[tombert]

I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.

I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school.

I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.

[necovek]

I never taught myself, so take this with a grain of salt (though I do think it is extremely hard to do well).

I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.

I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.

Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.

I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)

[annzabelle]

I was lucky to attend a liberal arts college with a large and extremely pedagogy focused mathematics department, and all of my math classes there were like this. Engaging lectures, if I listened and wrote down everything on the board I would be able to get a B on the exams, even if I skimped on practice. Made it all the way to measure theory this way. They included in class group practice integrated with the lectures, which definitely helped.

St. Olaf College for those wondering.

[yuanBuilds]

I also went to a liberal arts college and, yes, my instructors care a lot about what I've learned. However, I am exactly that "asked educated question but sucked at homework and test" student. I usually got A or A- for first few assignments and just cannot finish any assignment near the end of the semester. The only exceptions are those "really hard and abstract" lessons where most of people got 70/100 for exams and I got 110/100 (literally).

I am 30 now and I realized that it was very much of ADHD symptoms. I am just an edge case of college education.

However, by genetics and mathematics we know that in every classroom, there are tons of “edge cases” from different perspectives.

[wnc3141]

I definitely struggled with feeling hyper engaged in the classroom setting, and then the jarring transition to the next class. By the time I switched between three and four subjects that day and on to do assignments, I was completely fried.

[wombatpm]

Bette White has an honorary degree from there for her Rose Nieland character on Golden Girls

[SoftTalker]

I'm having a hard time believing this. I've had one really good math teacher, his lecture prep was thorough, and the way he presented the material was very understandable, but without doing the problem sets, and some pre-exam review, I would not have been able to remember everything weeks later on an exam.

[annzabelle]

I definitely did some problem sets and review if I struggled with a topic, but the lectures+in class review was enough for most topics. I do pick up math very easily - a lot of my peers needed more practice than I did.

I will note that this was the B's get degrees approach. If I had been aiming for graduate school, I would've needed to put in significantly more time to get A's and get picked for/complete undergraduate research projects.

[CobaltFire]

I can believe this. I had some subjects I was able to do this for going through Naval Nuclear Power school, and later college. Others I was unable to do this with.

Different people grasp things at different rates.

[SoftTalker]

Yes, I can see it with something you are naturally gifted in. But in that case the instruction probably has less impact; you'll get it even if it's poorly explained.

[JoeAltmaier]

My son went there! Andrew the cello player.

[wnc3141]

Loved my time at Olaf.

[keithnz]

schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.

[RealityVoid]

Yes, as always, we like people to be good at their jobs instead of being bad at their jobs.

But, I think teaching skills, juuuust like any other skills can be taught and improved. So if we want good teachers and educators we need to build them up, not just relie on a few good ones to carry the day.

I personally reject the notion of competency in this as a matter of "giftedness", as something you either have or don't have. I think it's something you cam build. It's something you can teach. But you need to specifically aim for it.

[Edman274]

You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.

[bccdee]

> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers

…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.

> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence

What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.

So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.

[sokoloff]

> it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.

I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.

There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.

[Edman274]

Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.

[slim]

who will train them ? average trainers. it's a chicken/egg problem

[necovek]

I think in this case, it was a teacher who is motivated, committed and focused on efficient, effective direct instruction followed by practice.

But I believe your point is great — we usually focus on average vs non-average student, and you are absolutely right that we need to focus on an average teacher just the same: what is the most effective way for a possibly non-motivated, less capable teacher to provide instruction with?

[basch]

There’s a massive amount of duplicated effort in curriculum creation.

If the really gifted are documenting their lessons and publishing the framework other really good teachers can pickup where they left off.

Having those curriculums in a standard format would go a long way to making components interchangeable and remixable.

[necovek]

Just like in learn-by-doing, I believe some of it has to be done by the teacher themselves — by feeling where the pain is, they'll better focus on what matters.

Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)

[red-iron-pine]

the market also prices out these gifted teachers.

you either struggle to pay the bills and teach -- a thankless job, often -- or you take those gifts and double your pay working in industry.

[tau5210]

I agree. We seem to enjoy getting excited about ways of improving education in our heads, but somehow keep forgetting or think lightly about the actual teachers in reality.

Teachers are always going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks: no matter what fancy perfect education method people come up with, it's still not going to be any better than what an average teacher can teach. Or equivalently, what an average teacher understands herself. And in fact, the greater the discrepancy between the theory and the teachers, the worse the actual outcome will probably be...

If we still want to introduce some new fancy ways, at the very least, we have to begin by teaching the teachers, not the students. I think this is true even if we suppose that all the teachers are "gifted" so to speak. Otherwise, teaching isn't a science so each teacher will just do things their own way, which again will probably be a mess. Even gifted people are not all the same. Or if we say that's ok, then we wouldn't need an education system to begin with: just let each teacher teach in their own way and the world should still be great a place-- but I doubt it.

On a side note, I've come to see textbooks as a great invention in that sense: the students can learn a bare minimum even from the dumbest teacher as long as you make sure they follow the text book. Put another way, the textbook is like a baseline meta-teacher teaching the teacher along with the students.. I'm not a teacher myself but I have a lot of teachers around me including family members from whom I've heard this.

[bjourne]

> I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades

This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.

[necovek]

Perhaps worth reading through the rest of the comment too? I had other teachers where it was easy to pass and get good grades (As even), but I did not call them out as good.

