I was a student of calculus once. But it was long ago and I no longer remember what it was like. Human memory is bad and we are prone to hyperbole when it comes to recalling struggles/good times. A reminder is not a bad idea from time to time.
I suppose there are past experiences that you have forgotten what it was really like.
You might not remember a lot of the specifics. But I am sure you remember that you did a lot of sitting and a lot of listening (2 of the 3 surprising findings of the article).
I remember class being boring, but I didn't have these two hour long block classes that seem in vogue now. Well, I did in college and grad school, but you could skip class. Or during grad school it was common to just surf the web when you got truly bored.
After reading this I remembered sitting in some really boring high school classes boiling with almost rage at how boring it was. Sitting and looking at the clock. I wouldn't have remembered that without the help of the article.
I can easily see how a teacher would lose this prospective.
My father was a high school teacher. When his school shifted to long block classes it was great for lab and shop classes because they lost much less time on setup and cleanup, but terrible for lecture classes because many students couldn't pay attention that long.
Man, I have vivid memories of AP calculus. And that was... almost 20 years ago. At my school each class had 2 PCs: one for the teacher and one for the students. Our student PC was broken and the school apparently didn't have the resources to fix it. My calc teacher let us fix it for her, so we did. Then we started playing Grand Theft Auto (the original). In the game there's this chain of like 8 joggers we called the "school children" (meh, it was pixelated). We'd take turns trying to get a flame thrower and then finding the school children. Then you'd announce you were ready. The teacher would stop the lecture and we'd all go back to the computer to watch you try to flame thrower all the school children in a single go to get some giant bonus points. Then you rotated out. A couple weeks before the AP exam we all decided we should learn calculus so we started cramming. Most of us passed.
-- if you wish to promote a specific vision of gentle relations. However, if you're after information, then you should choose whatever is best for scientific economy. Maybe that takes you down a gentle path, and maybe it doesn't.
It's just a heuristic along the lines of Occam's Razor. Competent malice is less likely than incompetence, all else being equal. Normative motivations are irrelevant.
Yeah I agree, I mean, I realized all this stuff around 8 years old. Even after reading this I don't think any other teachers actually care or will ever care. This teacher is just getting old and forgetting how much being in school sucks. Thankfully I can just work on computers and make tons of money and love it. I now learn more every single week than I probably learned in a few months of school and, I graduated. That isn't from work though as I'm over 40.
It's just because I love to read and learn. I was doing Autocad in 1988 in 8th grade. I was learning Unix/Slackware inside out in 1993 after I graduated. School barely gave me basics in 13 years and I could of learned all of that in less than a year. If my wife wasn't a stay at home mom I'd probably home school my kids. Sadly though I have to work all the time so, they go to a boring school and only learn how to take tests.
13 years in a designated place of learning is worth less than 1 year in unstructured freedom, according to OP. It's ironic because for OP a place where you are suppose to learn is not a good place to learn
I learned more about technical writing from The Elements of Style and a one-semester university course that I ever did from 13 years of public schooling. I learned more about creative writing from being an immortal on a MUD and contributing to the underground newspaper than from anything I ever did in classes.
What I learned from the public school system was that I was not a good writer, and didn't know how to appreciate literature. As it turns out, that was antipodal from the truth. I have since re-synthesized the available data and revised my conclusion: my interests in school simply did not align with the curriculum mandated by school administrators. My grades were a measure of correlation rather than indicative of causation.
For instance, my teachers made me read Dante's Inferno. If Dennis Miller ever dropped the name Vanni Fucci into an obscure joke, I would probably get it, still having vague memories of the Malebolge filled with thieves and bitey reptiles. But I consider Planescape: Torment to be a better work of art. It isn't in a standard poetic form, though. Torment is a bit tougher to read in its entirety, and no one would dare to allude to bronze spheres to make a point without some inkling that the audience has played it. It is one thing to be exposed to art that has been blessed as a canonical masterwork in a controlled, sterile classroom environment: it is another thing entirely to recognize art in the wilds of your own life, and to recognize its worth because you feel emotion in its presence. When the system values the former over the latter, it has failed in its purpose. It failed me.
So I consider myself fortunate that I taught myself to program in BASIC and C many years before my public schooling system decided to offer a programming course in Pascal. Had that been my first exposure to software development, I would certainly not be here, writing this, now.
> But I consider Planescape: Torment to be a better work of art. It isn't in a standard poetic form, though.
Mmm. There's some of that, yes, but I think it'd fail for not being so entirely sublime as the best canonical works of prose and poetry (and art, generally). It avoids some of the drudgery of its genre, yes, but while much of the "waiting for the pathfinding to take The Nameless One from one side of this room I've already seen 10 times to the other" might be fine in a narrow sort of way, given enough of it (and there is enough of it), that probably takes it out of the running for any sort of grand cross-medium canonical great-art-of-all-time collection.
Unless you cleverly add constant wonder and discovery or some kind of emotional connection to the gamey-because-this-is-what-games-do bits (or cut them, somehow, without making it Not A Game) it's like a film with a great story and acting, but poorly-selected shot framing and uninspired editing constantly working against it.
Say it's in a genre you like a lot, though, and maybe you'd feel put-out that it's not being shown in film courses, because you don't notice the parts that aren't so good or could easily have been much better and better served the film's purpose, and besides most of the movies in the genre you like are that way, so what's the big deal? Certainly you like it much better than Kurosawa or Truffaut or whoever's in the curriculum.
FWIW the only real masterpiece of a game I can think of that I've played, in that kind of broad all-of-human-art sense, with a real understanding of its sources, its direction, art in a larger sense, the games that have come before it, and the way games work and how it can use that constantly to its advantage for more than just occupying the player's time, is Kentucky Route Zero. I've never seen the game-parts of games used in such a literary fashion before, with everything else also coming together nicely. Just beautiful. And I've played and enjoyed lots of games.
[EDIT] The Witness shows signs of qualifying, too, but I haven't played enough to be sure, and it's the kind of thing that needs good follow-through to fully work. Gotta get back to that one and finish it.
But that's just it. Different art says different things to different people.
To me, Inferno read like historical fan-fiction, where Dante put some well-known figures and some people that he just had some personal grudge against into his own version of Hell. The words were well chosen, but I didn't like it. Yet there it was, in my Norton Anthology. Someone liked it well enough to decide that I had to not only read it, but also dissect it and write BS essays about it.
