was active, The Carpentries does not monetize content.
Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.
Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.
I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?
This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.
No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.
I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).
Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.
I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.
Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.
Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.
It's the circle of liiiiiife......
What did tutored students go on to do? Were they over represented in Nobel Prizes, hedge fund billionaires, heads of state?
Or did they do well on a meaningless test and then forget all about whatever they “learned” just like everyone else?
The entire field is absolutely littered with this problem. Everyone is targeting cholesterol and not all cause mortality.
Humanity is now preparing students with a 20 year time horizon, while tech changes much faster. If this was agriculture, the industry would be doomed by that horizon mismatch.
We really need more teachers, if we want the median citizen to be better off.
Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.
There are some early products around:
Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others
But primary education needs to be a requirement for every child. Coming from a country with a large illiterate population, it's easy to see how hard their lives are compared to folks with an education but similar socio-economic backgrounds.
Now obviously implementing universal primary education and the details can be debated and need to be context specific.
Makes a lot of teacher not want to be there too!
The schools also have little interest in spending time and money on the higher performing students. They teach the minimum and focus resources on the failing ones to raise school averages.
Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.
Hilarious assertion.
Absolutely false in my experience.
Someone who just starts to learn in college will be years behind the students who began in high school. They probably mistake it for not “being good at” a subject, but it can really keep people away from some areas. For example, hard sciences and math, where years of training problem solving skills makes solving new problems easy.
Not saying all primary/secondary education is good, but there is a massive gap between the good and the bad.
The phrase "real learning" is hard to define but I think I understand what you mean here, ie critical thinking. But this is only possible on the back of foundational literacy possible by years of primary education.
> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.
Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education. Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers. The kids might not want to be there for a variety of reasons, but if you've ever interacted with kids informally you'll know they are typically curious and eager to learn about the world around them.
And if they aren't the reasons need to be understood and the kids would ideally be provided the care they need, although there reality is far more complex.
This exception does not invalidate the basic premise of primary education, the benefits of which can be seen globally in pretty much every context.
I have yet to see a suggestion on how to do that, that isn't obviously unworkable.
> Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers.
It is not teachers I worry about, it is the other students. Peer pressure matters and so put kids who want to be there with kids that don't and some kids will decide they don't want to either. (the reverse is also true, but there is no way to know and I wouldn't risk my kids who like school in an area where many kids don't want to be there)
But to the original point I was trying to make, troubled kids don't automatically mean they don't deserve education or we should allow them to fail out or give them the option of leaving primary or secondary education. We should really be making every attempt at figuring out ways to make them stay in school, given how stark the difference in outcomes are.
Looking back I am extremely appreciative of my time in school as much as I might've not liked it at the time, and my education has undoubtedly made me into a more intelligent and capable person in pretty much every conceivable way. Especially high school, pretty much everyone I know who's a high school dropout (and doesn't come from a wealthy family) is much worse off than their peers who finished it.
As for tertiary education, that is already completely optional. I attended university for 1 year, said "This ain't for me", and things worked out just fine for me.
You are probably right that most kids do not want to be in school, however most kids love learning. They do not have to learn in school.
Not do schools have to teach they way they do, and if they were more fun and interesting the kids would want to be there.
> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.
But good luck reversing that trend.
"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"
To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.
But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.
I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.
I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.
I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.
> They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.
Then they should not be there. That is the fundamental problem. Especially at that level why is anyone there who is not even motivated enough to study? Someone might not like ever undergraduate level course they need for a degree, but they should be able to push themselves through the boring stuff.
At school level, its difficult to make things work in a classroom setting with a fixed curriculum. Once I took my kids out of school they largely learned what they found interesting until they started studying towards doing exams. I made sure they learned core skills around reading, writing and maths, but they still had a say in what to do and how. A lot of it can be done by pursuing other subjects or hobbies. With the exams they had a choice (discussed, and they had to do maths and English language) but they had a choice) of what subjects to do and made choices that suited them, including some less common subjects (such as astronomy and Latin). Again, motivated and requiring very little actual teaching (they both entirely taught themselves Latin, and did other subjects with minimal help - although we did have tutors for English literature and classical civilisation, and varying amounts of parental help with other subjects).
A lot of the best universities (in the UK, at least) have tutorial systems that rely heavily on small groups rather than lectures (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews - that I know of). A lot more individual attention is a long proven method of getting better results.
At school level it might look very expensive, but that is balanced by needing a lot less time per student. A few hours of one to one a week is cheaper than school.
Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.
There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.
All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.
Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.
Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.
> The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have.
Do they actually have it? Do you think schools that have fixed a fixed curriculum are successful at teaching this to everyone? Try picking some average people and asking them to explain Boyles Law, or why and how Rome became an Empire or the causes of the Second World War.
Is the level of minimal knowledge the same for everyone regardless of talents? Some kids will know before they are teenagers than most adults ever will about any of the topics picked, and many more.
I am confused about why you think knowing Latin somehow excludes knowing history of physics or biology.
You are arguing from a position of not having an experience of eduction outside the school classroom setting. I am speaking from experience and from having actually read up on the evidence.
You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.
I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.
Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades.
I eventually more or less figured out how to force myself to learn things I didn't care about, and I did eventually get my bachelors and a masters, but that wasn't until my 30's.
Honestly, these are the most important things to learn. I spend a lot of time with my kids talking about ways to get your brain to do what you want.
I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?
Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?
I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?
To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.
It's a side effect, perhaps, of the modern "main character syndrome". An electrician doesn't need political "leadership". He needs to know how to wire a house quickly, efficiently, and above all, safely. He doesn't need extensive training on how to help bring about a proletariat revolution. That's an example from the trades, but same in the white collar world; my employers accountants weren't hired because of any activism, but because they know accounting rules and regulations so the rest of the business doesn't have to think about those things as much.
If anything, modern generations need reminders that 99.99% of us are NPC's and the best thing we can do for the world, our families and those around us are to be really good, competent NPC's.
Let me also point out we landed on the moon without that view of education. People, on the moon, with all the technological and institutional advances necessary to make that happen.
I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.
here's a simple one: what is the right answer for how to use a road? more parking? more bike lanes? exclusive use for busses? we do not bid on roadway land, there is no market solution to this. you can come up with a lot of metrics for efficiencies and optimize for them, but which metrics matter? journey times? environmental impact? there are real disputes about waymos, it isn't enough to invent autonomous vehicles, there must be leadership on adopting technology. these are all political issues. okay, and you probably spend 30m to an hour on roadways every day of your life, you can't say, this isn't a real problem.
the greatest irony is it is exactly the families with this fairly myopic "all problem solving is math problem sets" point of view who disengage from political life, and despite their fixation on cultural hegemony, they have disproportionately little representation in politics. to be real, the reason parents care about math is because money. which should tell you everything you really need to know about its power to "solve problems."
How children learn is not how adults learn.
I'm not sure what's so offensive about it?
If it was downvoted, what interests could want to draw attention away from those sentences, and why?
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crm9125 13 hours ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]
Also there are about 2 billion children on earth, each with their own different idiosyncrasies. Good luck finding the grand unified theory of pedagogy for that.
Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...
I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.
I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.
[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(
So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)
Maybe briefly show how that adavanced topic will be taught and let them realize they can not possible even start to understand advanced topic because they are missing the more elementary pieces.
Similarly why they can't got further without doing their homework. How mastering the homework exercises let's you solve more problems.