Before jumping to conclusions, maybe ask for context too? In particular, this was a high school for gifted math kids, and what I learned through regular classes let me pass math uni entrance exam in the top 10 (out of ~500 students) with no extra prep and even easily pass a couple of semesters of uni math with almost no prep (I took exams for two semesters after the first semester). My (lack of) working habits did catch up to me after that.

Also, for 4 years in two uni degrees, I did not get such a good teacher ever again, and there were a few who were easy to get great grades with.

Perhaps you can give some benefit of the doubt, though?

[bjourne]

Well, I don't know you, your teacher, or even what subject we're discussing but you wrote that you did "not have to bother with homework and assignments". Perhaps you would have learned more if the instruction had not failed to make you study? :P

[necovek]

Whether they'd be able to make me study (it was a mathematical analysis course, though I do not think it matters) is a question that'd be hard to answer — I was already highly motivated with different topics: I was spending my time reading on CS topics like algorithm complexity, operating system development and building software interfacing with hardware. So another possible outcome would have been that I simply learned less of it due to lousy instruction — which was the case with a few other subjects.

Sometimes a teacher can also do a great job of getting you interested (also important) but I was focusing on quality instruction.

[SoftTalker]

Or maybe OP is just naturally gifted at math.

[DroneBetter]

this is not necessarily the case; the coursework could have been produced by a different person from the teacher (although generally at my alma mater the 'module organiser' fulfils both roles).

[sokoloff]

I’m not sure GP’s point landed. As I read it, it had nothing to do with who created the curriculum or even how much the student learned.

“Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.

[necovek]

I am not disputing that being the case in general, but it'd be nicer if they gave me more benefit of the doubt: I tried to give an honest view of actually receiving good instruction, and not enjoying being handed good grades for nothing.

I've responded to them directly what that got me (like great uni entry exam scores with literally zero prep for a maths program, and a couple of semesters of exam passing with minimal prep for a maths/CS/physics majors).

On top of that, I am talking of this almost 30 years later — perhaps I have some perspective and I am not a fresh out of school guy who just loves getting off the hook easy?

[teiferer]

> teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.

This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.

And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.

The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.

[atoav]

Yes, but as an university level educator I have to stress that the vast majority of students suck at understanding what they will need to know to be good at the juicy bits that interested them in the first place. Our task isn't just to teach them what they are interested in. Our task (among others) is to prepare them for a life after university in their profession(s) while giving them the practical skill of learning new subjects themselves. For example: Nearly nobody wants to do the math stuff, but nearly everybody will profit from knowing it after the fact (at least in the field I am in). Education is more than knowledge, but if we talk about knowledge it is the systematic accumulation of interlinked ideas and concepts that after a few years turn someone who had no idea into someone who can excell in their field. Nobody who likes to work on cars likes doing taxes, but nearly everybody who lives off working on cars will need to know how to do them. So the question will be, can a society afford to teach people only the fun bits?

I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.

But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.

[win311fwg]

> I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside.

While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?

[beej71]

> something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world

I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.

[atoav]

Yes, this is what I meant University is both academic in the sense that it is about research for the respective field(s), but it is also in a very real sense the last educational institution for many students who end up outside of academia. I am not saying that academic rigor needs to be replaced with a self-help group, what I say is that we can look for win-win-situations that help both in an academic sense and are practical outside of academia.

Of course I can't catch all of my students deficiencies (alone for the reason that I can't discover all), but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal. As a software developer I have met people who worked a decade in the field, did good work and they haven't heard of a fundamental concept in networking before. Everybody has their gaps, even people I worked with who are the most knowledgeable people I have ever worked with sometimes have gaps in basic stuff. Maybe your former teachers neglected them, you never really had to apply it, or whatever. Normal.

Good teaching means you quickly recap the required knowledge before you apply it. I can't recap simple arithmetics, but if we need integration or trigonometry I will recap in a beginner course.

An important aspect of University is that it is more free than school education. That means it teaches people to organize their own learning to a much higher degree (which you also may need after you graduate or drop out). If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.

[win311fwg]

> but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal.

Absolutely. Which is why we've built a society where helping others close those gaps is natural and considered to be part of a life-long process. Again, it is great that you are playing your part, but you'd be doing the same if you were standing beside someone on an assembly line. It is not clear what the significance of university is, unless you are simply biased by it being central to much of your experience?

> it is more free than school education. [...] If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.

Which is why youth life doesn't end at school. In fact, school is supposed to be just a small part of that existence. We encourage them to do things like babysit young children, get jobs, etc. where hitting a wall and shattering is plain unacceptable and even catastrophic. This forces them to quickly get up to speed on how to learn and feeling like they can learn when things get real.

It is inevitable that someone will end up living a completely sheltered life and miss out on those fundamentals, but compelling them to first un-shelter themselves is what university entrance requirements are for. If you are regularly seeing students both sheltered and accepted into university, our fundamental assumptions about university have broken down and we need to step back. You working hard to offer a bandaid is noble, but not a good solution.

[whiplash451]

To a large extent, the onus is on the teacher to generate interest. Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.

[graemep]

> Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.

That is the problem. It should not be forced. People naturally love learning and its a matter of facilitating that. Not going into details here as I have recent comments on this and other threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409530

[bccdee]

I know a lot of people who believe this, and I think it just doesn't bear out.