That's a horrible enough thing to do to art you actually enjoy, but to chop up and rehash something you feel nothing for is even worse.
From my perspective now, as 2017-me, I wouldn't say that Planescape: Torment was "sublime". But 1999-me thought it was just the best thing to ever grace my hard drive. And 1999-me was able to look back on 1994-me and think "This is way better than Dante's Inferno." Dante took the concept of Gehennom from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tradition and turned it into an epic poem. Black Isle Studios took the Planescape campaign setting from D&D 2nd Ed. (aka AD&D) and turned it into an epic CRPG. In it, the ordered layers of Hell had to be renamed to Baator because of the moral panic from D&D 1st Ed. When Nameless One actually (re-)visited renamed Hell, I thought that the pillar of skulls was at least as good as anything Dante ever dreamed up, and the protagonist actually had a plot-essential reason to see it.
I think I actually need the gamey bits. I have tried the artsy walking-simulator games where the story is on rails, and I don't like them. For me, an essential part of enjoying the art is in the discovery. I tend to like it more if I had to work to get it. So as tell-a-story games go, I much prefer something like The Stanley Parable over something like Dear Esther.
Really sucks to hear this, I might have just got lucky but I had a great teacher. I started learning programming on Q basic. I remember learning about Boolean and keywords like 'IF' for the first time, ah how far we come along... He did a great job of applying the real world and other classes to the class room. Most of the programs we created were to improve current software that was already released. Not sure if I just got extremely lucky but most teacher that I had in HS were really fun and interactive.
The best example I have was when he brought in other classes into his. Our classroom was small about 5 people and all of us were taking Physics and Uni Math (In Ontario you have different streams of Math and physics is an elective). We created a small gravity / momentum / acceleration and deceleration game. We had to apply certain formulas from physics class and math. As the course progressed we started doing more complex tests and implementations I think it really help solidify the physics course because we where going through documentation more and reading outside of course material for the resources which then applied back to the classroom afterwords.
But the main reason why I really got into programming was a story that he told the class. A power plant of sorts was having issues with hydro costs. the prices would increase at certain times throughout the day and decrease in others. This facility didn't need all the machinery working all the time so he was brought in to build an optimal solution which sadly was simplified to a y=m*x+b and checking it's slope then based on a bunch of different conditions certain machines would be powered off and then when the slope started to balance back out and go below a certain value it would turn on machines in the expected order of importance.
I'm not sure why, but I guess this story to a 9 grades just made this field feel like we can apply theory from a bunch of different fields and If I ever get bored in 1 area I can always take time to learn another field and apply programming to it. But programmers will always be employed for the foreseeable future and that was a huge worry in my mind at the time but seems everything turns out alright.
I had the worst stereotype of a 9th grade history teacher you can imagine with a curriculum of a dumbed down textbook written at about 80 IQ level to maximize sales and tests consisting mostly of matching names and dates. I almost failed that class...
We can't teach dead white male texts for political reasons anymore. Nothing motivates a white male teenager like telling him a book is forbidden. I'm reminded of a nearly illiterate friend who forced himself to read Huckleberry Finn solely because it was banned. So needless to say as a little rebel I grew up reading and enjoying Plutarch, Xenophon, Gibbon, Herodotus. In a different era under superior political leadership, those books would have been considered masterpieces. Today they are considered fuel for book burnings solely for racial reasons.
There's no constant to "canonical masterwork" but if there is any constant at all, its probably that your school textbook was not a "canonical masterwork", LOL.
There is literally a literary canon. It has certainly evolved over time, but almost everything I was assigned to read in my high school literature classes was in it. My personal opinion is that no one would bother reading Inferno today if it wasn't in the canon.
To be fair, your perspective changes when you're on the other side of the desk. Teacher training in the U.S. is pretty abysmal. The research they're exposed to is largely theoretical or specialized, because that's what your professors have to focus on in a publish or perish world.
Good training would identify the misconceptions teachers are prone to, and the practical application of adolescent psych. There's also an appalling lack of guidance through the states' regulatory framework.
The three key points outlined by this piece are not difficult to grasp, or even realize. Its common sense. Bottom line, teachers are incentivized to sabotage real learning opportunities. the sad thing is, no one is trying to change it.
Adults forgetting what it is like to be young has been a foible of teachers and parents for all of recorded history. People are way worse at making connections between past experiences and present ones than we like to admit.
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
Now before you 'noob' me I did put in some effort. The old "google the title and click thru from google" doesn't work. Ghostery isn't helping. Adblock Plus isn't helping. Its a clickbait article and there's nothing wrong with that but it is a relevant issue in that I'm not switching browsers to read it.
I'm not sure it's the teachers' fault either. Not entirely anyway. They are beholden to school boards and parents (and ultimately all voters via funding). In fact - I suspect this was written for parents (etc) who are not involved in the day to day experience of school, but who demand certain things from schools without any concern for the real world effects (e.g. idiotic faith in standardized testing).
Those folks may not know these things. Unfortunately, they probably don't want to pause and think about it - If I showed this to some of my conservative friends and relatives they would take it as evidence that teachers are useless, not that the current teaching system needs some serious rearrangement.
The difficulty is that there is not an obvious "better way" for all schools to serve all students. The underlying goals of schools are often at odds and incompatible with each other, let alone the goals of the students/parents/communities that direct those schools. HN is full of people who hated the constraints of school but loved learning and succeeded based on that personal zeal, but I've known countless young people that wouldn't succeed in learning basic arithmetic or reasonable advanced literacy without a strong push to get them across the line. The answer is probably a larger variety of smaller schools (and cracking the nut of how to measure teacher effectiveness), but we're not economically or socially prepared to attempt that on the necessary scale.
Yes. I'm a teacher as well. The goals can be very contradictory.
Students and Parents want to learning to be individualized for them based on their specific needs. They don't want to be treated like products on an assembly line.
Students and Parents also don't want to be treated any differently than anyone else. They don't want another student to receive "better" treatment than what they are receiving.
GT students need different lessons that can keep up with them. GT students don't want to feel they are doing more work than non-GT students because they are GT. GT students don't want to have to do the same work as non-GT students. Otherwise what is the point? Non-GT students think it is unfair that GT students get to do different activities.
It can be hard to explain to students and parents that Samantha gets more unstructured learning time because she can handle it and Timmy has to be pushed along with less unstructured learning time because he goofs off the whole time.
