[6438y44y4u]

I think you should talk with your wife more to be honest because I think you've missed the key elements of what she was telling you. I live in California myself and have a number of friends who are teachers at various grade levels. Your wife is spot on and AI is the last thing that's going to solve the issue. Children with behavioral problems (hint: 9.5/10 times it's their family's fault but you're not allowed to blame the parent as an educator) aren't going to cooperate with your automated learning. If they were a poorly performing student before, they also probably have a home situation that isn't going to be receptive to whatever pressure you try to apply on them to coerce their children. And even if you could find an angle to apply pressure from, what are you going to do if you discover that the solution is disproportionately necessary for certain minority groups? Now even if your solution works it's dead in the water because it's racist. The teachers aren't leaving because they lack solutions they are leaving because nothing effective is allowed and all the while they get to endure abuse from both parents and students. None of this is going to be solved by making it even easier to ignore school by replacing teachers.

[__MatrixMan__]

My wife is a teacher and she often notices that many behavioral problems are curriculum problems. If Jimmy suddenly starts pulling Susie's hair it's not because he wants to hurt her, it's because he wants to distract from the fact that for whatever reason he isn't prepared for what he's just been asked to do.

As for myself, I spent freshmen year stealing anything not bolted down and a few things that were. I was just bored and angry that the system wasn't treating me like it respected my potential. That was childish of me, but then again, I was a child.

A therapist recommended putting me in some advanced classes, and the behavior problems went away.

For these reasons I think that the adaptability of an AI generated curriculum might solve some of those behavior problems.

Then there are the other problems. Like maybe the student needs glasses to see the board or feels unsafe for some reason or is too busy working to feed their siblings. For those, we're going to need humans in the loop and compassion in the policies.

[ChatGTP]

Do you think there will be much point in going to school if AI exists and it’s setting you assignments? I was already bored enough in school and at least I maybe could’ve been given the motivation to conform because I’d be able to have a decent career and money in the end, now ?

[JackMorgan]

Let's be real, school is 95% about day care and training kids to be obedient worker drones. Education is tertiary at best, but talked about the most to help the parents and teachers feel good about the situation. I'm a state licensed middle school teacher who's taught 5th and 6th grade before walking away.

Modern educational curriculums have very little content for: critical thinking, logic, creativity, self-teaching, responsibility, civic responsibility, curiosity, compassion, self respect, and finding purpose. Instead of teaching how to use history to prevent making the same mistakes we make them memorize dates. Instead of teaching them to use writing as an emotional regulator and self therapy we teach them to read a paragraph quickly to answer a multiple choice question about it. Since standardized tests are easiest and cheapest to grade through a scantron, state tests emphasize facts and memorization.

The entire lecture and classroom school system 99% of us know teaches dependence over independence and blind obedience over critical thinking.

Sports are taught through a hyper-competitive lens, getting them ready for a possible professional sports career.

See the famous New York state teacher of the year John Gatto for more https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

[_a_a_a_]

School is about social contact and social skills as much as anything else, and they are vital to learn. That needs to be recognised.

[ChatGTP]

That’s cool, I agree. I also think maybe bringing back philosophy is probably a good idea. Good for coping with a mad world.

[__MatrixMan__]

Well there would be no point in going to receive, work on, or turn in the AI-handled assignments. But presumably there would be projects that require you to go to a place and talk to people (maybe your classmates, maybe the wider community) or get your hands dirty in some way you can't do from home. Freeing teachers up to moderate that sort of thing would be a win.

[melagonster]

teacher needs to beg parents let their kids do homework today. at least in now society, it is not working.

[naet]

Not sure what you mean by solutions to education problems being "racist" and not allowed.... Also seems rude to assume you know better about this person's motivation for leaving teaching than they do.

I am a former California educator switched to software engineer. The reasons I switched careers is directly because education is underfunded and under supported by school administration and I didn't see a sustainable future for myself there. Many other brilliant teachers I knew have also left or are leaving because it isn't worth the effort and stress for bare minimum pay. Teachers aren't leaving because of the students, they're leaving because of the systems. You're severely overworked and underpaid, with no backup or support from the institution, in overly large class sizes, and have poor curriculums that teach to outdated standardized tests that you have to stick to so the school can try to bargain for more funding.