I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.

I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.

Kids aren't just a blob of flesh that will some day become an adult. People don't take them seriously as individuals, but they should. That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

[jjk166]

> I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.

Maybe we shouldn't be forcing people to do drills and practice at a time when they lack the cognitive skills to force themselves to do drills and practice, and we most certainly shouldn't be penalizing those who struggle with such a regimen. We live in a marvelous age where you can learn about things through a wide range of media which do not require any one particular gating skill. So long as children are engaged, eventually they're going to reach a point where there are so many things they want to read that the effort to read is no longer daunting. If well structured, they'll find that in their previous learning they've actually already picked up quite a bit of understanding that helps them.

The very worst thing you can do to a child is try to shove them through a process that was not designed for them, pressure them to succeed where they were set up to fail, then tell them the failure is due to a lack of effort on their part.

The work is in setting up education programs where interest in cultivated and challenges are calibrated to the level of a student's abilities such that what they want to learn and what they need to learn are aligned. This is not easy, but life does not guarantee there is an easy way to do everything. Children are not the only ones who must learn the value of putting in the effort to reap a bountiful reward.

> That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

Of course inexperienced children left to their own devices may not make the best decisions, and experienced adults must at times force them to do things for their own good. However you have to actually know what is better for them. So many terrible practices have been perpetuated because "I was ultimately better off for it." Once you accept that no one who came before you knew what they were doing, that they were all working with less information available than what you have now, and that in many cases you succeeded in spite of those shortcomings, not because of them, then you become cautious when playing the "I know better" card.

[graemep]

It does work in my experience.

> I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.

My kids learned to read without being forced. They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards. As far as they were concerned it was guessing game. Then on to reading books together designed for more whole word recognition, which is reading guns stories. I wrote a blog post about it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/educating-lucy-learning

> I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.

You can explain to a 14 year old. My kids had been out of school for years at that age and I had not had to force them to do anything. A teenager is perfectly capable of understanding that in order to achieve somethings they have to do other things. If they want a particular career you explain that as well as the interesting things they have to do some less interesting things. If they want to study a particular subject to a higher level they have to meet entrance requirements.

> You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

Sometimes, but rarely with learning. The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.

[bccdee]

I'm glad you've experienced success with these strategies, but unfortunately you can't generalize that.

> They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards.

Whole language learning is a perfect example of this: The fifth word on the Wikipedia page for whole language is "discredited." [1] It's been linked to systemic regressions in literacy among children. Clever kids with lots of support can succeed despite whole language methods, but in general, whole language is significantly worse than phonics. I'm glad it worked for your kids — hands-on attention from a parent is an excellent way to learn :) — but in the classroom, it is empirically much worse than the alternatives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

> The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.

It is great for kids to be intrinsically motivated & I think the course material should be as engaging as possible, but often the kids are disengaged regardless, and I'm skeptical that there's some special trick we can pull to make the majority of kids passionate about fourth grade math class. A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division, and I think it's better to make learning a smooth and efficient experience than to jangle enrichment opportunities in front of their faces like cat toys. Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?" No! Just tell me what's going to be on the test and let me do the work!

[watwut]

People naturally like learning some things and dislike learning others. The idea that if some learning is not interesting to everyone is misguided.

And no, something being useful and relevant does not make it interesting on itself. Even if you know it is useful you can just dislike having to learn it.

[graemep]

What is wrong with focusing on what you find interesting and doing only what is really necessary of what you do not? The problem is forcing everyone, regardless of talents or interests or aims, to follow the same curriculum

If you know its useful you are still motived. if you are motivated overall you will develop the discipline to get through what you do not find interesting and put the work in. it avoids situations like this from the first comment in this thread: "they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade."

[eldaisfish]

this is exactly how you create a population that is mathematically illiterate and ripe for manipulation by foreign powers and marketing agencies.

Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.

[tombert]

I'd argue honestly until graduate school too. Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.

I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well rounded education is important, but it's still a lot of stuff that a lot of students don't want to do.

Graduate school is more fun, and in some senses kind of easier (for want of a better word). Sure, the work is "harder" on an objective level, but by the time you've made it to grad school you're probably studying a subject that you think is interesting, so you don't mind powering through the hard parts.

At least that's how it was for me.

[beej71]

> Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.

This is why I LOVED getting my MS. Just computer science all the time! Heaven! None of those pesky, worthless general ed classes!

I was just a dumb college kid. I'm convinced I'd have done better in life overall if I'd taken those GE courses seriously and made the effort to be a more well-rounded individual. How many chances do you get where your whole job is just learning shit? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.

[tombert]

I go back and forth; part of what bothers me is how I'm paying for these GE courses.

Like, for example, I took a multicultural film course in college the first time around. I love movies, I love analyzing everything about movies, I love discussing themes and metaphors that are in movies, and I even love writing long essays pondering movies, and I enjoyed the class.

That said...is a multicultural film course really worth ~$1200 and like 10 weeks of my time? Maybe to some people, but it certainly wasn't for me.

[beej71]

Admittedly, I went to school when such classes cost more like $250 in today's dollars.

[h317]

I think the challenge that teachers have is that being “interested “ in something is a skill in itself. I never played a clarinet when I was a kid, maybe I would have like it, but never did that. If we assume that being interested is a function of household income/structure/ happiness than things get even worse.