Yes. I don't teach K - 12 but I have taught undergrads as a grad student and adjunct, and I wish more people realized this; I wrote "Ninety-five percent of people are fine — but it’s that last five percent" (https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe...) in part to explain the problems that a tiny minority can create. For example:
Teaching, especially at the K – 12 level, really suffers from this problem. A teacher who tries to be honest and interesting risks the ire of his or her angriest, more unhinged, or most ideological students (and, even worse, their parents). Almost no teacher gets in trouble for being boring, but a teacher can get in trouble or can get in trouble for being many values of “interesting.” Even I’ve had that problem, and I’m not sure I’m that interesting an instructor, and I teach college students.
Those are some awesome takeaways. I think that by the time you're a teacher, you forget what it's like to be a student. One of my biggest complaints with class is that its entirely passive learning and I am a completely hands on person. Additionally, after reading pedagogy of the oppressed, it's very easy to get bitter with education in general.
set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it.
Many teachers feel compelled to talk because they have a captive audience, so they prattle on about their personal lives or current events instead of engaging students in the topic they're supposed to be teaching.
Add metal detectors, wands, and barbed wire to the mix and you'll really know what it's like for some inner city high school kids (like myself once upon a time). Kids today have more time away from school than I did, I had more time away from school than my parents did, this article wasn't much of an eye opener, sorry.
Personally, high school is a waste, a transition period for students to truly find what they want out of life; in my opinion.
I can agree with you partially that high school in America is really poor in general. Having spent time in an inner city high school during my academic career, I agree with you that at the majority of the time, it felt like I was in some sort of government funded baby-sitting service. Man, I could go on for hours if you asked me about my experience there.
However, when I was a junior, I was relocated, started living with my aunt and uncle, and started going to a really nice public school. The difference was night and day. In fact, it took me weeks to stop walking around the hallways looking ready to bite someone's head off simply because that's just what you did in rougher schools to keep people from picking a fight with you.
The things I found at this nice high school were teachers who cared for my success and worked with me to get there, friends who shared an interest in computer science, UIL computer science academics, robotics, and so many other options and facets that have helped me to get a head start on my career. This school has options and extra-ciriculars that help students become young adults. I remember being on my high school campus an average of 10 hours with all the clubs, extra-curriculars, and athletics I participated in.
Sure, high school is always going to be a transitional time for people. But it doesn't need to be young-adult day care or a few steps up from jail. I earned three college credits and my CCENT in high school.
Yesterday there was a discussion here about antidepressants. I was tempted to jump in and comment that: sometimes depression isn't clinical, it can also be situational, that I had tried SSRIs and gotten nowhere, and the only thing that cured my depression was dropping out of college and finally getting a real life started.
School is a nightmare. Mix in bullying, antipathetic adults who behave like prison guards, teenage hormones. I don't know what the solution is, but American high school is a failed experiment.
Bravo to this principle for bothering to eat the dogfood.
(I was in cozy suburban schooling, incidentally; it felt like a prison. Now I live around your kind of schools, and I don't understand how anyone survives them.)
Right, internationally there are a lot of places where high school age is career prep, which makes a ton of sense. This is the age at which people were considered to be becoming adults, and the mind craves exploring autonomy and personal engagement.
It's ridiculous that people are shielded from adulthood until they're in their 20s. 21 years old is when a person should be reasonably expected to know how to be an adult, not the age at which a protected child gets their first glimmers of adulthood, but has full responsibility along with their naivety. 16-21 is when they need to practice being adults.
We had security theater in the burbs, in fact we probably had more and better guards and metal detectors. The big difference I see as an older parent is police involvement, at the good schools the cops occasionally lay down the law on loitering, possession, occasional fist fight requiring no medical treatment. The bad schools are full of daily police calls for all of the above plus stabbings, graffiti, handgun possession, rape, hospitalized beatings. It seems the biggest danger at the good schools is boredom and rebellion, and at the bad schools the biggest problem is physical danger.
For a long time I was a smoker, I would often walk out of the building with others, and take a break. Talking about their or my problem of the minute.
One of the other engineers who DIDNT smoke started coming out with us when we went. After a few weeks he noted out loud how his productivity had been UP since he started taking the journey with us.
It seems counter intuitive that getting up and moving around (even to do something bad) is good for you.
If your not a smoker, go hang out with them a few times a day (or use their smoke breaks to take your own break away from your desk).
Probably because people don't view walking 500 steps at 1.5 mph, standing for 5 minutes, then returning as exercise. Unless there are stairs or a significant incline, there isn't a readily noticeable change in heart rate nor breathing pattern. So most people probably view moseying around the office for a couple of minutes as a waste of time.
One of the best things I did was setting an alarm to get up every 60 minutes. But then I followed it too religiously by getting up damn near immediately. That broke productivity. I found a happy medium by finding an adequate stopping point and then getting up.
Taking a break during the class? Weren't you missing out some essential part of lesson?
My friend doesn't smoke but he often walked out to listened a metal music with high volume. When a song ended, then he got back to the class. Since one short break for a 3-hours class is crazy.
I am saying that the lesson applies in the "real world" as well. We as adults should not try and sit for hours on end every day and expect to remain productive!
For most of our couple hundred thousand year existence as a species we've been very successful using every learning technique except "sit down shut up and listen for a couple hours". In fact we've only done it for about a century almost exclusively with lower to middle class white European kids and all that's certain about that technique is its mostly resulted in the production of a lot of cannon fodder and factory (now cubical) drones. For most of our species history the shut up and listen technique has been limited to religion and brainwashing; perhaps there is no difference.
Its likely that what we arrogantly claim is education or training is merely implantation of weird religious beliefs via brainwashing, as opposed to actual education. Does it matter if the kid mindlessly repeats that 2+2=4, or the kid irrationally believes 2+2=4, or the kid understands how 2+2=4? In a world where all that matters is the correct oval is filled in on the endlessly growing number of standardized tests, I'm not optimistic anyone is learning anything other than to fill in ovals and parrot a belief in whatever this hour's authority claims is today's truth. Until tomorrow when it'll all be different.
This might explain how some new grads are so hopelessly useless in that perhaps they absorbed the "true believer" aesthetic and therefore were passed along, but they were never actually educated, never actually learned, perhaps algebra, or programming, or philosophy, or politics, or any other topic.
"I learned how to tell the teacher what they wanted to hear, then forgot it as completely as possible so as to endlessly repeat" could result in a very successful student career yet not so successful post-graduation.
