Excuse notes are a great example of why you need verification. Anyone can write one for themselves, and give it to you without proof it really came from a parent. That's a classic man in the middle attack.
What you really need is some kind of certificate for each parent, allowing you to verify the note really came from the parent. That's why self-signed certificates really aren't worth much -- anyone could have created them.
Totally agreed; this is exactly the generalized message I took away.
How many "lessons" (goals) could we tailor to the desires of the "student" (user) as a substitute for enforcement mechanisms? Surely not all, but many more than we're presently doing.
I think that concisely encapsulated the two go-to solutions for so many hackers: a) create a complex system that will postpone or perhaps solve the problem; and b) make the problem irrelevant with a miracle stroke of genius solution to be fleshed out at a later date.
Circle jerk? I was pointing out unproductive behavior - the tendency to simplify a problem such that it fits into a stock solution or counting on a miracle. Neither of these actually confront the original problem - just duct tape and wishes.
I thought it interesting that even without such a certificate, the teacher still had a pretty good idea of which notes were fake and which were legitimate. Kind of like websites - you just kinda know when they fake..
You don't know the teacher knew; all you know is that he sorted the notes into two piles. You don't know if the piles were correct. Not sayin' he was wrong. Just sayin'.
Instead of sending notes, an easier way to weed-out most fakes would be to require a phone call. Sure, it can be faked but it's a lot more difficult do (especially if they have met the teacher).
There is a great Erma Bombeck (author who wrote books satirizing suburban life "The Grass is Greener Over the Septic Tank") line about how the only real excuse notes are those written on a napkin, in lipstick and crumpled.
Now, if you are teaching kids Network Security and you start getting these kinds of forged excuse notes, you are exactly on the right track. Just start having the kids alternate between thinking of ways to make sure the notes are really from the parents, then thinking about how to crack the system they just came up with.
If anyone reading this is teaching such a class to undergrads or lower, please use this as a lecture technique and let us know how it goes. :)
This is the perfect example of "Unschooling" ( http://www.holtgws.com/ ) where children are encouraged to follow their interests, inclinations and energies to their full and natural ends rather than being cowed into performing busy work in one topic after another, until they hate nearly all learning.
I think it's just a sublime example of teaching. He made the kids care about the subject matter by making it relevant to them, and there are abundant examples of authors creating first-rate work by riffing off of old themes (Apollonius of Rhodes, for example).
McCourt was teaching a class on Creative Writing - this wasn't in a science or math class. He took what he was supposed to be teaching (how to write stories), and found a theme to write about that his students found interesting.
Those children weren't following their "interests, inclinations and energies" - I find it very hard to believe that every single kid in that class would be doing creative writing if they had the ability to do whatever their interests led them to. They were doing what they were supposed to do in that subject-specific class, and just happened to be led by a very good teacher.
The had already pulled off good creative writing in their excuse notes, notes that could have been written for any class. Writing those fake excuse notes DID come from their natural inclination, and when encouraged to continue to follow it, rather than to get back to the program, they produced even greater work.
Frank had already won when he didn't fuss or punish them for the fake notes. It's like PG says in his FAQ, kids can tell which teachers actually like them.
"I was having an epiphany. Isn’t it remarkable, I thought, how the students whined and said it was hard putting 200 words together on any subject? But when they forged excuse notes, they were brilliant..."
To me this is a great example of one of the fundamental problems with so much education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal... well, of course they're motivated. And creative.
That has always been true of me - when in grammar school, and decades into employment.
Question for you then. In high school, should a kid only interested in reading & writing (english class, journalism) be required to take math and sciences?
How about a kid who's interested only in physics, should we make him read and write poetry?
Even if each class is taught the best it possibly could be, individual interests will outweigh, and the kids will be bored in the alternate classes.
So the options are either 1) uninterested kids, or 2) uneducated kids.
Basically, since interests vary so much, even among middle school aged kids, there's no platonic ideal of a "perfect class that every kid will love".
Personally, I think that given an intellectually stimulating home environment, passionate teachers, and a great curriculum, (almost) every kid will be interested in both poetry and physics, because they are both fundamentally interesting and beautiful things.