[conductr]

We shouldn’t force interest. But have high expectations across the board and just realize disinteresting topics will just take more effort and or be more time. It’s virtually impossible to make every subject interesting for every student.

The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action. And not from the school, from parents. Bad grades should result in punishment. It’s should be the parent’s job to find what motivates their kid to perform under those circumstances. Being grounded, withholding allowance, reducing screen time, whatever your child responds to. The entire issue is rooted in a parenting problem. The education system wants a silver bullet solution that can ignore that but it is pretty constant.

[teiferer]

> It’s virtually impossible to make every subject interesting for every student.

It its full generality that's probably true, but we probably don't fully appreciate how the classical school system kills interest. I've met many 6 year olds that were so curious about the world, you could tell them stuff about any subject and they would soak it up and ask for more. 2 years later, shaped by a school system that focuses on grading and pressure, and their interest in anything had tanked. It was very sad to see.

Maybe trying to avoid killing that natural curiosity would be a useful step in improving things.

> The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action.

I don't know if you forgot a negation somewhere. That's completely unsuitable to create interest, it fosters hate with a passion for subjects and school in general. I know it did for me.

[conductr]

I'm speaking of disciplinary action that is home/family based and can just be rooted in the expectation of high effort. When this parenting is established young, the kid knows no other way. They know they have to participate. They generally don't want to disappoint their family. Everything is setup so disciplinary action should seldom need to occur and instead the opportunities for academic intervention are truly identified in a timely fashion and can receive a targeted solution (tutoring, different teaching style, etc).

Some families will decide to push harder, A's and AP classes are required, full effort in academics at all times. Some families will decide every assignment has to be completed and A's and B's with maybe an occasional C in a very hard class is acceptable and the student is left some bandwidth for social/non-academics. Some families take a simple pass/fail, as long as the kid finds a way to pass then they are good. So on...

The throughline is the parents are involved and monitoring the whole school year. Is homework being completed, how are your grades, talk to teachers when needed, etc. I feel this basic parenting is no longer common, parents want to blame the education system without taking any responsibility.

Sure we can incrementally improve education along the way, but we have to have a good faith expectation and base line of participation as a foundation or nothing will work.

Kids lose their curiosity because they witness their peers goofing around and not taking it serious. So if my friend's parents don't care and he's allowed to goof around instead of putting in the work, then I get a sense of FOMO or feel like a sucker for putting in the work. So everything devolves to the lowest common denominator. There's a lot more group dynamics and kids obviously don't know what is best for them, so adults really need to tell them what is expected. It's amazing how quickly a class elevates when you remove 1-2 distractions and likewise when the whole class is engaged and there is no distraction to begin with, it's ideal.

[bccdee]

I believe in school as an opportunity for intellectual enrichment, but fostering interest is not the primary goal of schooling. It's nice if school can make your kid an engaged and passionate reader, but your kid must become literate—whether they want to or not. And frankly, until they can string a sentence together, interesting books aren't even on the table.

At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.

I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.

[lan321]

As with everything, there's a balance. I've had teachers who can make interesting content boring and ones who can make boring content interesting, even if they have to make themselves interesting in the process.

Just like you can only make your lecture so interesting, a parent can only punish their child so much until the child has nothing to lose anymore or their choice becomes boredom with effort VS boredom.

Both sides should do their part for best results.

[conductr]

Sure, there's truth in that, but I've not seen a lot of evidence that teachers are the problem. Especially at a macro scale. For decades, they shoulder all the blame. We need to have a large level set / reality check on the parenting side of the equation. It's a cultural phenomenon that largely, in the US anyways, we don't care about education the way we say we do. We just want to buy it and check a box.

This time of year there's always a wave of videos that hit the internet that are basically outraged parents that their kids are not passing the year or graduating. The fact they are surprised by this at the end of the school year is usually not a lack of effort on the school's part and I feel this is a good indication of how aware/engaged many parents are.

[darkerside]

Teaching is a lot like (a certain style of) management. You learn what motivates someone, make the connection between that and the subject matter at hand, and make it accessible for them to get to the next level. The rest takes care of itself.

[teiferer]

And a good manager understands the difference between obedience out of fear and internal motivation out of interest.

[vintermann]

Well, we've all been students, haven't we? And most of us probably have experience with ways of teaching us that worked, and ways that didn't. Of course we're all going to have an opinion.

I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.

I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.

So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.

[somenameforme]

I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another.

And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.

This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.

[bluGill]

Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)

[somenameforme]

Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

[pc86]

> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?

If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.

[somenameforme]

Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.

Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

[bluGill]

Are they having the best results from that? I've seen the claim of other countries using that and having book smart kids who can't think. (Whatever that means)

There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.

[satisfice]

I was one of those students. I refused to do homework after the age of 11 (I cited the 13th amendment). Quit school as soon as it was legal to do so. I wrote about this in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Now approaching my 60th birthday, I feel certain I was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD.

You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.

I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.

[tombert]

I was too. That's why it was so frustrating to me.

Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades.

I eventually more or less figured out how to force myself to learn things I didn't care about, and I did eventually get my bachelors and a masters, but that wasn't until my 30's.

[cortesoft]

> Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably.

Honestly, these are the most important things to learn. I spend a lot of time with my kids talking about ways to get your brain to do what you want.