I think a good system of well funded schools and teachers can get almost any student to a good place if they're enrolled at an early enough age and properly educated. Unfortunately there are increasingly common situations where a student has been let down by the school system for years and ends up falling too far behind their grade level to catch back up, but that is a failing of the school system and not their race or home life. I know because I have first hand experience in those elementary or middle schools, they just aren't able to serve students well with what they have (low wages lead to inexperienced or uneducated teaching staff, overfilled classrooms leads to not enough individual attention, poor learning environments, etc).

[ericd]

I’m helping to run a preschool right now, I don’t think it’s a matter of “early enough” - if there are family issues, if they’re feeding the kid crap, not helping them get enough sleep, sending the kid to school with crap food, there’s frequently not too much the school can do, even with very high ratio of highly dedicated staff per student.

The school can work on behavioral issues, but then they go away on break, and come back with big regressions.

We should stop blaming everything on the schools. There are ways to raise a kid that are conducive to behaving well in that environment, and there are ways that are not conducive to that.

But we can’t blame it all on the parents either, they seem to have a lot less slack than I think US parents have had historically.

[Baeocystin]

Have many teachers in my family. My only complaint with your statement is that 9.5 out of 10 is way too generous. The level of absolute bare basics decency and behavior is so bad that it's hard to believe.

[jacobolus]

I spend plenty of time around “normal” well-adjusted middle- and upper-middle-class kids, and I’d say kids are inherently little balls of emotion with their own ideas and personalities who haven’t yet developed socially appropriate ways of dealing with frustration. They get into plenty of mischief despite their parents’ best efforts and wide variety of parenting styles.

Most families are doing their best, but being human is just hard sometimes.

[Baeocystin]

To be clear, I'm not talking about mischief. I'm talking about assault, battery, serious destruction of property, direct threats to the teachers during class, with less than zero support given to the staff by the administration. To give a specific example, one of my friends used to teach 5th grade. A student got angry with him, and when he turned to address another student, jumped him and literally pulled his arm out of his socket. Not only was the student not expelled, but my friend had to spend months while recovering from surgery refusing to sign papers the administration was pushing on him to make him accept all responsibility. This is not hyperbole in the least, it really happened, and it is way more common than anyone would think.

[jacobolus]

Okay, that’s pretty messed up. Seems plausible the kid may come from some context of severe neglect/abuse. (I am guessing this kid is quite a bit older than the 1st graders the top-level comment was discussing?)

I’m thinking more of 4–7-year-olds hitting each-other with sticks they pick up at the park, having temper meltdowns at trivial frustrations, refusing to follow instructions to stop doing obviously unsafe things, etc.

What do you think should be done in this sort of case? How does it get to this point, and what could be done to help kids like this before they reach the point of literally assaulting their teachers or other criminal-level violence? Most kinds of school punishments (detention, extra homework, suspension, ...) seem unlikely to really solve whatever issues this kid has, but teachers don’t have the extra bandwidth to be full-time social-worker caretakers of each specific kid.

[Baeocystin]

He was a 5th grader. Average size, just clear... issues across the board.

With the foreword that I know this is a huge thorny mess of a problem with no easy solutions, there are three things that would make an immediate improvement.

#1, by far: Administrations as they currently are live in existential fear of a lawsuit that will destroy the entire district. Teachers are thrown under the bus with almost rabid fervor, as they are seen as fungible. This must stop, and real consequences need to be consistently enforced across the board. The genuinely unstable and violent need to be removed from the general school population. I do not know what to best do with them, and I will not even hazard a guess in this post. But I do know that they are holding the entirety of the education of the remaining 90% of the student body hostage to their whims, and that has to stop.

#2: The student teacher ratio needs to drop from 30+:1 to below 15:1, ideally even lower with the addition of aides along with regular teaching staff. The money is there- if you look at the per capita spend, the US is very high, even compared to other Western nations. We just blow it on literally anything other than paying teachers.

#3: Free, school-supplied breakfasts and lunches for the entire student body, no questions asked. Hunger is a huge deal, and hungry kids can't learn. Food instability affects somewhere between 20-50% of the students in the US, and it is a phenomenal return on outcome vs. $ spent.

[sdenton4]

I mean, if we're worried about ai taking all the jobs and concentration of wealth, just raise taxes on the billionaires and hire more teachers...

Getting class sizes to 10:1 or 5:1 is quite the jobs program, and will lead to amazing long term outcomes for the kids.