I can confirm this. In high school I hated math, planned on getting an English major, because the English teachers were so good. Previously, in middle school I hated critical analysis of books, but because my math teacher was so good I was an absolute math geek.
I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.
Your second paragraph struck a chord with me - through middle and high school, nearly all my math teachers would preface various topics with "You'll never use this in real life..." With that kind of sentiment, its no wonder why a lot of students did not want, or develop, an understanding for math :/
But the teachers are right, you know. Professional mathematicians doing research will practically jump at the chance to tell you that their work is meant to be beautiful, not practical. I think that's the message we should be imparting to students: math doesn't have to be useful for you to study it, just as poetry doesn't have to be useful for you to read it.
It should delight them that writing proofs help you think about thinking logically, monads help you write abstract code, prime numbers (and the difficulty of factoring them) helps you think about encryption; it's just that explaining that "doing this proof is like doing stretches before you work out" leaves some unfulfilled.
I remember my year-12 math teacher being the first true teacher I had for the subject in a very long time who actually cared, A student who came up with a varied or creative solution to a normal problem was praised with an overwhelmingly happy and teary exclamation.
I tried harder that year than ever before, Not just because of the importance of my results, But because I wanted to understand her euphoria at really giving yourself over to the problem.
Unfortunately Teachers who inspire such enthusiasm are a desperately rare breed.
Does it need to be so either/or? Not everyone needs to be expert at everything, but on the other hand ignorance creates enormous barriers to entry - illiteracy being an extreme example.
If we focus on educating people as consumers and then gave them discretion on which subjects they are sufficiently interested in to become producers, we might gain more. for example, politicians and marketers abuse statistics on a regular basis, secure in the knowledge that the average person has little statistic knowledge. So we have a small set of people who understand statistics very well, a larger population that are very credulous, and a similarly sized one that think all statistics are BS, an only slightly less ignorant position. You can imagine parallels with rhetorical fallacies or logic and science.
I suggest that students need to be well-rounded enough to assess the quality of information they're likely to encounter or use frequently and then follow their interests from there. So we should probably be teaching financial numeracy, basic statistics and perhaps geometry/trigonometry much earlier, because those are massively important life skills. Algebra, maybe not so much.
When I look at verbal political debates, they seem to me to center around the 8th grade level or even a bit lower. Written debates (eg newspaper editorials) seem to float in the 6th-12th grade level. Then again, I can't help noticing the existence of a TV quiz show called 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' :-/
False dichotomy. Forcing people to take classes does not make them educated. Yet if they are free to participate in the activities they choose, they will educate themselves.
Ok, you are quite the optimist to truly believe that every kid will learn enough math by their own choice. No matter how much encouragement and good environment and teachers, there will be kids who just don't want to learn statistics, or compound interest.
So you're left with either forcing them to go, where they at least learn something exists, or letting them do their own things, and never learn anything about math at all.
Many people commenting here have this idealized view of education as "if only... xyz... then every kid would spend 12 hours a day teaching themselves!". That's absurd, and any realistic look at education has to realize that sometimes we need to teach kids skills that are useful, but not interesting.
If being ignorant of statistics is such a terrible thing, then it shouldn't be very difficult to persuade people that they should learn it. Make your case, and let them make a value judgment. I question the value of locking people in rooms and calling the truancy officer if they don't show up. That's prison, not education.
Before 1900, curricula in schools ranging from elementary school right up through university level were prescribed with no choices left to the students.
The attitude also was one of sink or swim, with the idea being a comparatively few "educable" people would become truly learned while the rest would pursue utilitarian goals tied to earning a living.
The classes emphasized formative skills ultimately tied to the idea of learning how to think as opposed to specific instruction that was supposed to instruct in any immediately practical way.
Even the learned professions were regarded as mere utilitarian applications to be pursued only after one had become properly educated.
A very elitist and, one might say, "strongly typed" view of how education should proceed.
It is a modern concept that students should even be able to choose among electives or follow their own inclinations without rigorous guidance from instructors using a strictly prescribed format.
Of course, all this has completely changed today, with the result being an "idealized view of education" (to use your phrase) to the effect that all students are capable of learning, and will learn, if given the freedom and motivation to develop their abilities.