[obscurette]

Sounds too familiar. But I survived at school and I think that it helped a ton that I went to school at sixties (Soviet Union) – explicit teaching, homework and grades since age six, order in classrooms etc allowed me to practice handling my brain with babysteps since early age. If I look at classes my grandkids are put in – no way I'd survived in such chaotic and noisy environment with so few rules.

[Danox]

In America being willing historically depending on where you live still isn't enough for getting an education, healthcare or voting depending on where you live. But no worries there is a country on the other side of the world moving upwards.

[socalgal2]

There's also this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ which claims data shows students being forced to "figure it out" is not the best way to learn. Most HNer disagree with this.

[zipy124]

That's exactly quoted at the start of the article?

"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "

Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.

[g3f32r]

> students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students.

While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically?

When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based learning group nor the traditional schooling group - which performed better and by what metrics?

---

It seems silly to say "This group who was instructed to rote memorize material could indeed perform better on a direct memory recall examination." and then close the door on problem-based learning.

[Wowfunhappy]

If you're doing a large-scale study, exam scores are basically the only way to get quantitative data.

And, exams aren't that bad! A well-designed exam can't be passed by merely recalling information, because it will give you novel problems that require reasoning with the material on a deeper level.

Also, explicit test prep—where you basically teach strategies for cheating the test—universally sucks, but presumably that's not what the study is measuring.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It seems to me that exam scores are a better metric of the underlying thing we care about, the ability to accomplish things in the world, than solution skill when faced with novel problems. Even if you're a very innovative person leading a project to do something entirely unprecedented, most of the tasks you need to do, text you need to read, etc. will not be novel.

[bccdee]

I feel like many of the more alternative teaching methodologies have unclear learning goals. What is "holistic problem-solving"? How can we measure it? Do we know that conventionally taught students lack it? Is it hard to acquire? Is it even important?

When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).

To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.

[socalgal2]

I think one claim is that the pile of rote memorized info is a required basis for novel solutions.

[AnimalMuppet]

Seems to me that "figure it out" works better for learning depth of knowledge than it does for breadth of knowledge. That is, I can figure out the computer graphics tricks I need in order to get my project to draw fast, even if they're fairly deep and sophisticated tricks. I'm less likely to figure out, say, the humanities portion of a college education.

Why? At least for me, focused goals motivate more than diffuse ones. I could treat "the humanities" as a bunch of focused goals, but there would be a large number of them. That takes a fair amount of motivation.

[rsolva]

What they need to figure out is what topics peaks their interest. Kids need exposure to a broad spectrum early, get interested, and then have mentors that know how to run with it and harness that motivation. Later on these kids can tolerate learning more mundane, boring stuff if that brings them closer to a goal they have set for themself. But motivation has to come first!

[tuumi]

Piques their interest. Sorry to be that guy.

[rsolva]

Thanks, English is not my first language, and I appreciate the knit pick :)

[obscurette]

As someone who have been teacher for some time - students being forced to "figure it out" is the worst way to learn. For every subject you teach explicitly there is always a ton of knowledge to discover if students choose to do it, but being forced to do it very clearly damages students.

https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/no-explicit-instruc...

[SoftTalker]

One of my sons is one of those. He's smart, tends to creative pursuits, and while he will research and learn on his own about stuff he's interested in, put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.

[hylaride]

I was one of those kids.

Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.

A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.

I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.

I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".

We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.

I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.

[aidenn0]

I was also one of those kids.

Some of it was diagnosed ADHD (I was on Ritalin; I couldn't tell the difference, but my mom said it was huge; on almost every day I forgot to take it she would get a call from the school about my behavior), but much of it is something I still can't explain to this day.

I was a voracious reader, but if the book was assigned for school, I wouldn't read it.

Science was usually my best subject, but my personality clashed with my 5th grade teacher, so I spent one quarter of 5th grade just not doing it at all. As in when it was time for science, I read a book I had brought from home instead of participating. I did absolutely no work. I didn't even turn in the homework and I handed in blank pages for the in-class work. I received a D (the lowest passing grade) for that quarter, which rather confused me.

For 7th grade, I tested into Algebra, but at the time a teacher recommendation was also needed, and my 6th grade teacher declined to do so. I got a D in pre-algebra, with a B+ test-average being pulled down by my homework (or lack of it). I did however teach myself lock raking with a 5-pin lock that was on the file-cabinet in the back of the class.

I had the flu when I took the SATs so got what was (for me) a poor score. My guidance counselor told me that there was no need to retake, as no schools that wanted a higher SAT would take me with my GPA as low as it was.

It took me 11 semesters and two summer sessions to finish college with a 2.2 GPA.

[SoftTalker]

Oh man did I hate math up until algebra. It just seems like pointless memorization and rote work. Then with algebra suddenly I could see applications. "I can actually solve problems with this" and my grades went from Cs to As immediately.

I still remember the test I took in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. For reasons I don't understand I was in a panic for nearly the entire test. My hands were shaking. I don't think I even finished it. Yet somehow I passed it and that was a turning point in actually starting to like math for me.

[aidenn0]

I'm there with you on seeing applications, but I never could bring myself to do math homework. Even today, I don't think I would even though I am 100% certain that doing practice problems is of huge benefit (every moment you're thinking about the mechanics of doing the math, you're not thinking about solving the problem that you're doing the math for).

I eventually hit a wall with both ordinary differential equations and vector calculus[1], which forced me to switch from Physics to CS.