90 minutes is too long. I remember lots of rushing between classes. We didn't sit for a 90 minutes in one room. Much of this talk about getting the blood flowing during lectures would probably be addressed through shorter classes; Not dedicated exercise but the simple act of getting up and walking from one class to the other more often.
My middle school kids have English Lit as a block.
Honestly, as a grade school kid if I was reading something I enjoyed, 90 minutes was not much of an achievement. You can will yourself thru something you hate for 45 minutes, gym class perhaps. You probably have to be a grown adult (or older) to tolerate something like a worthless 90 minute class or business meeting.
This stuff seems to me to be inherent to institutionalized education. When you have an instituion with lots of kids to teach, what option is there but to have them all sit down all day and be passive. Also dealing with lots of kids and their misbehavior and having to get through a lesson plan at the same time would make adults feel like they have to be strict and direct "shh" towards the kids. When this organization is being run by the same organization that runs the DMV it's only natural to expect more extreme negative behaviors like sarcasm and snark and probably even more negative things that happen when there isn't a shadow teacher following.
In my mind home school seems like the the only real solution to these ills.
> home school seems like the the only real solution
Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.
Parental involvement in education is kind of like eating healthy, in that its expensive and time consuming and not always fun, but the alternative being failure and disaster and death is kind of motivational. The stick is mightier than the carrot.
That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals matching your own is very low.
Of course, the goal should be to instruct the student as they would have wished from the perspective of their older selves. A damnably hard goal set to estimate. To enable fluid interaction with the bulk of society, however, my estimation is that the goals should include at least knowledge of the most popular curriculums, as taught to other students. There are a lot of socially valuable games set up around such curriculums and a student may be justifiably resentful if they are not competitive. A capable educator will go beyond that and treat the curriculums themselves as objects of study, but here the capabilities of the student come into play, since most are out of middle school before being able to comfortably make such distinctions.
>Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas.
At least for the first few years of a child's life, I think a parent can handle the curriculum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be time consuming. I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. Also, they can go at their own pace rather than at the pace of the class which should allow for a lot more to be crammed into much shorter periods of time.
Maybe in higher grades there will be things that parents cannot adequately teach, but these can be supplemented through means much less drastic than locking kids up for hours and hours in a school environment.
It will require one parent to stay at home with the kids . . . but I don't think that was ever really optional, our society has just chosen to pretend that it was an option because we seem to have our values misplaced.
> I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger.
I would actually disagree with that. To a kid, a teacher is its own mythical authoritative being solely focused on instruction and keeping the class orderly. (ymmv for poor unruly schools) It's always world-shattering for a little one to see their teacher in "normal life" at the store or wherever.
A parent is more familiar, and is somebody that you have arguments with. Being at home also has its own distractions, because you're usually not locked down to one thing in your own house.
I agree that factory-style education is pretty terrible, but some of the nuggets are useful, like getting away from the home to a dedicated place & people of learning.
I wasn't are that the Department of Transportation ran the schools, or are you honestly implying that the same sort of organizational structure is at place because they're both "the gubment"?
Why do teachers always think group projects and in-class demonstrations are great ideas? I hated that as a student. I found those classes to be really shallow, because groups of students rarely had good ideas or grasped the material well enough to present on it.
A good teacher can spend a whole class lecturing and is able to engage their students.
We don't need to fix class structure. We need to fix teachers.
"Group projects" at work are completely different from group projects in school. Work generally has managers. If someone isn't pulling their weight in a project, there's someone you can talk to about it and have something done about it. People have their income on the line.
At school, my teachers were almost always explicit about not wanting to manage. "Organize yourselves". There were countless times I had lazy project partners, even in grad level courses in college, that I could do nothing about. The teachers told me to just figure it out myself. They never took action against bums. This meant that lazy people could assume they'd be taken care of by their more disciplined teammates. As a result, I never got any value out of group projects in school - whenever I had a group project, I always assumed I'd have to be doing _way more_ work than I'd have to for individual projects.
I've never had to deal with coworkers who acted that way.
You've never had incompetent coworkers? You've never worked at a megacorp where it was basically impossible to get fired? One of the things you could've done for your group projects is be the manager yourself. Assign tasks and divvy up the work load based on skill/knowledge. Obviously, don't give the doofus anything challenging. 99% of the time people are willing to do whatever they're explicitly instructed to do. Track assigned tasks and completion. If someone doesn't pull their weight, don't put their name on the finished project and turn in the assignment tracking with the project to explain why their name was removed.
I would never work at a megacorp. That sounds miserable.
And why are you assuming I didn't try managing projects? Of course I did. I would always divvy up the work in such a way that'd I'd have the more difficult portion and I'd keep tabs on people. And when I'd tell my teachers that someone wasn't pulling their weight, they'd say it's my problem. I took _one_ class in college where the professors actually took that into account and docked my teammates. Without threats from teachers, students do not give a fuck. Complete waste of my time in school.
Consider bigger companies where the enemies of middle managers are all other internal departments. Technically IT and engineering work for the same company. In practice you're more likely to get cooperation with a competitor company. I'm not exaggerating in that its easier to serve on standards committees than to get an exception to "policy" from another department. The "dog eat dog" happens at middle management not grunt front line level, but it's there...
Group projects at work are different because everyone has a different role. In school, everyone must have the same role in order to equally learn the material. Any divisions are arbitrary and the consequences of not putting in effort are minimal.
>Any divisions are arbitrary and the consequences of not putting in effort are minimal.
That's been my experience at work too. Sure, I might be a developer, but I'm often doing PM, QA, or BA tasks. Eventually crappy coworkers might get the boot, but almost never within the time frame of a single project.
The argument is that this kind of group project arrangement is crappy; It's possible for work group projects to be terrible for the same reasons but it's absolutely guaranteed in school projects.
If anything, we are just training students that your terrible group work experiences are normal.
>If anything, we are just training students that your terrible group work experiences are normal.
Oh, absolutely. That's what the whole school experience is about. Think about it. We sit all your desks in nice neat rows. You have to ask permission even to use the restroom. We demand conformity, maybe even put you in a uniform. Don't you dare ever question authority. Sit here quietly for hours on end doing mindless tasks for meaningless rewards.
If that's not some reasonable analogy to what your job is like, then you are probably at least a standard deviation outside the norm in IQ or creativity.