I know that is not easy, the teacher may not quite understand how topics relate, why each of them is needed in a specific order, if they have not thought about that much.
The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles.
(This is why many teachers - I was among them - aren't immediately good at teaching concepts or subjects that come easily to them as they may be at teaching things they struggled a bit to learn. If you've had to break something down for yourself then you're ahead of the game when it comes to breaking it down for others.)
For a while I taught an "Improv For Teachers" workshop (I have a theatre background), which was really about listening to your class and being ready to adapt your lesson plan to where they are in their course of work, or even to their mood on the day. It was mostly elementary school teachers, and some of them really resisted that idea. I'm convinced, though, that that's an important skill: the most memorable and successful classes I've taught have happened when I've been able to take advantage of a student question or a student interest and run with it - sometimes not even knowing where it'll go - with the confidence that I'll somehow be able to pivot back to the curriculum. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable, and embrace a bit of fear, and risk a bit of failure to do it, hence why the Improv experience is so helpful.
Do you have teaching experience?
The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.
The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.
When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.
So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.
Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.
Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.
Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").
English is a really messy language but there are many simple underlying roots that can tell you what the word means with context clues after hearing it for the first time.
Also learning the International Phonetic Alphabet is probably another huge boon for comprehension, the nicer books often include IPA spelling for crazy off the rip words
However... unless you account that the native speakers and heritage speakers will learn English, making your ability to say cerveza useless. If you aren't fluent and have professional Spanish qualities (like Medical Spanish), its useless. Learning Latin or Greek would have been more useful, at least I could struggle through Cicero in Latin, than saying 3 words in Spanish before the other guy switches to English.
I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.
Edit: I will still say that Greek has little relevance to common English vocabulary, though it is very relevant to almost every scholarly domain. The same is true to some extent for Latin - as the vast majority of non-scholarly Latin words in English are actually borrowed from French, and have (Old) French spelling and pronunciation, not Latin ones.
…I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.
Because verbs have so many specific forms, it is also pretty common in Latin, as in most modern Romance languages, to omit the subject of a sentence, as it can typically be inferred from context plus the specific verb form - so, you often have to recognize the verb form to be able to understand who the sentence is even talking about (e.g. a sentence might say "amo regem"; if you recognize the words but not the specific forms, this means "love king"; but this unambiguously means "I love the king").
Now, there is quite a bit of regularity here - there are 5 categories of regular verbs (plus some specific irregular verbs), and 5 categories of nouns (though there are multiple sub-categories, as there is some variation in noun forms even in the same category; plus of course some irregular nouns).
Overall no, I don't see any comparison where you could say that Latin is a simple language. All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. For example, Spanish drops the case system entirely, drops the neuter gender, and reduces the number of moods for verbs.
Wikipedia informs me that Romanian is a Romance language and has retained some of it. Also, the Slavic languages have largely retained most or all of what you’re describing, although they are not classified as Romance languages.
Slavic languages also have a case system (I think it's possible that this is part of why Romanian kept the Latin case system, as there was quite a bit of Slavic influence in Romanian), but they didn't "retain" it from Latin, as they are not Romance languages at all - they simply share this linguistic feature; Latin and Old Slavonic are by no means the only languages with a case system.
Good for getting SAT scores, but 3 years of actual French or Spanish would have done far more for me.
Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.
However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.
My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.
Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.
This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.
You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.
My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.
The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.
It makes me _irate_ when the solution is "just throw more money at the problem, that will fix education!"
Like, irrationally mad. It is lazy. It is soulless. It is callous. It is arrogant. It is detached from reality.
"Education will fix the problems in schools!" is circular logic.
My pet theory, and this will bet destroyed here, is that we should have developed birth control for males a loonnngg time ago. Accidental kids that have dad peace out on them usually never get a fair shake at life.
There is not enough money in the economy to pay for all the domestic work that productive people do for themselves.
Parenting is a good example of this.
It is possible to fix school. It needs understanding learning, and also being willing to revisit learning design at every level. How to bring meaning in?
Without meaning you could have all your fancy chromebooks and chatbots but you won't move the needle (as we are seeing)
We are actually trying to change schooling (but with a tiny experiment, knowing that scaling does not happen without changes and cultural context)
https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
It seems like the biggest frustration from the teachers’ part with modern schooling is lack of engagement from the students. This is clearly telling us something.
Sure some students have not even had their basic needs met, which is a separate issue. But those that have and still don’t engage tells us that their brains have probably assigned the information they’re receiving as “having little or no value”, i.e. meaningless.
I bet if you were to lead a class of teenagers on the subject of relationships or friendship, or even how to host a successful party, suddenly you’d see a lot more engagement. Why? Because it’s actually relevant to their every day existence.
I have legit seen real world adults do things like say "Well, I got ten widgets because I know that's enough for two people. But there's gonna be four coming so.. uh.. 10+2=12, I'll bring 12 widgets"
Kids will make eye contact with you and nod along as you teach, but they are wearing air pods and can't hear you over their spotify playlist.
Im not sure I can be more interesting than Taylor Swift, Call of Duty, MrBeast, and texting with friends all at the same time. You need the student to be a little bit receptive to even have the opportunity to convince them what you are teaching is relevant to them.
https://github.com/zoobab/educode
https://www.educode.be/doku.php/educode_2019/conferences/hac...
This is the disconnect I've always found growing up, I get told this is how you calculate angles, but besides the test, there's never the why. Granted this is a bad example because at least that one had a practical, real life application example (calculating the height of a tower in the distance based on distance + angle of the ground to the top from where you're standing), but things just get more and more abstract later on.
The best teaching was always projects and internships, because they start with an objective and meaning (= build software that does this), and what knowledge you need follows from that.
I mean sure you need some basic knowledge before you can work backwards from an end goal, but surely they can teach said basic knowledge without it just being "this is how you solve this test problem"?
If you have ever been stuck doing a project you didnt want or like, you may relate.
> Meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement.
You might propose that getting a good measurement is the meaning, but saying that doesn't mean a student has really or fully bought into this idea and find it compelling. i.e Their heart may not be in it.
No. The objective is for you to learn a specific topic. Tests are how we tell if you have learned it. Graduating is proof that you have learned it.
The worst people in the world created schooling and the education system for their own narrow, selfish, greed and profit driven objectives. Is so deeply engrained, with the very “educators” themselves often not even realizing that through their having also done through the system, they are actually just enablers of an abusive and toxic, soul crushing system … which is precisely what it was designed for; because after all, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and “ no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”; both the words of a great steward of systems thinking, Stanford Beer.
If schooling and learning/education are truly mutually exclusive then who is the most learned and educated person you can point to that never stepped foot in a school? And how do those rare examples compare against the breadth of modern PHD holders?
There are a non-negligible fraction of kids that are kept out of school, homeschooled, etc. If school was as bad for learning as you suggest then one would expect those kept out of it to demonstrate higher-than-average aptitude.
How big is that fraction? In my experience being around a bunch of home schoolers (and adjacent, and school system), some of whom were more in or out of unschooling, I think it's small enough that it should be a rarely considered option.
There are some kids where it will work _really_ well. I've interacted with a couple. There are a lot of kids where it really doesn't work, especially in a distraction rich environment.
It is also and equalizer. Unschooled kids from bad backgrounds now start even lower.
It seems obvious to me that the answer should be yes. So the follow ups should be figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.