1: And I thought vector calculus was the coolest thing ever; you can use Gauss's theorem to derive Archimedes's Principle from integrating the partial-pressures over an arbitrary shape, which is one of the most elegant things I've ever seen.

[notnullorvoid]

> put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.

Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.

[boringg]

I'm guessing your past this option but you could try a Montessori classroom -- less structured and allows children to chase their own pursuits. My sense is its stronger for years 1-6 as opposed to later years. Also it doesn't feel like Montessori tries to grind down the children - school/teachers dependent for sure (same could be said for other systems).

[SoftTalker]

Oh he's well past that now. He did graduate High School, kept his grades up enough to be eligible to participate in some extracurriculars that he enjoyed. He made a couple attempts at community college, but it didn't go well and we agreed that we'd stop wasting money on that for now.

[fraserphysics]

I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. There were articles to read in advance. I should have taken that class before I spent 15 years teaching at university rather than afterwards.

[shimman]

What aspects of pedagogy did you find most relevant? It does seem sad that in our industry, one where practical learning is necessary, that learning how to learn isn't really taught well. Often the worse ways to learn are those that seemed to be encouraged, mostly because it's the easiest way to monetize content.

[fraserphysics]

It was so long ago that I've forgotten most of it. I was impressed that it was based on evidence based literature. Here is a link to the training now https://carpentries.org/instructor-training/ I am disappointed that I don't see a reading list.

Unless it's changed since I was active, The Carpentries does not monetize content.

[Cthulhu_]

From experience (with a moody teenager), can confirm; I think this is less teaching methods and more personal development.

Younger children will conform more easily to e.g. structured education, teacher / parent authority, and basically do what they are told/asked to do. But at college / uni ages, you're dealing with young adults, some of which are only doing an education still because it's expected of them by parents/society. Or even when they want to be there, the motivation to do the work may not be there. yet.

It's difficult because their brain is still at high learning capacity, so one has to capitalize on that. But they also have other interests, like sleeping until midday and spacing out for ages.

[graemep]

Younger children will do what they are told more easily, but making learning a chore they do because they are told to rather than a joy will kill their love of learning and that is what causes the lack of motivation later on.

[fhe]

based on your description, one reasonable way to 'revolutionize' school might simply allow people (who don't want to be there) to leave.

[bluGill]

That might be fine for someone in the wrong college degree, but I - as a tax payer - need every sixth grader to learn essential the same things. I need kids to grow up able to provide life support for themselves so I can retire as by body fails from old age. I'm investing in the future of many kids I otherwise don't know or care about because making their life better makes mine better.

Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others

[kitchi]

Depending on what you mean by "school" I'd disagree. Voluntary tertiary education makes sense, not all chosen professions may need or benefit from a degree.

But primary education needs to be a requirement for every child. Coming from a country with a large illiterate population, it's easy to see how hard their lives are compared to folks with an education but similar socio-economic backgrounds.

Now obviously implementing universal primary education and the details can be debated and need to be context specific.

[BobbyTables2]

Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.

Makes a lot of teacher not want to be there too!

The schools also have little interest in spending time and money on the higher performing students. They teach the minimum and focus resources on the failing ones to raise school averages.

Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.

[fn-mote]

> tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen

Hilarious assertion.

Absolutely false in my experience.

Someone who just starts to learn in college will be years behind the students who began in high school. They probably mistake it for not “being good at” a subject, but it can really keep people away from some areas. For example, hard sciences and math, where years of training problem solving skills makes solving new problems easy.

Not saying all primary/secondary education is good, but there is a massive gap between the good and the bad.

[BobbyTables2]

I mean more that the elementary/secondary school years are largely wasted in terms of what could have been taught.

Yes, some things are taught and sometimes learned, but only superficially.

Even basic economics and financial literacy is taught way too late. These kids have been ogling phones, tablets, apps since they were in Kindergarten and then learn a few basics over a decade later?

Acceleration in Physics is not a difficult concept. Yet, it’s often taught late in secondary school - 6 to 8 years after teaching fractions.

Each year Math classes largely repeat the previous year with just a small extra wrinkle (except for the crazy year known as Geometry).

Pre-algebra, algebra I, algebra II, advanced math, Calculus I. That’s 5 years to poorly learn lines, parabolas, and integrals — longer than an entire college education.

Imagine if we taught grammar that way. All Of Elementary education would be stuck in the simple tenses! The future perfect continuous would be taught Senior year!

I’m not advocating teaching Calculus in 2nd grade but I think we should be doing better.

[kitchi]

> Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.

The phrase "real learning" is hard to define but I think I understand what you mean here, ie critical thinking. But this is only possible on the back of foundational literacy possible by years of primary education.

> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.

Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education. Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers. The kids might not want to be there for a variety of reasons, but if you've ever interacted with kids informally you'll know they are typically curious and eager to learn about the world around them.

And if they aren't the reasons need to be understood and the kids would ideally be provided the care they need, although there reality is far more complex.

This exception does not invalidate the basic premise of primary education, the benefits of which can be seen globally in pretty much every context.

[bluGill]

> Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education.

I have yet to see a suggestion on how to do that, that isn't obviously unworkable.

> Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers.

It is not teachers I worry about, it is the other students. Peer pressure matters and so put kids who want to be there with kids that don't and some kids will decide they don't want to either. (the reverse is also true, but there is no way to know and I wouldn't risk my kids who like school in an area where many kids don't want to be there)

[kitchi]

Yep that's definitely fair, to not want to put your kids in a school which has a large population of troubled children.