If you could try to be a bit more cynical you'll see that HS is preparation for most jobs. We line all your desks up in nice neat rows, conformity is mandatory so we may even put you in uniforms. We don't want you ever questioning authority. We want you to sit here quietly and do mindless work for countless hours with minimal rewards. Most jobs out there are not inspiring or in anyone's intellectual interests.
I think if that's not what your job is like, then you're probably in the vast minority in the world, probably even in Western culture unless you're a standard deviation above the norm in IQ or generational wealth.
If you have no tolerance for such BS, you'll eventually find your place without it. There are literally millions of companies to work for, as well as other non-direct-employment opportunities which is something like 30% of the workforce now.
Accepting these problems as a necessary burden is your own personal choice.
As a guy who almost thought about committing a suicide due to working in offices, and as a guy who eventually found his way to stable remote work, I still think you're being too harsh.
People get tired. People get burned out. People need to switch an active and hectic period with a period of stability and tranquility. Having someone who needs such a more relaxing period to NEVER engage it to continuously chase the ideal employer is a recipe for a suicide.
Moving between companies is harder than it should be.
I rather think tools need to improve. Could you do without a teacher? That should be the goal. To be able to simply take ur tablet out, and learn and have fun doing it, to discover and practise, as to get the knowledge into you while enjoying the experience.
I think that should be the goal, because then you will do it again and again on your own. Why do you like computer games so much? Cause its fun!
That should be the goal im my humble opinion. Get students to learn all day long while enjoying it and being productive without teachers, so to make the learning success independent of the teachers and tests, whereby the students all the while learn more than they would on a test.
Think of a meeting without clear hierarchy, with a random team (so no "usual roles") and the stress to handle people that are not entirely your first choice...
But even more I hated psycho-games. Some rules or some concept you have to follow without being told what it is good for in the end. ("Write down whay you think about XY, now exchange these with your neighbour. I will tell you what to do with it later")
So basically, she thought it was OK to make fun of students when they asked a question that had been asked already. Wow, so sorry I missed being in her class...
(In a non-personal non-doxing manner, I'm just saying you read like my sister-in-law kinda and she's got 20 years in. Which sounds like a prison term. Um...)
I don't, but I know several teachers, and am married to one. Anecdotes from 3rd-9th grade, all running pretty much like that. I gather some level of this occurs almost daily. Most of them teach in "good" schools, too, so these are the students who are easy to teach.
(for the record, I don't think any of them actually drink at school)
I am shocked--simply shocked--to discover that most teachers do not bother to view the experiences they supply from another perspective!
The tragedy of this article is that any lessons learned from such a stunt will not likely survive long enough to make any actual, substantial changes in public school pedagogy.
Students will continue to sit down and shut up, as they are expected to passively absorb all information given to them, to be regurgitated on demand. It would be difficult to change that even if you had the force of a published, peer-reviewed scientific study behind you, rather than just two days worth of anecdotes.
...there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of communication.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
(All in all, I agree, this should have been obvious without having to shadow any student at all.)
Not a teacher but an instructional designer. Digital courses tend to have very high dropout rates so my job is to design the best possible eLearning experience with maximum information/skill retention. I credit my successes (apologies for the shamelessness but it's necessary to make my point!) to my being a learner myself. It's simply not enough to know pedagogical, cognitive and design theories and techniques, you really have to become a learner yourself in order to get better at educating.
For example, in design stage where I'm scoping, scripting and storyboarding for a digital course, it's essential to keep close relationships with the subject matter experts and a sample of learners.
For the latter, one-off interviews are simply not enough. It's much more revealing when you station yourself "in the field" to observe and interact directly, so that you deeply understand their problems, work environment and ways of working. Even if you gain no new information, the experience will shape your design decisions and help make the course more "human."
But for subject matter experts, I tend to assume the role of the dumbest learner ever. Actually that's not very hard, I'm a slow learner myself! But by making no assumptions and asking the simplest questions, I find that I can get the course to flow better and much more easily digestible.
Brief stints are still not enough though. Outside my professional life, I take a few online courses to help me stay grounded and informed of the best and worst techniques. (And learn new things!)
So it really boils down to empathy. As educators we can suppose so much, but at the end of the day, it's the learners that receive it all. The closest we can get to understanding them is then to become learners ourselves.
I am glad that this topic has been highlighted. It is really important to understand that education cannot be treated like 0 & 1 in the schedule. After some lessons student can be so much mentally exhausted that is really hard to imagine for someone who forget how it is, when you need to spend few hours being constantly focus and thinking.
An interesting analysis would be to take the 87 (and counting) comments here on this submission and compare them with the 178 comments from some 900 days ago.
Can NLP do this? Can comments there be compared with comments here to see if there is a matching?
That would be a fascinating exercise. Anyone up for it?
108 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThese things are pretty obvious. I always just assumed teachers didn't care.
*Edit: words
I suppose there are past experiences that you have forgotten what it was really like.
After reading this I remembered sitting in some really boring high school classes boiling with almost rage at how boring it was. Sitting and looking at the clock. I wouldn't have remembered that without the help of the article.
I can easily see how a teacher would lose this prospective.
Indifference in this case. Anyone could have remembered or imagined what the day of a student is. They just didn't care
It's just because I love to read and learn. I was doing Autocad in 1988 in 8th grade. I was learning Unix/Slackware inside out in 1993 after I graduated. School barely gave me basics in 13 years and I could of learned all of that in less than a year. If my wife wasn't a stay at home mom I'd probably home school my kids. Sadly though I have to work all the time so, they go to a boring school and only learn how to take tests.
Oh the irony...
What I learned from the public school system was that I was not a good writer, and didn't know how to appreciate literature. As it turns out, that was antipodal from the truth. I have since re-synthesized the available data and revised my conclusion: my interests in school simply did not align with the curriculum mandated by school administrators. My grades were a measure of correlation rather than indicative of causation.
For instance, my teachers made me read Dante's Inferno. If Dennis Miller ever dropped the name Vanni Fucci into an obscure joke, I would probably get it, still having vague memories of the Malebolge filled with thieves and bitey reptiles. But I consider Planescape: Torment to be a better work of art. It isn't in a standard poetic form, though. Torment is a bit tougher to read in its entirety, and no one would dare to allude to bronze spheres to make a point without some inkling that the audience has played it. It is one thing to be exposed to art that has been blessed as a canonical masterwork in a controlled, sterile classroom environment: it is another thing entirely to recognize art in the wilds of your own life, and to recognize its worth because you feel emotion in its presence. When the system values the former over the latter, it has failed in its purpose. It failed me.