I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager. It is pretty easy to design education for the eager. And discussing how to optimize that is a completely different discipline than the discussion about how to coax. The discussion about moving the unwilling to the coaxable is another topic on its own.
Having a mixed class of unwilling, coaxable, and eager in a classroom with a mantra of "no child left behind" is a huge mistake in the same way it would be a mistake to have one teacher in a mixed classroom for Geometry, Alphabet, and Orchestra.
I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.
This is a very bold claim. I don't think most kids are curious about the multiplication tables
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395840
and ultimately this about a successful experiment in other approaches to maths:
I think sibling comments are taking issue with `learn multiplication tables` versus `memorize multiplication tables`. I find no value in the latter in kids but incredible value in the former.
What I'm teaching my homeschoolers is to instead be able to quickly derive the table from the "easy" ones. Everyone practices counting by twos, fives, and tens at an earlier stage of math. So when multiplication tables come around, if you can fill 2s,5s, and 10s out easily, then any other thing you need is (usually) just one simple addition or subtraction operation away.
I do it this way for the same reason I'm against learning "tricks" like FOIL ( first-outer-inner-last) for binomial multiplication. You end up learning the narrow-scoped trick or you end up learning the table, and not a framework by which to solve problems of a broad class.
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I've seen entirely too many kids who memorize the table up to 10x10 and then are totally stunlocked at 11x11.
A better analogy would be "why stop memorising long works now we can read things instead". No one memorises epic poems anymore but we read novel instead.
Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.
"nerds" would disagree with you. I think the point that OP was trying to make is the three groups are dynamic based on the topic. So the groups are not the same for biology, maths and for literature.
It’s exceptionally rare to encounter any person, adult or otherwise, that genuinely holds no value in any opinion of another. And even those people hold to their own self evaluations which do not spawn from pure noise.
Which is exactly why they stopped teaching them in US curriculum under No Child Left Behind.
https://www.thewellnews.com/opinions/california-removes-memo...
When rubber hits the road with a learning objective, I think the two most important axis are: how much does the student want to learn (this), and how easy is it for the student to learn (this)?
Both can depend on a variety of factors... For example a masters student paying their own way mid career maybe really wants to learn as much as they can, but a specific research report assigned during a busy work week, and some family emergency, etc. may mean they treat the assignment as "I just need to get this done" instead of "I want to get as much as I can out of this", and one way that can show up is how much they depend on an LLM to do the work for them...
In any case, people who wanted to learn were easy to deal with. The other two motivations could be used to coax the person to learn, but they required different approaches.
There is no stress, they just don’t want to “explore” things they see as non-urgent.. basically everything you need like writing, reading and calculating properly.
No amount of coaxing, gamification or whatever works consistently. The only thing that got my smartest kid through anything is by force. Not too much, but still, they need some amount of coercion no question about it. Anyone that denies this I find very, very hard to take seriously.
Interestingly the slightly less cerebral one is easier to guide through gamification. I guess the smarter you are the easier you see through BS. It’s easier to just learn to suck it up and Do The Thing instead of “learning is fun”. It isn’t and it doesn’t matter.
I've found that the people who are more optimistic about kids tend to live in a particular category of socioneconomic bubble.
The kids that study and apply themselves, I don't think it's so much that they can see they understand the benefits of linear algebra at the time, it's that their parents and the social network they're a part of sends them signals that this is what they should do to be successful and they're rewarded for doing well in school.
The other argument about teaching "advanced math" is the same as why Cristiano Ronaldo spends a significant part of his training in the gym lifting weights? Ever seen Ronaldo take out a barbell and start doing squats during a game? One should reflect on this.
In short, math is a powerhouse tool for carrying society forward.
Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"
In short, starving artists.
There is also the whole thing where art is an abstract concept with a subjective definition, and a solar cell sporting new tech with 33% efficiency objectively being better than one with 24% efficiency.
There were humans for tens of thousands of years before there was high technology. But there were hardly any humans around before there was art.
Idk, the soviets didn't invest in socialist realism propaganda for nothing.
Less sarcastically, art has had an outsized influence on society and culture. Take any social movement you want, and there was probably some novel or work of art that galvanized it.
10,000 artists in, one $20k work of art out.
Whereas something like the engineer is closer to
5 engineers in, $500k of work out (and even that is pretty conservative)
Also i'd point out the selection bias of not counting people who fail out of engineering school but still counting every unsuccessful artist.
As a first order approximation the "price" of art (as distinct from its value) is a function of branding not asthetics.
Secondly most artists get paid, not from doing fine art, but from adjacent careers that require good color, balance, composition, and so on. Industrial designers (think Jonny Ive), interior design, food presentation, magazine layout, web design, architecture and so on. Art skills are all around us. In the same way engineering is around us.
Put another way, engineers build ugly (think beige PC boxes). It took an artist to give us the iMac. And it was a marketing genius (yet another important skillset) to bring the artist and engineer together.
Teaching math goes far beyond creating mathematicians. Teaching art goes far beyond teaching artists. Societies that drop art because it is unproductive get ugliness permeating everywhere.
Applies to art, fashion, media.
Most practical (including engineering) successes are much less externally attractive but do make decent money for everybody involved.
Further, judging the value of art to society by how much it costs is ridiculous and an asinine comparison.
It grew out of a time where basic artistic skills were expensive to learn, and could be a real class differentiator (and had some employment benefits).
That's now a fair bit less true; but still continues to prevent these things becoming the sole domain of private schools.
Did do writing although a lot was extracurricular.
the number of adults i've met who cannot add two fractions together is depressing.
at some point each of them had decided "i'm just bad with numbers, hahaha" and they gave themselves permission to stop trying math. worse, society gives you a pass at not knowing math. we need to apply the same constant social pressure to mathematics skills that we do for learning to read.
An inability to understand compound interest is classic.
I think we're more talking about algebra or, really, anything "higher" in maths than arithmetic. Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
And also, if we think that basic financial management is a good thing for kids to learn, why don't we teach that?
If you bought 6 liters of soda for £3/2-liter bottle with 8% consumption tax, how much should it cost?
You have to shape that all into a series of operations for your calculator. The calculator can't do it by itself. Even basic arithmetic takes some education before the calculator can be useful.
I would disagree. How to minimize a function, how to calculate interest, first derrivative are all pretty useful in finance, and a bit beyond basic arithmatic.
> I think we're more talking about algebra
"Algebra" as a term covers a lot. Being able to solve for x is a very useful skill and often what people mean by algebra.
If you mean understanding groups, rings, fields, or whatever, then sure that is probably not very useful to the average person's day to day. However i dont think that is usually tought in high school.
> Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
Pretty sure nobody in high school is getting a solid understanding of set theory. That is more university level.
> And also, if we think that basic financial management is a good thing for kids to learn, why don't we teach that?
I guess it depends on where you live, but i had to take a class on that in high school.
Is there any benefit to being able to distinguish logical entailments from non sequiturs?
The things that are taught under the label "set theory" are taught elsewhere under the label "basic logic". The most primitive symbols are intentionally matched: in logic, "and" is ∧ and "or" is ∨, while in set theory, "and" is ⋂ and "or" is ⋃.
The symbols stop matching quite that well after that - compare logical ⟶ and ¬ to set-theoretic ⊆ and ᶜ - but they continue to consist of the same material.
These are college graduates.
> Does a solid knowledge of, e,g, Set Theory, give any benefit later in life?