For a fascinating comparison of the old way with the new, read Albert Jay Nock's 1931 assessment (given as part of the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia) of what he considered the utter failure of the modern approach to deliver on its promises of universal education. (http://mises.org/story/2765)
Nock's defense of the old way is undoubtedly narrow, even embittered, but his critique of the new way is often intriguing. At the very least, it makes us examine our assumptions about modern education in ways that we do not often do.
If anyone goes to the link, use the index up front to skip past the preliminaries and get to the substantive parts - otherwise, it is a very long read.
Knocking holes, but I'm sure there were a very large number of people who didn't attend university before 1900. Probably a lot of people also left school to get a job at some point before they turned 18.
The solution to that is a complete change in the way society views education. If education were seen as a lifelong thing and it was the norm for people to pick up new skills then things would be so much better.
The current system forces people to make choices at a point in their lives when they don't even know who they are yet, let alone what they want to do with their lives. Instead of Google's 20% time, we need 20% education time.
But the issue is that most every person is not going to go "ohh boy! Compound interest!". Even though society is better off when both sides understand mortgages and car payments.
They aren't going to go "ohh boy genetics!", in order to understand what they're voting for when it comes to science positions of political candidates.
Basically, in my view, both society and individuals benefit with a certain base level of knowledge. I also believe that a majority of people would never learn parts of that base level if they had to do self-directed learning. I know that I never would have picked up poetry, or music if I wasn't forced to.
Remember that we are the exception here. We are the cream of the crop in self-educating, self-motivated people. I think it's far too optimistic to say "let people get self motivated", and hope that they learn everything they need.
Well I had read somewhere the society is driven by need-of-development and human-needs are ignored. People take science even if they are interested in arts, code even if they are interesting in drawing..it's because former will give them jobs. Most of the time work != fun. It's especially true in countries like India and China. We love singing but we need to do some maths assignment because our teacher said so, becaused our parents forced it that way. They say it's good..it's necessary. But interesting things or we can say old-bore content taught in an interesting manner does make life good. Ofcourse I'll go for option 1 because option 2 was never in my domain :(
But yeah there exist classes every kid loves and they are more or less like halley's comet.
You expound an overly romantic view of education, that is completely at odds with the actual practice of learning. There are many things you only learn by repeated application of the same basic principle to a great many 'contrived tasks'.
I wouldn't have been as proficient at arithmetic as I was at age 9, if I hadn't done the same simple "2-digit number times 2-digit number" exercise hundreds of times. You can't possible practice that on 'challenging, related to life' tasks.
Figuring tips, baseball statistics, extrapolating energy consumption with population growth, arithmetic competitions, currency conversions for price comparison, price comparisons given a unit price, the price of 2400 grams of apples...
Most of these you can do with division instead, and some of them you have to, but it's harder. The competitions are probably the most effective way to motivate some students to be really excellent; I don't know how effective they are at raising the average competence level.
It's a cool story, but he's hardly the first to do it - I worked as a volunteer English teacher in Asia for 6 months, and did this with some of my senior classes - excuses for missing homework, being late for school, losing their notebook, etc - I think there was a prize for the most creative one. It wasn't an original idea of mine - I got the idea from a similar lesson in my own high school english class (UK).
It never crossed my mind that he was the only one, however it was still interesting to read and a good example of what teachers would be like in a perfect world.
Why are the students exceptionally motivated to fulfill this assignment:
- They have nowhere else to go. They have to sit in that class room. More or less, it's their job.
- They are being asked to create something from their own imagination, which is in stark contrast to the usual method of schooling: memorizing established facts from textbooks.
Motivation is a powerful force that schools do not harness enough.
However, large organizations will always be political in nature, so driving behaviour with intrinsic motivation is probably NOT something that will be practiced generally.
Ha, I wish I had this guy in my college lit. class. Of the 3 I had 2 were great and the one in between (the one I knew I was going to fail) was a complete asshole. I'm still not sure how the other 2 managed to find a way to make the material covered relevant, yet the 3rd guy managed to make me hate everything about him, his class, and his topics.