[james4k]

What are you thinking about when you say "nothing effective is allowed"?

[another_story]

Not OP, but removal of problem children from the general classroom environment and clear and consistent consequences for actions.

[dchuk]

This is very very necessary and basically impossible to actually get from the administrations. My wife has had kids who violently disrupted her class 3+ times a week, to the point where she had to evacuate 20+ other children from the room for multiple hours at a time (I'm not exaggerating at all).

We finally sat down and I helped her write a specifically worded email (finally got a good use out of all of that HR training as a manager! ha) to trigger the right response from her admin.

Any shitty single kid can ruin a classroom for the rest of their peers. And the system doesn't allow for any consequences. It's massively disappointing.

[brightlancer]

From my chair as a parent, I could not get teachers to care about one of my kids being bullied in class, and it was the administration that finally did something.

I have now dealt with dozens of public school teachers and while some were good, most were ambivalent and there were more garbage teachers than good ones.

The refrain of It's Not The Teachers rings hollow. It is the teachers. It may also be the administration, the parents, the community, the politicians, everybody, but it is still the teachers.

[IOT_Apprentice]

You should have started with administration first. Teach aren’t equipped or provided solutions for bullying and many are dealing with acting out or violent children. See the case of the teacher shot by her violent student a few months ago who kept warning school administrators who did nothing, even on the day of the shooting.

[JoeJonathan]

Sure. But it’s pretty easy to get dejected when you have a large class full of maniacs and no support.

Also, people here should stop generalizing their experience in California to the country at large. MA and NJ have pretty good public schools, some of which are in dense and diverse regions of each state.

[wrp]

Collecting problem children in smaller, more controlled classes is the only effective strategy. In a class of say, 30 kids, it just takes one to disrupt a lesson. On the other hand, if every kid is cooperating, a single teacher can effectively manage a class of hundreds (and actually do in some Asian countries).

Separation helps the problem kids as well. I have personally observed a high success rate in turning around kids once they get the more focused attention possible in a small class.

To be concrete, if you had 2 teachers and 60 kids with 5 of them "problematic", the most effective approach would be to divide them so you had the 55 cooperative learners in one room and the others in their own class.

[naet]

I found this was mostly a problem with school administration. You don't get enough support from the admin to come by and take a student to the office or out of the classroom if they're being disruptive. They want students only in their overcrowded classrooms and no support staff to cut down on costs. At a better funded school it's easy to phone the office and have someone take a student out to calm down or for a short detention but at the lower end public schools you're on your own to try and deal with everything that might happen in the school day, and so anything that happens you have to personally attend to which ends up eating into your class time or energy.

[XorNot]

Except this is frequently the goal of those children. And so where are you going to send them? To another classroom with other troublemakers, all in one group? What chance would they have?

What everyone is talking around is the fact that the solution to "problem children" in the classroom, if you're removing them, is that you have to spend more money and more time working with them to get them off the "problem" track and re-integrated.

Because that's the stakes: that kid who disrupts the classroom, if you don't succeed, is your future welfare dependency, local crime problem, or incarceration cost and a huge amount of lost tax revenue.

[xenonite]

If the other 20-30 students aren’t able to learn, the stakes are 20-30 times as much (regarding tax income).

[gameman144]

I'm curious though, what's the alternative? Yes, the problem child will cause problems in the future if they're removed from class. But they're also going to cause problems for other kids now, and there's still no reason to think they'd be any less problematic in the future.

[darkerside]

There's a funny thing that happens where recruiting that is effective and easy to allow gets allowed. That leaves the things that are hard to allow but effective, because if they aren't effective, nobody cares about them.

Hence, nothing effective is allowed.

It's the same concept by which Google Maps will invariably tell you, "you are in the fastest path to for destination", even if you just took the dumbest wrong turn possible.

[dchuk]

Sorry, I wasn't saying AI is the way to fix the issue, I think it's going to be the necessary response when everyone realizes no one wants to sign up for the shitty job of being a public school teacher.

[thequadehunter]

I agree with this. My mom is a 1st grade teacher for almost 40 years now. She tells me that she can tell whether a kid will be successful based on interactions with their parents. If their parents are a lost cause, the kid will be in most cases too.

[4dayworkweek4u]

Thank you for being real! Getting sick of these NPCs on here...