But to the original point I was trying to make, troubled kids don't automatically mean they don't deserve education or we should allow them to fail out or give them the option of leaving primary or secondary education. We should really be making every attempt at figuring out ways to make them stay in school, given how stark the difference in outcomes are.

[imhoguy]

And why they don't want to be there? This unearths more complex topic of individuality in aproximating school, because I think every kid wants and does't want different things. And these aren't limited to school material but also include social dynamics between peers or even type of chairs (ask kids with ADD spectrum).

[sensanaty]

If it was up to me (back then), I wouldn't have even done primary school. I'd wager that the vast majority of kids wouldn't want to do school, because obviously, but that's why we don't let kids make important decisions like those for themselves.

Looking back I am extremely appreciative of my time in school as much as I might've not liked it at the time, and my education has undoubtedly made me into a more intelligent and capable person in pretty much every conceivable way. Especially high school, pretty much everyone I know who's a high school dropout (and doesn't come from a wealthy family) is much worse off than their peers who finished it.

As for tertiary education, that is already completely optional. I attended university for 1 year, said "This ain't for me", and things worked out just fine for me.

[graemep]

> I'd wager that the vast majority of kids wouldn't want to do school, because obviously

You are probably right that most kids do not want to be in school, however most kids love learning. They do not have to learn in school.

Not do schools have to teach they way they do, and if they were more fun and interesting the kids would want to be there.

[throwaway2037]

    > Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.

At what age do you think kids should be able to leave school?

[bluGill]

I don't like my options. I want all kids to like school and so be there from 6 - 26 (that is get a phd). Anything else is a failure, even if it makes some kids better to get rid of other kids, it makes those kids worse.

[peterfirefly]

closer to 12 than to 15.

[SoftTalker]

Leaving school after 8th grade used to be pretty common. Many jobs were available for someone with an 8th grade education, or you'd start an apprenticeship.

[Danox]

The upper division has and is getting an education always has and always will and the same applies to those with money, with the screw worm fly hitting Texas of recent measles is ok fame and the current administration which is the worst in American history run by imbeciles the can do America appears to be gone and education for most along with it.

[cortesoft]

They were already at a University. None of the students were required to be there. They all had the ability to just leave.

[laughing_man]

That's the problem with having universities issue credentials. You end up with a lot of people who have no interest in learning but are going to stick it out for the credential.

[nhinck2]

There has been a shift towards too many jobs requiring a tertiary education.

But good luck reversing that trend.

[groundzeros2015]

This is not true. There has been a shift in requirements to combat credential inflation. The average person is not smarter or more capable.

[somenameforme]

I think you misunderstood his comment, because you agree with him. He's not saying require as in needed to do the work, but required as in unnecessarily needed to be accepted for the job.

[groundzeros2015]

Then I agree. I read it as the argument that the economy is actually more technically complex and requires additional education, which is a common argument made be politicians and university admins.

[peterfirefly]

reading skills are important.

[bawolff]

So? People can decide if they want the job enough to participate in the degree or not.

[beej71]

After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".

As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.

[tombert]

Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.

I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.

But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.

I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."

[Animats]

We know what works: a 1:5 staff to student ratio. At that ratio, method matters less. Beyond that, it's a productivity problem.

[kelseyfrog]

Yep, known as Bloom's Two Sigma Problem[1]. Like most hard problems we know the solution, but lack the appetite to implement.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

[intended]

Hey Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. So far, (nearly) all conversations about education on HN I’ve seen, have had a naturally point at which Bloom’s 2s should be introduced.

Humanity is now preparing students with a 20 year time horizon, while tech changes much faster. If this was agriculture, the industry would be doomed by that horizon mismatch.

We really need more teachers, if we want the median citizen to be better off.

[bradleyjg]

The study picked an artificial and useless proxy.

What did tutored students go on to do? Were they over represented in Nobel Prizes, hedge fund billionaires, heads of state?

Or did they do well on a meaningless test and then forget all about whatever they “learned” just like everyone else?

The entire field is absolutely littered with this problem. Everyone is targeting cholesterol and not all cause mortality.

[kelseyfrog]

What evidence would change your mind?

[bradleyjg]

Strong correlations to actual outcomes. That can be career outcomes or otherwise but actual outcomes people care about. Not test scores.

We have a zillion natural experiments because there are so many schools in the world and within many of them teachers given a lot of leeway.

Does any of it make a damn bit of difference controlling for everything else? We have Waldorf schools teaching woodworking and cram schools shoving AP courses at eighth graders—-that’s a large difference, what do life outcomes show?

[kelseyfrog]

That's fair. It helps knowing what would change things. Thank you for sharing! appreciate it

[BurningFrog]

With AIs as most staff, this should be very reachable.

[Gethsemane]

With AIs as teachers, I disagree. But with AIs assisting routine grading, filling in the university's assessment_framework_draft_v3_final_FINAL.docx, and otherwise freeing up time to actually focus on students - maybe? Although I fear that any productivity gains will be swallowed up by further reductions in lecturer headcount...

[AngryData]

AI lacks both the reasoning and insight needed to teach anybody that isn't already immensely interested in the topic, and even then might leave large knowledge gaps, not to mention how often it hallucinates wrong knowledge. Especially with topics that already have a lot of bad information floating around.