So I consider myself fortunate that I taught myself to program in BASIC and C many years before my public schooling system decided to offer a programming course in Pascal. Had that been my first exposure to software development, I would certainly not be here, writing this, now.
Mmm. There's some of that, yes, but I think it'd fail for not being so entirely sublime as the best canonical works of prose and poetry (and art, generally). It avoids some of the drudgery of its genre, yes, but while much of the "waiting for the pathfinding to take The Nameless One from one side of this room I've already seen 10 times to the other" might be fine in a narrow sort of way, given enough of it (and there is enough of it), that probably takes it out of the running for any sort of grand cross-medium canonical great-art-of-all-time collection.
Unless you cleverly add constant wonder and discovery or some kind of emotional connection to the gamey-because-this-is-what-games-do bits (or cut them, somehow, without making it Not A Game) it's like a film with a great story and acting, but poorly-selected shot framing and uninspired editing constantly working against it.
Say it's in a genre you like a lot, though, and maybe you'd feel put-out that it's not being shown in film courses, because you don't notice the parts that aren't so good or could easily have been much better and better served the film's purpose, and besides most of the movies in the genre you like are that way, so what's the big deal? Certainly you like it much better than Kurosawa or Truffaut or whoever's in the curriculum.
FWIW the only real masterpiece of a game I can think of that I've played, in that kind of broad all-of-human-art sense, with a real understanding of its sources, its direction, art in a larger sense, the games that have come before it, and the way games work and how it can use that constantly to its advantage for more than just occupying the player's time, is Kentucky Route Zero. I've never seen the game-parts of games used in such a literary fashion before, with everything else also coming together nicely. Just beautiful. And I've played and enjoyed lots of games.
[EDIT] The Witness shows signs of qualifying, too, but I haven't played enough to be sure, and it's the kind of thing that needs good follow-through to fully work. Gotta get back to that one and finish it.
To me, Inferno read like historical fan-fiction, where Dante put some well-known figures and some people that he just had some personal grudge against into his own version of Hell. The words were well chosen, but I didn't like it. Yet there it was, in my Norton Anthology. Someone liked it well enough to decide that I had to not only read it, but also dissect it and write BS essays about it.
That's a horrible enough thing to do to art you actually enjoy, but to chop up and rehash something you feel nothing for is even worse.
From my perspective now, as 2017-me, I wouldn't say that Planescape: Torment was "sublime". But 1999-me thought it was just the best thing to ever grace my hard drive. And 1999-me was able to look back on 1994-me and think "This is way better than Dante's Inferno." Dante took the concept of Gehennom from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tradition and turned it into an epic poem. Black Isle Studios took the Planescape campaign setting from D&D 2nd Ed. (aka AD&D) and turned it into an epic CRPG. In it, the ordered layers of Hell had to be renamed to Baator because of the moral panic from D&D 1st Ed. When Nameless One actually (re-)visited renamed Hell, I thought that the pillar of skulls was at least as good as anything Dante ever dreamed up, and the protagonist actually had a plot-essential reason to see it.
I think I actually need the gamey bits. I have tried the artsy walking-simulator games where the story is on rails, and I don't like them. For me, an essential part of enjoying the art is in the discovery. I tend to like it more if I had to work to get it. So as tell-a-story games go, I much prefer something like The Stanley Parable over something like Dear Esther.
The best example I have was when he brought in other classes into his. Our classroom was small about 5 people and all of us were taking Physics and Uni Math (In Ontario you have different streams of Math and physics is an elective). We created a small gravity / momentum / acceleration and deceleration game. We had to apply certain formulas from physics class and math. As the course progressed we started doing more complex tests and implementations I think it really help solidify the physics course because we where going through documentation more and reading outside of course material for the resources which then applied back to the classroom afterwords.
But the main reason why I really got into programming was a story that he told the class. A power plant of sorts was having issues with hydro costs. the prices would increase at certain times throughout the day and decrease in others. This facility didn't need all the machinery working all the time so he was brought in to build an optimal solution which sadly was simplified to a y=m*x+b and checking it's slope then based on a bunch of different conditions certain machines would be powered off and then when the slope started to balance back out and go below a certain value it would turn on machines in the expected order of importance.
I'm not sure why, but I guess this story to a 9 grades just made this field feel like we can apply theory from a bunch of different fields and If I ever get bored in 1 area I can always take time to learn another field and apply programming to it. But programmers will always be employed for the foreseeable future and that was a huge worry in my mind at the time but seems everything turns out alright.
Not a constant, there isn't even an ideal.
I had the worst stereotype of a 9th grade history teacher you can imagine with a curriculum of a dumbed down textbook written at about 80 IQ level to maximize sales and tests consisting mostly of matching names and dates. I almost failed that class...
We can't teach dead white male texts for political reasons anymore. Nothing motivates a white male teenager like telling him a book is forbidden. I'm reminded of a nearly illiterate friend who forced himself to read Huckleberry Finn solely because it was banned. So needless to say as a little rebel I grew up reading and enjoying Plutarch, Xenophon, Gibbon, Herodotus. In a different era under superior political leadership, those books would have been considered masterpieces. Today they are considered fuel for book burnings solely for racial reasons.
There's no constant to "canonical masterwork" but if there is any constant at all, its probably that your school textbook was not a "canonical masterwork", LOL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon#Literary_canon
There is literally a literary canon. It has certainly evolved over time, but almost everything I was assigned to read in my high school literature classes was in it. My personal opinion is that no one would bother reading Inferno today if it wasn't in the canon.
Good training would identify the misconceptions teachers are prone to, and the practical application of adolescent psych. There's also an appalling lack of guidance through the states' regulatory framework.
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
Now before you 'noob' me I did put in some effort. The old "google the title and click thru from google" doesn't work. Ghostery isn't helping. Adblock Plus isn't helping. Its a clickbait article and there's nothing wrong with that but it is a relevant issue in that I'm not switching browsers to read it.
When I clicked on the link directly I did not get a paywall. FWIW I do not have ABP.
Still, even with all that the WSJ have tightened their paywall and some people report problems getting around it even using all the tricks.
With special savings on our National Digital package, you’ll never miss a single story again."
I suppose it's good to remind teachers about things they already know, but are not regularly implementing.
Those folks may not know these things. Unfortunately, they probably don't want to pause and think about it - If I showed this to some of my conservative friends and relatives they would take it as evidence that teachers are useless, not that the current teaching system needs some serious rearrangement.