And the dude was a real hippy, but not in a cool way. All his themes were some sci-fi postapocolyptic drivel. When I brought his name up people knew of him and gave a sad frown like they knew I was suffering. Not just students but teachers and other professors.
For 3 years I was listed as a freshman with over 90 credits because the I refused to take another lit class and the university wouldn't change my status until I did.
BTW, almost 10 years later, it still pisses me off.
I can't express how much I love this style of teaching. This is about the only thing that you can do to curb this behavior and still maintain a relationship with your students.
I was a goof in school, but my teacher kept me from getting out of hand the exact same way. By guiding my exuberance instead of squelching it, we got along great, and I graduated near the top of my class.
68 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 979 ms ] threadI missed Angela's Ashes, but Teacher Man looks like it would be worth the read. What a great reminder of what a good teacher is capable of.
What you really need is some kind of certificate for each parent, allowing you to verify the note really came from the parent. That's why self-signed certificates really aren't worth much -- anyone could have created them.
How many "lessons" (goals) could we tailor to the desires of the "student" (user) as a substitute for enforcement mechanisms? Surely not all, but many more than we're presently doing.
If anyone reading this is teaching such a class to undergrads or lower, please use this as a lecture technique and let us know how it goes. :)
[EDIT] I just wanted to throw in here a hacker angle on unschooling or homeschooling: I would gladly pay for software that teaches math or grammar and is based on cognitive science. Something like SuperMemo http://www.supermemo.com/ profiled in this Wired article http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
McCourt was teaching a class on Creative Writing - this wasn't in a science or math class. He took what he was supposed to be teaching (how to write stories), and found a theme to write about that his students found interesting.
Those children weren't following their "interests, inclinations and energies" - I find it very hard to believe that every single kid in that class would be doing creative writing if they had the ability to do whatever their interests led them to. They were doing what they were supposed to do in that subject-specific class, and just happened to be led by a very good teacher.
To me this is a great example of one of the fundamental problems with so much education: it is full of unchallenging, unrelated-to-life, contrived tasks. When any process (creative writing, math, coding) is harnessed to a fascinating, meaningful-to-students goal... well, of course they're motivated. And creative.
That has always been true of me - when in grammar school, and decades into employment.
How about a kid who's interested only in physics, should we make him read and write poetry?
Even if each class is taught the best it possibly could be, individual interests will outweigh, and the kids will be bored in the alternate classes.
So the options are either 1) uninterested kids, or 2) uneducated kids.
Basically, since interests vary so much, even among middle school aged kids, there's no platonic ideal of a "perfect class that every kid will love".
That's what we should be aiming for.
I remember my high school Algebra II teacher was asked, "Why should we care about what you're saying?" His answer: "You shouldn't care. You're here to get a grade. You'll never use this and it's not fun." This while my English teacher was staying an hour after class to debate Lolita, Ulysses, A Space Odyssey, and a whole ton of other stuff with basically every student willing to talk to him. There were a lot.
Note that the public school approach doesn't work much better for poetry or literature. Precious few high schoolers graduate with a love of reading.
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
I tried harder that year than ever before, Not just because of the importance of my results, But because I wanted to understand her euphoria at really giving yourself over to the problem.
Unfortunately Teachers who inspire such enthusiasm are a desperately rare breed.
If we focus on educating people as consumers and then gave them discretion on which subjects they are sufficiently interested in to become producers, we might gain more. for example, politicians and marketers abuse statistics on a regular basis, secure in the knowledge that the average person has little statistic knowledge. So we have a small set of people who understand statistics very well, a larger population that are very credulous, and a similarly sized one that think all statistics are BS, an only slightly less ignorant position. You can imagine parallels with rhetorical fallacies or logic and science.
I suggest that students need to be well-rounded enough to assess the quality of information they're likely to encounter or use frequently and then follow their interests from there. So we should probably be teaching financial numeracy, basic statistics and perhaps geometry/trigonometry much earlier, because those are massively important life skills. Algebra, maybe not so much.