Knowledge of statistics will help a person a lot.
Another example. I wanted to put an elliptical brick patio in my yard. The contractor gave a square footage and I signed a deal with the charge per square foot. He staked it out.
It looked a bit peculiar to me. So I measured the major and minor axes and computed the area of the ellipse. It was 1/3 smaller than the contracted amount. The pallet of bricks was sitting in the driveway. I multiplied xyz to get the square footage of the bricks, and walla, it matched the area staked out.
I.e. I was being cheated. The contractor evidently was used to math challenged customers, and discovered how much he could cheat before being noticed. I pointed out the "error" (hahahaha) and the contractor reduced the bill by a third.
> why don't we teach that?
Exactly!
I'll add that math isn't really just about that sort of practicality though. It's also about a fundamental understanding of numbers and what they mean.
For example, inflation is in the news a lot. It's high, or low. Most people (the US president included) think that if inflation was 0% prices would come down. But that'd be a profound misunderstanding of the topic.
A grounding in numbers, in this case percentages, makes for a better understanding.
Any business owner needs to know fundamental truths to survive. Cost price, markup, margin, selling price, fixed expenses versus variable expenses and so on. All are grounded in basic math. Without that you can't do basic accounting. Without that you can't effectively run a business.
Anti-vax arguments are built on very bad math, and people bad at math fall for it.
We all use math all the time. People bad at math are at a major disadvantage. Populations bad at math are easily manipulated.
Ha Ha Ha! Cute you think society cares about reading abilities!
I mean, OK, you are expected to be able to do basic level reading. But, say, reading something independently to learn something? Even when I was in university 20 years ago it was a struggle to get people to read.
Could you clarify what do you mean by 'kids' and 'advanced math' here?
I personally believe we should stop believing advanced math is meaningful for everyone. Especially stop trying to push them down to high school curriculum.
When I say advanced math I mean anything involved with "what exactly is a ___ (vector space, real number, group, set, etc)".
I know full well that languages are necessary and useful ... and were. I still found learning languages the most boring thing in the world. I liked abstract math despite thinking it is not necessary useful - I did not cared. I could go on, but relation between interesting and useful was never all that straight forward.
When I was just a bit younger, I detested what I'm about to say, but now know as the "reality".
Your argument is focused on rationalism. You're trying to give kids/teenagers real world reasons to learn something.
People are rarely motivated by reason. They are motivated by emotions.
If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of very "rational" adults (college professors included) who clearly know something to be true, will admit to it, but will still go the emotional route.
As a parent, I looked into the research on changing/shaping children's behavior. And the key things that stood out:
1. If you know enough adults who do equivalently bad things even while they know the harm in it, don't expect kids to behave based on reason.
2. Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives. They shouldn't clean up the table because it will keep the house clean. They should clean it up because they'll get a (short term) positive reward.
3. Focus on building the ritual as a habit, and separate it from any semblance of morality. The brain needs to get accustomed to the actual behavior. The rationale can be added (now or when older), but if you focus too much on rationale without the habit, you'll get someone like me, who realizes a lot of behaviors are good for me, but won't do them because "my brain isn't wired for it".
Getting back to kids learning algebra, or whatever: Their lack of incentive isn't because they can't connect to practical skills in life.[1] The reason they don't want to do it is because it is not a valued skill amongst their peers. And it's also not a valued skill in American society.
That's why high school kids in Eastern Europe or East Asia tend to know this a lot better. If you can't multiply two numbers on paper, you're an idiot. Everyone will know you're an idiot. As much an idiot as not being able to read properly. So you learn it because you know that it's just a baseline intelligence marker you should have by a certain age. You don't whine about it any more than you'd whine about how to properly eat food without spilling it. Sure, once they're older and reflect back, they may say "I never needed algebra", but it doesn't bother them. Knowing it is merely part of being cultured.[2]
Now being motivated by shame is really not a great way to get people to do something, and that's not what I'm encouraging. The point is that it's a broader societal problem. Why should they learn it if they see no one else values it?
I wrote more about this about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065640
[1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
[2] This is why California, in particular, had a strong push back regarding calculus not being taught in high schools. There's a strong and relatively wealthy Asian/immigrant community in those places, and they've tried to maintain the value of being decent at math. (All the stuff about impacting university education is fluff. I used to work at a university, and they had remedial programs for incoming students who didn't know algebra/pre-calculus. It adds to the time to graduate, but by and large is successful - it's OK if you go into engineering without being exposed to calculus).
'It's fun' is a pretty compelling reason for both kids and adults to learn certain things, but you can't just decide what's fun and what isn't. Maths rarely gets to have that reason (and when it does, it applies to people for whom this entire problem isn't relevant).
I taught at an English-immersion high school in Shanghai.
It's worth remarking that the boy at the top of the class in each grade was dating the girl at the top of the class.
I can believe it, but I don't know if it's true. Obviously not true in the US.
That's also why all the examples of math's usefulness become ridiculous stories like: "imagine yourself getting stuck on an uninhabited island and having to calculate the triple integral to find the volume of a barrel of water".
No. The real use of school-level math/physics/chemistry/language is in laying the _foundation_ and training the brain.
And it doesn't really matter what exactly you want to use for mental training. Every structured activity is fine, as long as it engages the brain.
Even pointless tasks like memorizing scriptures help. There are studies that show that religious students who spent a lot of time on rote memorization, and later switch to other disciplines, in the end do quite well with their studies.
A really small number of disruptive kids will destroy the learning of the entire middle. The top kids will figure it out at home and survive, or their parents will separate them through brute-force - a few borderline high achievers will probably be brought down too.
In the poorer neighborhoods around me the school performance is actually shameful and the kids are being subjected to the worst of their peers constantly, destroying their ability to succeed. Many will (hopefully) drop out/get arrested by late middle/early high school but the damage they do to their entire neighborhood along the way is massive.
Cohorting the highs and the well-behaved middle would probably work out just fine but unless you can eliminate the disruptive and the very-behind it's just the worst of all worlds.
Arithmetic, Algebra, and Statistics are different classes should be taught separately.
"Please wake up and take your headphones off and answer my question even though you don't plan on passing any of your classes" and History are different classes with different types of students. Trying to conduct both classes at the same time using the same teacher is folly. You will be forced to abandon one or both of the students. You might argue that you should abandon them it turns every other day so they both get something out of the class. But that means they will each get half or less out of the class than they would have if you separated the classes. It is highly likely that you will frustrate both students to the point of impediment.
It shouldn't be. The research overwhelming says its a good practice. The type of people who say this type of thing are the exact type of ideologically motivated people who are destroying school systems in blue districts. Ironically this group both hates private schools and creates the environment that pushes parents to pay for private schools. I've personally seen the bad consequences of schools that do this and I know people who aren't here anymore because of it. So please, for the love of god, stop talking about topics you know nothing about.
The upshot for this is that the benefit is as much for the student doing the teaching as the one doing the learning. Teaching has a much greater effect on _retention_ than listening reading or even doing, which is the majority determinant underlying the primary school curriculum.
There are a whole host of secondary benefits to this (as well as lots of logistical challenges): the students are doing something useful, teaching, and we pay teachers if you wanted to expend budget there I suspect it would have great effect, as would any other form of ~~bribery~~, I mean, incentivisation; socialising, especially if you have the teaching being done across different classes (which you would want to do because you want the teacher to know more than the student).
