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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others
But good luck reversing that trend.
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.
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.
How children learn is not how adults learn.
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 :(
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?
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
Which is exactly why they stopped teaching them in US curriculum under No Child Left Behind.
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.
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.
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?
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 us 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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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?
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'll take 1-on-1 mentoring over better computers, books, clubs, sports, or anything else the budget is spent on.
Please hire more teachers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
- 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.
Turns out that when you enjoy something, the same amount of effort doesn't feel so taxing! Who would have thought?