When I look at verbal political debates, they seem to me to center around the 8th grade level or even a bit lower. Written debates (eg newspaper editorials) seem to float in the 6th-12th grade level. Then again, I can't help noticing the existence of a TV quiz show called 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' :-/
So you're left with either forcing them to go, where they at least learn something exists, or letting them do their own things, and never learn anything about math at all.
Many people commenting here have this idealized view of education as "if only... xyz... then every kid would spend 12 hours a day teaching themselves!". That's absurd, and any realistic look at education has to realize that sometimes we need to teach kids skills that are useful, but not interesting.
The attitude also was one of sink or swim, with the idea being a comparatively few "educable" people would become truly learned while the rest would pursue utilitarian goals tied to earning a living.
The classes emphasized formative skills ultimately tied to the idea of learning how to think as opposed to specific instruction that was supposed to instruct in any immediately practical way.
Even the learned professions were regarded as mere utilitarian applications to be pursued only after one had become properly educated.
A very elitist and, one might say, "strongly typed" view of how education should proceed.
It is a modern concept that students should even be able to choose among electives or follow their own inclinations without rigorous guidance from instructors using a strictly prescribed format.
Of course, all this has completely changed today, with the result being an "idealized view of education" (to use your phrase) to the effect that all students are capable of learning, and will learn, if given the freedom and motivation to develop their abilities.
For a fascinating comparison of the old way with the new, read Albert Jay Nock's 1931 assessment (given as part of the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia) of what he considered the utter failure of the modern approach to deliver on its promises of universal education. (http://mises.org/story/2765)
Nock's defense of the old way is undoubtedly narrow, even embittered, but his critique of the new way is often intriguing. At the very least, it makes us examine our assumptions about modern education in ways that we do not often do.
If anyone goes to the link, use the index up front to skip past the preliminaries and get to the substantive parts - otherwise, it is a very long read.
The current system forces people to make choices at a point in their lives when they don't even know who they are yet, let alone what they want to do with their lives. Instead of Google's 20% time, we need 20% education time.
They aren't going to go "ohh boy genetics!", in order to understand what they're voting for when it comes to science positions of political candidates.
Basically, in my view, both society and individuals benefit with a certain base level of knowledge. I also believe that a majority of people would never learn parts of that base level if they had to do self-directed learning. I know that I never would have picked up poetry, or music if I wasn't forced to.
Remember that we are the exception here. We are the cream of the crop in self-educating, self-motivated people. I think it's far too optimistic to say "let people get self motivated", and hope that they learn everything they need.
For me - you could have had project-based courses that combined reading, writing, 'rithmatic and science and I'd have been in heaven.
That might not work for everyone, but it would be great if we could accommodate more than one type of learner.
I wouldn't have been as proficient at arithmetic as I was at age 9, if I hadn't done the same simple "2-digit number times 2-digit number" exercise hundreds of times. You can't possible practice that on 'challenging, related to life' tasks.
Just saying.
Most of these you can do with division instead, and some of them you have to, but it's harder. The competitions are probably the most effective way to motivate some students to be really excellent; I don't know how effective they are at raising the average competence level.
It's an article about making up excuses. I was hoping everyone would chime in with their own excuses in the spirit of the article.
But I think you were supposed to come up with a well written creative excuse. A short one-liner is not enough.
- They have nowhere else to go. They have to sit in that class room. More or less, it's their job.
- They are being asked to create something from their own imagination, which is in stark contrast to the usual method of schooling: memorizing established facts from textbooks.
Motivation is a powerful force that schools do not harness enough.
However, large organizations will always be political in nature, so driving behaviour with intrinsic motivation is probably NOT something that will be practiced generally.
Good one !!!!
And the dude was a real hippy, but not in a cool way. All his themes were some sci-fi postapocolyptic drivel. When I brought his name up people knew of him and gave a sad frown like they knew I was suffering. Not just students but teachers and other professors.
For 3 years I was listed as a freshman with over 90 credits because the I refused to take another lit class and the university wouldn't change my status until I did.
BTW, almost 10 years later, it still pisses me off.
I was a goof in school, but my teacher kept me from getting out of hand the exact same way. By guiding my exuberance instead of squelching it, we got along great, and I graduated near the top of my class.
+20 to dedicated teachers!