Projectors, videos, computers, tablets, calculators, are all completely useless in teaching math.
I have a great deal of respect for you. Your math skills are much greater than my own. But you have stretched your statement too far. Flash cards can be very helpful in teaching math. Timed tests for math facts can be very helpful. Both of these can be facilitated with computers or tablets. Animations can be a very useful instructional tool. Even taking a picture of the chalk on the blackboard and putting it online can help students (and possibly helpful parents) review the in-class lecture from home while they do their homework.
I don't dismiss your overall point, but don't be too flippant. A video of the lecture can be very helpful.
The real problem beyond all this is that the educational spending goes to the wrong spots. If you ask me, teachers should be empowered to select their own curriculum using a budget and most of the rest of the money should go towards paid tutors, better teacher-student ratios, etc (and probably way fewer administrators). I am firmly convinced that a lot of kids act out because they can’t grasp the material, not in spite of it.
What works:
1. having a lecture on a chalkboard
2. taking notes by hand. Yes, by hand. Something about the act of writing it by hand fixes it in my brain
3. using pencil and paper to do the problems.
4. and what really works is giving an in-person lecture on how to do it
What doesn't work:
1. everything else
I've watched many instructional videos. Poof, none of it sticks. I've audited classes. Poof, none of it sticks, because I didn't do the homework.
I've never known anyone who learned arithmetic from a calculator.
It's like wanting to be strong. You have to do the work to get strong. There is no substitute.
There are visual learners out there. Being a visual learner doesn't mean you don't need to do the work, it means you typically need some visualization for things to click, and then you practice applying it like everyone else. Some people can even manage with just lectures.
This causes some students trouble in school because their needs may not be met by every teacher. It's especially worse if the student hasn't learned what their learning style is yet.
Learning Styles: VAK Doesn't Exist (Here's What Research Actually Shows)
https://www.structural-learning.com/post/learning-styles-myt...
Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental (by American Psychological Association)
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...
I have difficulty believing that my learning style is uncommon. Consider trying to build muscle. There are techniques that are proven to work best. There are no individual "muscle building styles" that work better, unless the person has a disability.
And I don't believe that in general the kids in classes are mentally disabled.
Yes, I know about ADHD, autism, and dyslexia.
I think it's more of a motivation problem. Not all students are eager to learn. They may not be interested in the subject for whatever reason. It's hard to teach someone who isn't open to it. Learning styles can help bring some of those barriers down by shifting the material into a form that they are more open to.
The same applies to building muscle. Not everyone is self-motivated to do it. There are different ways to motivate people to work out. But in the end they all need to do the work/practice.
You have to do the exercises. But it might be beyond your ability to start doing them straight from the textbook. Crafted didactic material can walk you through initial exercises to the point where you have a theory of where to begin on another one. Or it can let you investigate a structure until you have an idea.
In your analogy, if you want to be able to bench 150 pounds, at some point you'll have to bench 150 pounds. But a nonconfigurable 150 pound weight isn't the best way to get there. You can have a set of weights that let you start with easier tasks. You can have a set of exercises that aren't bench pressing. Those things are helpful, and generally required.
In the USA there are approximately 50 million students aged 5-18. If you paid for each student to get 1:1 attention one day a week, you would need one teacher per five students in schools that meet five days a week. Let's use that number because it reduces 50 million students nicely to 10 million teachers. Let's pay each teacher $70K/year. That would cost $700 billion per year.
The USA military spent $100 billion per year in Afghanistan.
If the USA provided the 1:1 attention only in 1st Grade and 3rd Grade, they could fund it with the same commitment they made in Afghanistan with a lot fewer deaths. The USA persisted in Afghanistan for 20 years. Shall we experiment with education for 10 years and see if we get a better result than we did in Afghanistan?
That 100 billion goes to a bunch of extremely well-connected businesses who fund lobbyists to make sure the USA continues expending munitions in a series of utterly pointless, futile, wars.
Let's say that you have some curriculum C that you think is vital for children to learn, and you want as many children as possible to learn C.
Even ignoring ethics, it's not obvious to me that attempting to coerce all children into learning C is the best way to accomplish your goal!
Why is it obvious that an educator should do their best to teach a student something even when they don't want to learn? Well for one, it's their job, and two... Children especially are not good judges of which knowledge and skills will benefit them later in life.
This. If children knew what was best for them, they wouldn't need teachers or parents.
When I was in college, the courses were laid out for particular majors. Electives were few. I trusted the college that they knew what they were doing in deciding the curricula, because I sure didn't.
This is very context dependent. If you grow up surrounded by a typical western/industrial/post-industrial diet, then yes, it almost certainly does.
But you could also change the food environment.
Hopefully the analogy/metaphor that connects this to schooling is reasonably obvious.
You go do that then. Enjoy your slow death from malaria.
The food choices having nothing to do with the jungle, but rather: regular, significant consumption of highly processed and most significantly sweetened foods. There were plenty of people in the world before the widespread adoption of sugar as cooking ingredient whose dental health would likely not have been improved by brushing, and they didn't live in "the jungle" but places like ... America, and Japan, and India and ... basically the entire planet.
And you need to do that. It trains your brain. If you simply rely on calculators, LLMs, and Google Search, then you likely can forget about doing advanced science.
It doesn't mean that you have to _master_ everything. Far from it. But you need to apply real effort to various subjects to train yourself.
I've been giving chemistry lessons since I was a teenager, and quite early this became my first order of business after that alone was responsible for turning a D student into a B student in one session.
For that first non-mathematically inclined student who was having so much trouble, this had to be accomplished before any of the specific concepts and problems could be properly addressed in the course they were enrolled in.
All that was accomplished in two hours was gradual but progressive reversal of attitude, not unlike what I was accustomed to in ramping up to more advanced subject matter, but we never got around to that during the first session.
The next week they had a very positive attitude and were going to call me later with some challenging equations for some help.
Wasn't necessary, the very next week they got a B on their own initiative, were so excited and passed everything after that with no further problems. It was probably the most thankful student I ever tutored.
And if good habits are not instilled, they will have a difficult life ahead of them. It's far easier to learn those habits when young, than to try to independently course correct as an adult.
Not coercing a child towards correct behaviours, is doing them a great disservice. In some circumstances, it's child abuse to not coerce those bahaviours.
There's a huge difference between a loving parent gently but firmly teaching their kid to clean their teeth every day even though they don't want to, and a brutal schoolteacher beating facts into a class full of miserable kids.
There is in fact little difference between "you have to learn these things" and "brushing your teeth".
Thus to be ethical in your society, usually means you must follow the rules determined by a collective group of your nations ancestors or you will be shunned/jailed/harmed/etc. Which is essentially coercion. "Act this way or be punished."
White collar crime might be illegal but most societies would definitely punish a murderer either legally or illegaly. Social stigma is a MUCH more serious thing than legality of action.
I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.
This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen and i think that has an effect.
This feels too vibes-based. I never saw messaging like this when I was a teacher, nor when I visited the schools my mom taught at, nor when I visited schools to help with kid hackathons. This would be in California, Texas, the PRC, Japan, and Taiwan. Mostly I saw little nonsense alphabet stickers, famous buildings, chemical symbols, or like, comically diverse but in the end harmless bits of bric a brac like an astronaut in a wheelchair.
What specifically have you been seeing that would lead you to think boys in schools are being held back by messaging?