Students and Parents want to learning to be individualized for them based on their specific needs. They don't want to be treated like products on an assembly line.
Students and Parents also don't want to be treated any differently than anyone else. They don't want another student to receive "better" treatment than what they are receiving.
GT students need different lessons that can keep up with them. GT students don't want to feel they are doing more work than non-GT students because they are GT. GT students don't want to have to do the same work as non-GT students. Otherwise what is the point? Non-GT students think it is unfair that GT students get to do different activities.
It can be hard to explain to students and parents that Samantha gets more unstructured learning time because she can handle it and Timmy has to be pushed along with less unstructured learning time because he goofs off the whole time.
Yes. I don't teach K - 12 but I have taught undergrads as a grad student and adjunct, and I wish more people realized this; I wrote "Ninety-five percent of people are fine — but it’s that last five percent" (https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe...) in part to explain the problems that a tiny minority can create. For example:
Teaching, especially at the K – 12 level, really suffers from this problem. A teacher who tries to be honest and interesting risks the ire of his or her angriest, more unhinged, or most ideological students (and, even worse, their parents). Almost no teacher gets in trouble for being boring, but a teacher can get in trouble or can get in trouble for being many values of “interesting.” Even I’ve had that problem, and I’m not sure I’m that interesting an instructor, and I teach college students.
set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it.
Many teachers feel compelled to talk because they have a captive audience, so they prattle on about their personal lives or current events instead of engaging students in the topic they're supposed to be teaching.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
Personally, high school is a waste, a transition period for students to truly find what they want out of life; in my opinion.
However, when I was a junior, I was relocated, started living with my aunt and uncle, and started going to a really nice public school. The difference was night and day. In fact, it took me weeks to stop walking around the hallways looking ready to bite someone's head off simply because that's just what you did in rougher schools to keep people from picking a fight with you.
The things I found at this nice high school were teachers who cared for my success and worked with me to get there, friends who shared an interest in computer science, UIL computer science academics, robotics, and so many other options and facets that have helped me to get a head start on my career. This school has options and extra-ciriculars that help students become young adults. I remember being on my high school campus an average of 10 hours with all the clubs, extra-curriculars, and athletics I participated in.
Sure, high school is always going to be a transitional time for people. But it doesn't need to be young-adult day care or a few steps up from jail. I earned three college credits and my CCENT in high school.
School is a nightmare. Mix in bullying, antipathetic adults who behave like prison guards, teenage hormones. I don't know what the solution is, but American high school is a failed experiment.
Bravo to this principle for bothering to eat the dogfood.
(I was in cozy suburban schooling, incidentally; it felt like a prison. Now I live around your kind of schools, and I don't understand how anyone survives them.)
It's ridiculous that people are shielded from adulthood until they're in their 20s. 21 years old is when a person should be reasonably expected to know how to be an adult, not the age at which a protected child gets their first glimmers of adulthood, but has full responsibility along with their naivety. 16-21 is when they need to practice being adults.
For a long time I was a smoker, I would often walk out of the building with others, and take a break. Talking about their or my problem of the minute.
One of the other engineers who DIDNT smoke started coming out with us when we went. After a few weeks he noted out loud how his productivity had been UP since he started taking the journey with us.
It seems counter intuitive that getting up and moving around (even to do something bad) is good for you.
If your not a smoker, go hang out with them a few times a day (or use their smoke breaks to take your own break away from your desk).
One of the best things I did was setting an alarm to get up every 60 minutes. But then I followed it too religiously by getting up damn near immediately. That broke productivity. I found a happy medium by finding an adequate stopping point and then getting up.
My friend doesn't smoke but he often walked out to listened a metal music with high volume. When a song ended, then he got back to the class. Since one short break for a 3-hours class is crazy.
Do we really need to follow students to learn that they sit a lot and listen a lot?
For most of our couple hundred thousand year existence as a species we've been very successful using every learning technique except "sit down shut up and listen for a couple hours". In fact we've only done it for about a century almost exclusively with lower to middle class white European kids and all that's certain about that technique is its mostly resulted in the production of a lot of cannon fodder and factory (now cubical) drones. For most of our species history the shut up and listen technique has been limited to religion and brainwashing; perhaps there is no difference.
Its likely that what we arrogantly claim is education or training is merely implantation of weird religious beliefs via brainwashing, as opposed to actual education. Does it matter if the kid mindlessly repeats that 2+2=4, or the kid irrationally believes 2+2=4, or the kid understands how 2+2=4? In a world where all that matters is the correct oval is filled in on the endlessly growing number of standardized tests, I'm not optimistic anyone is learning anything other than to fill in ovals and parrot a belief in whatever this hour's authority claims is today's truth. Until tomorrow when it'll all be different.
This might explain how some new grads are so hopelessly useless in that perhaps they absorbed the "true believer" aesthetic and therefore were passed along, but they were never actually educated, never actually learned, perhaps algebra, or programming, or philosophy, or politics, or any other topic.
"I learned how to tell the teacher what they wanted to hear, then forgot it as completely as possible so as to endlessly repeat" could result in a very successful student career yet not so successful post-graduation.
Honestly, as a grade school kid if I was reading something I enjoyed, 90 minutes was not much of an achievement. You can will yourself thru something you hate for 45 minutes, gym class perhaps. You probably have to be a grown adult (or older) to tolerate something like a worthless 90 minute class or business meeting.
In my mind home school seems like the the only real solution to these ills.
Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.
That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals matching your own is very low.
Of course, the goal should be to instruct the student as they would have wished from the perspective of their older selves. A damnably hard goal set to estimate. To enable fluid interaction with the bulk of society, however, my estimation is that the goals should include at least knowledge of the most popular curriculums, as taught to other students. There are a lot of socially valuable games set up around such curriculums and a student may be justifiably resentful if they are not competitive. A capable educator will go beyond that and treat the curriculums themselves as objects of study, but here the capabilities of the student come into play, since most are out of middle school before being able to comfortably make such distinctions.
At least for the first few years of a child's life, I think a parent can handle the curriculum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be time consuming. I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. Also, they can go at their own pace rather than at the pace of the class which should allow for a lot more to be crammed into much shorter periods of time.
Maybe in higher grades there will be things that parents cannot adequately teach, but these can be supplemented through means much less drastic than locking kids up for hours and hours in a school environment.
