[smogcutter]

For my sins, I teach middle school. There’s plenty of different angles on this, but I’d like to highlight a recent one that may not immediately occur to people here without young children: COVID retirements hit the elementary schools particularly hard.

Teaching high school on zoom is one thing, now imagine teaching 3rd. So the veteran elementary teachers retired or quit, and there’s no adequate pipeline to replace them, especially in underserved communities.

Coming through the system now is a cohort of children whose k-5 teachers have been a rotating cast of subs and ineffective new hires, and it shows.

[ddq]

This to me is the most urgent moral issue of the day: our active stunting of our children's development. Our collective misguided and counterproductive approach to pedagogy does not cultivate a learning mindset but rather stifles children's enormous natural aptitude for exploratory play. We are doing it wrong and we know it. The curriculum we use isn't worth paying minimum wage to teach.

It could be different. It must be. We have role models to imitate, better methods to follow, resources and tools galore. What is needed now is organization toward common purpose. How does the internet bystander locate effective organizations to disrupt the march of folly? This is a situation where the pilot has gone mad and we must seize control of the aircraft but are too paralyzed by social forces to act.

[WillAdams]

The thing is, Jerry Pournelle claimed in his "Chaos Manor" column from _Byte Magazine_ that he and his wife had developed a system for teaching even adults to read in short order using a video game/tutorial system and playing games seems to be pretty much universal on devices.

Why can't things such as Khan Academy be included in the school curriculum, allowing children the chance to work at their own pace? The best school system I ever attended did this (through 8th grade, children were allowed to work up to 4 grades ahead --- after that there was no cap, many teachers were accredited as faculty at a local college (or students would be taken to the college, or professors from there brought to the school) --- it was not uncommon for a student to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree.

[goosedragons]

I don't think most students are self-disciplined enough to do that. Motivated adults are very different from unmotivated children.

[WillAdams]

Can't the teachers/school system impose the necessary discipline? (in terms of encouraging/monitoring usage)

My kids had access to texts/resources which I only dreamed of when I was young (too much time reading Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ which they seem drawn from):

- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...

- https://www.motionmountain.net/

- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...

[tartuffe78]

Teachers need parents to help impose that discipline at home, which doesn't happen anymore. My wife is a teacher (high school) and lots of parents side with their child now when it comes to not doing their homework (Well they said they did turn it in), or cheating (No they didn't cheat why would you say that).

[4b11b4]

For my sins... I appreciate your deep intentions in that

[donsupreme]

At some AI going to be the best teacher for any children

[sureglymop]

Not sure if you're being sarcastic. I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with. It may have been because they had shown kindness or that they were overly interested in their own subject or something else, but there was a sense of "not wanting to disappoint" the "good teachers" and thus pay more attention and try to excel.

I think we are very far from such a personal connection to an AI. If that connection isn't there, there's no real stake.

[spwa4]

> I don't know about you but the best teachers I ever had were those I felt a personal human connection with.

Not me. Knowledge and patience do it for me. Computers do pretty well on the patience front, but are a bit more "DIY" than I'd like on the knowledge front. I'm hoping AI can fix that. But I have met humans who did well on both, and boy did I advance in skill studying under them. They are far superior to anything I think AI could ever become. But they are few and far between, at any level of education (even at uni, they're exceptional).

Most teachers I was far smarter than the teacher and they were a waste of time. Plus I've been burned extremely hard by teachers I felt a personal human connection with (and then social workers) "trying to help". Never again. Hell, I literally fought my way out that situation, physically, many individual fights with actual people getting hurt, and not by choice (did you know, for their own ease and budget savings, social workers put kids who get bullied into the same group bedroom as kids who pulled a knife at school (and don't make sure they don't have a knife). That's how much they ACTUALLY care). Never again.

I also would like to point out the priority. A patient teacher with knowledge and zero human connection: anyone who wants to learns A LOT. People who really don't want to learn, learn a little. A teacher with knowledge but no patience: everyone learns a lot, but there's a lot of shouting. It becomes painfully clear who is best. A teacher with lots of human connection without knowledge: everyone learns very little. A teacher with lots of human connection and no knowledge or patience: worst of all possible worlds. Bullies run the classroom. Nobody learns anything.

This last kind of teachers, lots of human connection (at least in their mind) and very little knowledge, rules the schools of our country.

In other words, you want to do well for students: for teachers, knowledge comes first, by 100 miles. Human connection is somewhere between nice to have and destructive. Patience: same. Makes things look nicer from the outside, but is actually kind of destructive.