I would say the more harmful slogan has been "you're okay just the way you are." I'm not saying we go back to harsh discipline and abuse, but there has to be a middle ground where we hold children, especially boys, to a higher standard.
Why is it that when boys/men where outperforming and out-earning women, people were willing to move heaven and earth to correct this terrible injustice, but now when outcomes have reversed (for years at this point) it's considered acceptable to say "Welp, that's just how it goes. Boys just aren't good enough."
Hmmm...almost like, it's not a level playing field??
Year Male Female
1970 58% 42%
1975 53% 47%
1980 48% 52%
1985 46% 54%
1990 45% 55%
1995 44.5% 55.5%
2000 43.9% 56.1%
2005 43.3% 56.7%
2010 43.0% 57.0%
2015 43.6% 56.4%
2020 42.7% 57.3%
2025 42.7% 57.3%
Boys don't owe society squat, and now they know it!
We do know boys mature later which may be reason to not level the field completely, but we should still not allow that as an excuse.
If someone shows another difference I will have to think in depth about the details before I can comment.
Boys have also been doing more destructive things, but that's a different issue.
Boys and girls do struggle with different issues socially and culturally, which is upstream of struggling with them academically.
What's consistently missed that education is downstream of socialisation. The experience of learning as a first introduction to culture shapes consequences more than individual techniques do.
Part of that is challenging all gender stereotypes. The traditional stereotype was that girls were frankly rather stupid and couldn't handle anything rigorous and challenging.
Now the stereotype is that men lack focus, are disorganised, and have poor communication skills.
One stereotype has been challenged, the other seems to have replaced it, and younger men have almost been encouraged to live down to it.
I don't think as a culture we're emotionally mature enough yet to handle these issues in an effective way, and both education and socialisation will remain problematic until we do.
We're well past that. In fact, the gender gap in college graduation is now worse than it was when Title IX was passed. But because the gap favors women no one gives a shit -- many 'progressives' even celebrate it and continue to insist we need all these programs specifically to get women into college.
Projections? Aren’t we already there in reality? That future is today.
I have two kids in K12 and I don’t think it’s that simple. Not that I have a good explanation of my own, mind you.
Is this explanation not making a blatant assumption here that girls are statistically less hyperactive and distracted than boys?
I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.
They might be referring to the TED Radio Hour "Beyond the manosphere" by Richard Reeves. I think it was on NPR a while ago, I looked it up because the "school isn't designed for boys but girls" sounded familiar.
A math test is a math test is a math test.
What's the math teacher supposed to do?
I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?
I don't know how to teach socialization other than kids figure it out, but I'm open to the idea.
Maybe some exist but I don't know of any
The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.
Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Because that's how language works. Stop being a pompous self-righteous ass and take responsibility for your own words.
Isn't this admission a sign that you should be more clear on the intent of the comment? There are many countries with well-functioning public school systems.
Do you have an alternative idea in mind?
What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?
Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.
Badly misquoting Churchill, public schools are the worst form of education, except for all the other forms.
I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)
Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)
I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.
Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.
If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.
And the research on the topic says that tracking (the idea you are criticizing here), improves educational outcomes. What to know the real problem with education? Its people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system driving their own ideology and biases into the system. You have no stake in this, yet you want your opinion heard despite the fact that you put no effort into learning about the topic of education other than going through the system yourself which hardly counts.
PS You don't even know the term for the thing you are criticizing.
PPS By definition, every kid can't be average. So you don't understand statistics either.
I'm a grandparent.
>people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system
You know when I did my student teaching stint to certify? 1993.
PS: You know why they say tracking works? Because we throw out data from after high school graduation. Ever wonder how those, uh, "gifted", kids who got "A"s in high school Calc typically do in Calculus streams at the University level? I can assure you there are many many professors out there dealing with the results of our tracking system, (that being where the proliferation of "gifted" programs came from), who would not say that it is "working".
The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accurate. It's based on my impression of a book I read a couple of years ago, polluted with my own biases, other things I've read on the topic etc.
No country has perfect education, but what we call education is very useful for becoming a society participating human.
I highly recommend reading the book, even if you expect to disagree with every fact, statistic, opinion and conclusion.
Most cranks are.
Caplan is a radical libertarian bent on annihilating what few functioning social institutions we have left.
Bad decisions at the state level can hurt the academic performance for thousands and thousands of students.
Both are very bad problems that should be addressed.
There's a growing cost of living and poverty crisis in some countries that probably is strongly correlated with education levels. That's also the urgent issue to address.
And there are issues with students not finishing school. Or students entering higher education without basic skills for math and literacy after actually completing high school. I know some Dutch universities have had to skill up students on basic high school math, for example. No longer being taught adequately, apparently.
And then separately you might wonder which skills are actually still relevant for people to have. People not speaking more than one language used to be a big problem in some countries. These days that's still not great but something you can compensate with using AI translations. Being able to calculate numbers is nice. But it's not the end of the world if people use a calculator for some things. But it is an issue if that's not a thing they can do.
Education was never about enlightenment and more about making sure workers were ready for a productive live factories and offices and making sure companies had access to people with a good base level education. Before the industrial revolution, most people would not spend a lot of time, or any amount of time, in schools.
Now, being six hours straight on a torture chamber seating on a medieval torture device are not the best conditions for learning.
I remember in the nineties I went to Japan for a course and they had executive chairs for every student, a nice desk, two whiteboards for projecting slides, breaks every hour, bombarded with visuals it was the best learning experience ever, you never got bored.
And learning Japanese role playing different characters, that's how you learn a language for daily use. A student played as a cab driver, turned the seat around, and another in the back seat, asking to go to the airport, the academy, a restaurant, counting money in Japanese, paying, being thankful for everything. Unforgettable learning experience.
> As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses
Why not spec out the curriculum and spec out the approach (regular quizzes, etc.), then use that to guide the AI? Make the skill gap an objective thing.
2. John Holt (look him up)
3. I always wanted to offer people the chance to both leave and return to K-12 education. Lots of kids want out as teenagers, and we should make that possible but only if we make equally easy to come back when they realize the downsides.
4. Almost every child is a willing, in fact, overachieving learner. The fact that they fail to be interested in a topic is a reflection of things other than their capacity and capabilities for learning.
Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense.
And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.
When I was an international ESL teacher, this was known as “guided discovery,” the goal being that students organically uncover the rules that govern the specific domain being taught.
It works quite well because it transforms what would otherwise be a passive curriculum from more of a spectator sport into an active, participatory learning experience.
People do not, as a general rule, "learn" stuff by people telling them stuff. The retention rate is incredibly low, the comprehension is even lower. Now, it is often the case that good learning environments in our culture combine being told stuff with the sort of experiences that really lead to knowledge and skill acquisition. But everything I've read suggests that it is the latter, not the former, that generates the results we're hoping for.
Also, it may not be obvious, but sometimes testing is a critical part of those successful educational experiences. Nobody learns their times tables because a teacher told them the times tables ... but if you put children in an environment where they can both experience the patterns (or not) in the tables and where there is suffficient incentive to memorize either the tables or some heuristics, then they learn them.
> People do not, as a general rule, "learn" stuff by people telling them stuff.
Yes. Recalling stuff and applying stuff is how we learn.
I strongly suggest you look into Math Academy and just bowse Justin Skycak's books on their method. I think they are right in many many aspects perhaps except the behavioral motivation ones. I think kids going through school need to either build self motivation or have someone build it for them, and I feel that is the gap in MA.