It will require one parent to stay at home with the kids . . . but I don't think that was ever really optional, our society has just chosen to pretend that it was an option because we seem to have our values misplaced.
I would actually disagree with that. To a kid, a teacher is its own mythical authoritative being solely focused on instruction and keeping the class orderly. (ymmv for poor unruly schools) It's always world-shattering for a little one to see their teacher in "normal life" at the store or wherever.
A parent is more familiar, and is somebody that you have arguments with. Being at home also has its own distractions, because you're usually not locked down to one thing in your own house.
I agree that factory-style education is pretty terrible, but some of the nuggets are useful, like getting away from the home to a dedicated place & people of learning.
A good teacher can spend a whole class lecturing and is able to engage their students.
We don't need to fix class structure. We need to fix teachers.
At school, my teachers were almost always explicit about not wanting to manage. "Organize yourselves". There were countless times I had lazy project partners, even in grad level courses in college, that I could do nothing about. The teachers told me to just figure it out myself. They never took action against bums. This meant that lazy people could assume they'd be taken care of by their more disciplined teammates. As a result, I never got any value out of group projects in school - whenever I had a group project, I always assumed I'd have to be doing _way more_ work than I'd have to for individual projects.
I've never had to deal with coworkers who acted that way.
And why are you assuming I didn't try managing projects? Of course I did. I would always divvy up the work in such a way that'd I'd have the more difficult portion and I'd keep tabs on people. And when I'd tell my teachers that someone wasn't pulling their weight, they'd say it's my problem. I took _one_ class in college where the professors actually took that into account and docked my teammates. Without threats from teachers, students do not give a fuck. Complete waste of my time in school.
That's been my experience at work too. Sure, I might be a developer, but I'm often doing PM, QA, or BA tasks. Eventually crappy coworkers might get the boot, but almost never within the time frame of a single project.
If anything, we are just training students that your terrible group work experiences are normal.
Oh, absolutely. That's what the whole school experience is about. Think about it. We sit all your desks in nice neat rows. You have to ask permission even to use the restroom. We demand conformity, maybe even put you in a uniform. Don't you dare ever question authority. Sit here quietly for hours on end doing mindless tasks for meaningless rewards.
If that's not some reasonable analogy to what your job is like, then you are probably at least a standard deviation outside the norm in IQ or creativity.
But it's not, and it doesn't pretend to be. My high school had some really knowledgable and inspiring teachers (and many not so!).
Some of those great teachers were able to plant seeds of thought with their lectures, and those were some of the most valuable lessons I had.
I wish HS could involve inspiring, knowledgeable teachers, plus self-study in one's own intellectual interests.
Add in a social / political culture that is right out of middle school behavior at the worse employers...
Accepting these problems as a necessary burden is your own personal choice.
People get tired. People get burned out. People need to switch an active and hectic period with a period of stability and tranquility. Having someone who needs such a more relaxing period to NEVER engage it to continuously chase the ideal employer is a recipe for a suicide.
Moving between companies is harder than it should be.
I think that should be the goal, because then you will do it again and again on your own. Why do you like computer games so much? Cause its fun!
That should be the goal im my humble opinion. Get students to learn all day long while enjoying it and being productive without teachers, so to make the learning success independent of the teachers and tests, whereby the students all the while learn more than they would on a test.
Think of a meeting without clear hierarchy, with a random team (so no "usual roles") and the stress to handle people that are not entirely your first choice...
But even more I hated psycho-games. Some rules or some concept you have to follow without being told what it is good for in the end. ("Write down whay you think about XY, now exchange these with your neighbour. I will tell you what to do with it later")
Teacher T, Student S (not always the same student), Students Ss
T: "I've put the exact steps you need to follow on the board, right here. Repeat that back to me."
Ss: "The steps are on the board."
T: "Great. Any questions? No? Makes sense? Cool, get started!" (walks among students to check work and help as needed)
(10 seconds later)
S: What do we do first?
T: It's on the board. Right there. The step labelled "1". And first on the list. Is there part of it you don't understand?
S: Oh, no, I just didn't know it was there.
(2 minutes later)
T: Uh, are you done?
S: No. I just didn't know what to do next.
T: Did... you do all the steps? On the board?
S: Oh, right! No, just step 1.
(5 minutes later)
S: Mr/Mrs T, what's step 3?
T: Did you check the board?
S: Uhhhhh, oh yeah.
(this happens some more. 6 hours later)
T: (grading papers. Several students missed one or more steps.)
(next day)
S: Why is my grade so low?
T: You didn't do step 4. At all.
S: I didn't know what to do there.
T: (points at list, still on board)
S: Oooooh, yeah.
T: (sneaks whisky from desk to make it through the day without killing self or others)
[EDIT] formatting
(In a non-personal non-doxing manner, I'm just saying you read like my sister-in-law kinda and she's got 20 years in. Which sounds like a prison term. Um...)
(for the record, I don't think any of them actually drink at school)
I know I'm bitter but it's only because I was a bottom 20% student in high school and I'm now a top 10% student in college.
The tragedy of this article is that any lessons learned from such a stunt will not likely survive long enough to make any actual, substantial changes in public school pedagogy.
Students will continue to sit down and shut up, as they are expected to passively absorb all information given to them, to be regurgitated on demand. It would be difficult to change that even if you had the force of a published, peer-reviewed scientific study behind you, rather than just two days worth of anecdotes.
For example, in design stage where I'm scoping, scripting and storyboarding for a digital course, it's essential to keep close relationships with the subject matter experts and a sample of learners.
For the latter, one-off interviews are simply not enough. It's much more revealing when you station yourself "in the field" to observe and interact directly, so that you deeply understand their problems, work environment and ways of working. Even if you gain no new information, the experience will shape your design decisions and help make the course more "human."
But for subject matter experts, I tend to assume the role of the dumbest learner ever. Actually that's not very hard, I'm a slow learner myself! But by making no assumptions and asking the simplest questions, I find that I can get the course to flow better and much more easily digestible.
Brief stints are still not enough though. Outside my professional life, I take a few online courses to help me stay grounded and informed of the best and worst techniques. (And learn new things!)
So it really boils down to empathy. As educators we can suppose so much, but at the end of the day, it's the learners that receive it all. The closest we can get to understanding them is then to become learners ourselves.
Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067
Can NLP do this? Can comments there be compared with comments here to see if there is a matching?
That would be a fascinating exercise. Anyone up for it?