I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.
I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."
Give more money to schools and teachers so that classroom sizes are smaller and the children can be separated by learning ability and the lessons be catered towards them.
That's it.
Schools are a function of families and the community. You can’t improve 1 without simultaneously improving all 3 at the same time. The key thing is family - because it’s actually the family that’s the bedrock and the first educator. Miss educating the family and the whole endeavors is lost.
After school, methodology, all these things, when you need to improve education you need to build a movement around doing so.
The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce around a party specifically seeking to invest, which is difficult and unreliable.
In my time at high school (UK equivalent) I don't remember receiving any peer assistance at all and its feels like we've missed a trick.
- Education should probably be an area where methods are chosen conservatively based on what is proven. It's easy to forget that a change in curriculum will affect thousands or millions of kids and could have a life-long impact on them. We'd pillory someone who suggested testing new drugs on thousands or millions of kids even though the effects might be far less pronounced or long-term than a few years under a poorly designed curriculum that embraces bad methods.
- Neither should we give up on finding better methods. Education has undergone significant changes that have almost certainly turned out for the better. How well would a kid perform if they were put through a typical 18th century study of the classics? Latin mastery is not the passport to success it once was.
- The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
This is a double edged sword, though. You have extremely knowledgeable people who can't teach because they have an actual degree in their subject matter but not in education. Also stuff like PE teachers teaching physics because they have the required education degree already and they can't find any physicists with them.
> In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching.
Case in point:
In the book Angry White Pyjamas [0], the author is British and living in Japan.
He is going through the Tokyo Riot Police training which involves a lot of aikido training. He is also teaching English to high school students.
He points out that the techniques used for training aikido worked well with the students as well.
Specifically:
- show the technique
- have someone try out the technique
- talk about what they did well and what they didn't do well
- have everyone else practice
Highly recommend the book btw if you are interested at all in Japan, martial arts, living abroad etc.
Here some links for the lazy ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
Just to note: I was taught 3 different writing systems and my ability to write on a whiteboard is rubbish
Same with literacy. Depoliticised it needs phonics and whole-word. And a shit tonne better teacher pupil ratios and more pay for kinder and primary.
The Jesuits mantra is about "until 12" for a reason.
Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.
Parents want their kids to get into college, admins want to keep the parents at bay, teachers are trying to get by, unions want teacher protections, etc. There's no QBR where people look at the stats and iterate.
I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here.
We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...
Like have school open from 7 - 6 with the same amount of teaching but lots more recess so that parents can drop their kids off in the morning and pick them up after work. Also, have schools available in the summer so parents can drop the kids off while they go off to work.
Maybe you could join the local parent teacher association and see if anything can be done to make it cheaper.
Now the birthrate is literally the lowest around the world, at 0.7[0]. The other comment is spot on:
> 7-6? Why even have kids
Humans should create societies that are friendly to parents who take care of their children. Not societies that encourage parents to delegate their children to someone else, being it nannies, schools or governments. Otherwise people will eventually ask this question: Why even have kids?
[0]: to put a scale for how low 0.7 is: you might have heard that Japan has a low birthrate. And they are at 1.15.
1. experiences. Intuition comes from experiences, and IMO an under-appreciated amount of 'education' is building strong intuitions. Experiences can include project work (including struggling!), travel & reading (what it's like to be someone else), sports and music (what it's like to build skills over time and work as a team).
2. practice. So much of what we can do - from language to mathematics - is a composition of rote behaviors, responses, and habits. It's impossible to become skilled without practice.
3. building habits of mind. This includes scientific thinking, applying mental models (I like this list here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/), pro-social behavior (listening, conversing). Much of science & math is having an available set of mental models, understanding how/where to apply them, and recognizing when a new one is needed.
My preference would be for traditional subjects to be taught with these firmly in mind: when thinking about biology, for example, what are the rote skills that must be learned? What intuitions should students achieve, and what experiences will enable them? What habits of mind produce an orientation, attitude, or set of thought processes conducive to practicing the science and art of biology?
I think this doesn't contradict the author.
I'll take 1-on-1 mentoring over better computers, books, clubs, sports, or anything else the budget is spent on.
Please hire more teachers.
Educational professionals appear terminally prone to fads and magical thinking, but it's the people outside the school - parents and other adults - who seem to have the clearest conviction about things they know little about. Appeasing ignorant people makes bad public policy.
PS I know this is one event, it was also part of a consistent pattern of similar events. The school administrators had no problem admitting this in public and were proud of it.
Was this true when you were a kid? Why do you think it changed? Because when I was a kid and a kid was bad, the teacher would make the parent come to class until the kid started behaving. Do you think this would work today? And why would some teachers be opposed to it?
If it wasn’t actually useful information, how would you know? How would you discover that?
As you say, it’s a bit of a black box unless you volunteer in the classroom (as my spouse did).
That it seems to be that case in education seems to me to qualify for the label of surprising.
The ruling class doesn't want the general population to be well educated critical thinkers. They want them to have just enough education to perform exploitable labor and engage in unquestioning consumption. They want them easy to manipulate and control. They want their children away from home all day so more parents can work instead of staying home raising them.
It isn't some giant conspiracy. It's loosely coupled, powerful people, with aligned interests guiding decisions, influencing opinion, and swaying sentiment bit by bit over decades.
...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece.
Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.
- A list of complaints about what people did not like about school. eg: "The teacher yelled at me too often and then I became discouraged in this subject."
- Working backwards from bad outcomes. "Numbers are getting worse. It must be that we're not _empathizing_ with kids enough!"
The topic seems politically fraught enough (and for good reason, I suppose) that it's hard to imagine landing firmly on the correct answer. No matter how many good ideas you have, there will be so much complexity in the system, so many schools and systems that don't fit your model, that it will be possible to point to failure for any reform.
In Japan, at least in primary school, boys can get away with anything, as "boys will be boys." Girls must take care of others (first) and themselves (second). If girls misbehave, write sloppily, forget things, and so on, it is much more addressed than if a a boy does the same.
What’s being discussed here is how to optimize mass education so that it’s least bad and is effective for a majority or least a substantial portion of children.
Utter nonsense and the educational data says its nonsense. If what you say were true, the highest performers in STEM fields would be from the richest areas. In fact, the opposite is true, the majority of the highest performers come from middle of the road places. You are trying to make this about money. Its not about money. Its about the negative consequences of ideology and politics.
without a large corpus your pretrain is doomed to fail
Your post-train tricks hardly pays off if your base model doesn't scale.
1. The desire for a "royal road" to understanding. This is a bad motivation, because while there are more or less effective ways to learn, there is no royal road. You will spend your entire life trying to squirm out of doing what learning requires.
2. A utilitarian view of education. This is a tragedy of our times. People insist that their learning be "useful". Calculus is useless, because chances are that most people who learn it will never employ it for practical work. But this totally degrades what education is. It turns human beings into mere machines for proximately practical work. There is no theoretical desire for understanding things to understand reality better. This is false education, because knowing and understanding the truth are central purposes of a true education.
3. An "agnostic" view of the purpose of education. Without a destination, there can be no discussion of strategy or tactics, no discussion of progress or what is good education. The classical liberal arts had an answer. Sadly, much of modern education does not, at least not a clear, coherent, or healthy one. It is often an incoherent assortment of disconnected and disorganized material with no organizing principle. This is disrespectful to the student. Also, where motivation is concerned, classical education places a great deal of emphasis on acquiring the virtues that should always be cultivated in parallel with learning.
4. Bad execution in practice. Not all teachers are great. When you press people on why they hate a particular subject, how often is it the case that the subject itself wasn't the problem, but how bad the teacher was, either as a pedagogue specifically or as a person?
5. A failure to distinguish between pedagogical problems and the influence of the home environment. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. Students enter schools as products of their moral and social education at home. When the home is deficient, students may lack the appropriate dispositions needed for formal education. Sometimes a good mentor can help counteract some of these deficiencies, but the bulk of the responsibility rests on parents. With the disintegration of traditional community life into which family life is embedded, things become even more difficult.
We also mustn't ignore that learning occurs within human relations. That is why a good pedagogue is so valuable. His goodness is first goodness as a person. Pedagogical skill becomes intelligible, human, and more effective when the pedagogue is like a benevolent parental figure who acts as a guide, neither dominating the student nor spoiling him. A parental figure also responds to the particular needs of the student, because there is a relationship there. The students doesn't just become an alienated number in the classroom.
If we test students with standardized tests of their knowledge of facts and simple routines, I'm 100% convinced that direct instruction works better. I'd like to see if it's better also on aspects like student welfare, ability to reason and solve complex problems, creativity and innovation.
It _is_ possible that direct instruction also works better in these metrics, I just think this should be made explicit.
But this part misses the point:
"As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses."
It seems like he is expecting a chat-based LLM to maintain a model of the user's skill tree. But it wo:
- create a detailed skill tree for whatever subject
- have the user try to apply the skills
- store the user's mastery level for each node, in some structured format
This isn't something ChatGPT is going to do if you just starting chatting with it.
But you can design a system to do it, which is what the Math Academy folks have done.
Edtech tools don't have to have user-facing AI. They can use AI under the hood, or use no AI at run time at all.
It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.
Whther you're skeptical or not, lots of the things that are ideal for the average student, can be a disadvantage for the above average student.
- The hard part about education has little to do with learning and a whole lot to do with socioeconomic realties.
- Education and learning is a public good. Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it. Any successful company that looks like it's selling learning is not really selling learning. (access, prestige, a promise to earn more $$$, compliance)
I did not read the article. I just have thoughts. Got edtech nerd-sniped.
I think we all know this to not be true. We've all had a super engaging teacher or task in which we learned quickly and efficiently without it feeling hard. I've learned far more through natural interest or through pursuing a goal than I have forcing myself to engage with a subject.
>Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.
This also seems obviously false. Suppose some company did figure out a way to make learning twice as fast/efficient and proved it with data, there would be tons of money in it. Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well. The issue seems to be that no company has figured out how to make arbitrary knowledge interesting enough to a wide enough variety of people.
If you take the extreme, people would pay huge amounts of money for The Matrix download to your brain type learning. The problem isn't no money in it, the problem is no solution thus far.
> Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well.
That's my point, it doesn't actually work for learning. Duolingo sells feel-good vibes of being productive with your doomscrolling time. It's learning-porn basically (could be worse).
I think a point to keep in mind is that even if some team cracked the ed-tech challenge and created a software that was wildly effective at getting students to learn, it would actually still be very difficult to get public schools to actually adopt it, unless they have some incentives like it being heavily subsidized, or free. And even then, it might not be free forever. That's part of the reason why ed-tech (even when it is proven to work) doesn't really make money.
No, Duolingo is an example that proves that there is plenty of money in taking a flawed-but-useful education tool, and making it much worse in specific, habit-forming ways. I don't know that it proves anything about the profitability of providing learning: merely about the profitability of providing the perception of learning / a habit-forming activity that you can persuade yourself is a virtue.
Perhaps showing people metrics derived from the "proved it with data", after each session, to provide the perception of progress even when the learning task is frustrating? Looking into gym psychology, rather than (video) game psychology, might help. You'd want to try to encourage intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation, but I'm not aware of any research on how to do that.
Turns out that when you enjoy something, the same amount of effort doesn't feel so taxing! Who would have thought?
Cancer research has a half-decent feedback mechanism that means fads eventually have to prove themselves or die out.
I was teaching a lot of stuff to students: physics, math, statistics (during my university times) now I teach programming and Machine Learning.
I am torn between instructional based approach, which has this advantage that gives people a set of minimal skills to start doing stuff by themselves and the project-based approach, which is probably more interesting, but is very hard to squeeze in a relatively short classes time and also might left gaps, even in the base areas, as there is no time to cover everything end-to-end (think of teaching people about for loop, as it helps working with lists, but do not mention a while loop).
So, there should be some ideal holy grail in between both ways of teaching: show them everything versus let them explore and invent everything by themselves.
The crux is that instructional-based approach works great if it is well tuned to the student's needs. The problem is that every student has different needs and capabilities, so it is hard to do something that will work for everyone. So something is too difficult for some people, while being too easy for others.
That's why we have Bloom's 2 sigma problem - 1:1 learning works orders of magnitude better than in-class learning.
Now, LLM AI enters the scene, as the article is mentioning - individualized instruction could be finally achievable and I am much less skeptical about that than the author, as I tested that on myself, the good thing is I can ask and ask for more and more details if I am not able to grok something and my "teacher" is always patient, has as much time as I need.
It does not mean that teachers are not needed, just the opposite, because the key problem is to know what to learn, LLM will just do what you ask for, nothing more, so one need to know what to ask about. But once someone is on the specific topic and problem, you can really go quite far with LLM as a tutor.
school was a massive waste of potential
what.
You can teach anyone over the age of 12 the PAIR troubleshooting process. I have seen people with drug abuse related mental health problems cope with it. Kids are sponges. Soooo I guess I am agreeing with the back half of this section not the front half.
>In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice.1 Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise.
Yeah it all goes back to Mastership learning, which modern schooling doesnt look anything like, because scaling to it would be madness.
>project-building or acting like a scientist, it will probably be worse...Students are unmotivated.
I feel like a lot of the systems being criticized here are designed to motivate children. And then all your N=1 people talking about their successes online, convincing people to approach things like this are related to having very motivated children.
>Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer.
Guy has at least 5 blog posts and a whole book on something he admits hes unqualified in.
He is a bit of a polarizing figure because he was a teacher of 26 years in NYC and was awarded the NY teacher of the year award two months before he published his famous resignation letter “I Quit, I Think”[1]
For anyone who is at all interested in education or the system will be aware that there is an scene crisis in the teaching profession and teachers are quitting left and right, to a degree that it is a serious civilization ending risk. I’m not even going to start talking about all of it because there is no way to do it justice, but suffice it to say, when the system of teaching the next generation collapses, your civilization/society/country will simply just stop functioning.
Maybe some of it can be eventually overcome where AI teaches your children instead of some government apparatchik type, but that’s a whole different set of problems caused by a solution.
“… we need to realize that the institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate"; that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing." - John Taylor Gatto
Yes, but, you attended a school, no? You are more qualified to answer than you think.
> for the average student.
Who is the 'average student?' This is such a non-existent class I'm skeptical of it's invocation.
Not once is class size mentioned. Perhaps putting 30 randomly selected people in a room and then trying to move them lock step through a subject is complete folly?
Your schools are designed for administrative efficiency, not student outcomes, and "average people" simply do not exist.
Just follow the people who invented kindergarten :))