[ykonstant]

Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.

[BurningFrog]

I'm thinking of custom built Teacher AIs, trained in how to teach different kinds of students, and with well defined curriculums.

Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.

There are some early products around:

- https://www.khanmigo.ai/

- https://squirrelai.com/

[doctorpangloss]

> I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything

I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?

To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.

[mrngld]

Got to disagree, there's been a cohort of teachers pursuing that avenue of thought and all it's led to is colleges that shout down anything that'd pierce the monoculture and employees so politicized they lose some utility in actually doing the useful work that the company or entity exists to perform.

It's a side effect, perhaps, of the modern "main character syndrome". An electrician doesn't need political "leadership". He needs to know how to wire a house quickly, efficiently, and above all, safely. He doesn't need extensive training on how to help bring about a proletariat revolution. That's an example from the trades, but same in the white collar world; my employers accountants weren't hired because of any activism, but because they know accounting rules and regulations so the rest of the business doesn't have to think about those things as much.

If anything, modern generations need reminders that 99.99% of us are NPC's and the best thing we can do for the world, our families and those around us are to be really good, competent NPC's.

Let me also point out we landed on the moon without that view of education. People, on the moon, with all the technological and institutional advances necessary to make that happen.

[roncesvalles]

>because all real problems are political

I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.

[doctorpangloss]

at every level, we face political problems that "STEM" provides bad or wrong answers to.

here's a simple one: what is the right answer for how to use a road? more parking? more bike lanes? exclusive use for busses? we do not bid on roadway land, there is no market solution to this. you can come up with a lot of metrics for efficiencies and optimize for them, but which metrics matter? journey times? environmental impact? there are real disputes about waymos, it isn't enough to invent autonomous vehicles, there must be leadership on adopting technology. these are all political issues. okay, and you probably spend 30m to an hour on roadways every day of your life, you can't say, this isn't a real problem.

the greatest irony is it is exactly the families with this fairly myopic "all problem solving is math problem sets" point of view who disengage from political life, and despite their fixation on cultural hegemony, they have disproportionately little representation in politics. to be real, the reason parents care about math is because money. which should tell you everything you really need to know about its power to "solve problems."

[jon-wood]

> I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.

Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.

I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

[PotatoPrime]

> How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.

No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.

[hylaride]

Universal K-12 education was probably one of the greatest level-up programs that society has ever implemented. The question now, is it holding us back and how (if) it should be reformed. And reform is dangerous as there are people whose only goal is to ruin it, damned the consequences.

[Natsu]

There's a huge difference between things people are forced to learn and stuff they want to learn. Life does tend to make you learn a few things by force, but that can also kill off one's taste for a subject.

Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...

[wdutch]

As a math teacher myself I want to say... A parent taking an interest and spending some quality time with their child over a subject can have a huge impact on their motivation to learn. Props to your mom.

[Natsu]

She was an elementary school teacher herself.

[tombert]

There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it.

I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.

I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.

[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(

[galaxyLogic]

Thing about it is the students should be given an explanations about why each topic is important for them to learn to be able to learn more advanced topics.

Maybe briefly show how that adavanced topic will be taught and let them realize they can not possible even start to understand advanced topic because they are missing the more elementary pieces.

Similarly why they can't got further without doing their homework. How mastering the homework exercises let's you solve more problems.

I know that is not easy, the teacher may not quite understand how topics relate, why each of them is needed in a specific order, if they have not thought about that much.

[eszed]

Yes, to all of this.

The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles.

(This is why many teachers - I was among them - aren't immediately good at teaching concepts or subjects that come easily to them as they may be at teaching things they struggled a bit to learn. If you've had to break something down for yourself then you're ahead of the game when it comes to breaking it down for others.)

For a while I taught an "Improv For Teachers" workshop (I have a theatre background), which was really about listening to your class and being ready to adapt your lesson plan to where they are in their course of work, or even to their mood on the day. It was mostly elementary school teachers, and some of them really resisted that idea. I'm convinced, though, that that's an important skill: the most memorable and successful classes I've taught have happened when I've been able to take advantage of a student question or a student interest and run with it - sometimes not even knowing where it'll go - with the confidence that I'll somehow be able to pivot back to the curriculum. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable, and embrace a bit of fear, and risk a bit of failure to do it, hence why the Improv experience is so helpful.

Do you have teaching experience?

[galaxyLogic]

Not much. I worked for an E-Learning company some years back when it was the trendy thing. So I started thinking are the courses we provide really helping students to learn? But turns out the business-model was mostly to provide compliance courses so that companies could prove yes they did train their employees in compliance so they could not be sued. The courses were made kinda easy to begin with because what was important was that employees could pass them without wasting too much paid work-time.

I also gave some presentations in IT-related conferences. People in conferences often get tired. So once as I entered the lectern I turned on a piece of music I had on my thumb-drive. It was the loudest hardest Rock'n'Roll I had. The audtorium had good loud-speakers. I think it woke the audience up. But soon I saw them nodding again. :-)

[tombert]

One of my favorite teachers that I ever had was my Calc 2 teacher in high school.

He always made a very special point to explain the "why" of everything. Not just "how is this used?", but he would also derive a lot of the formulas for us instead of having us just memorize forms. I think it makes you better at math in general; the whole point if mathematics education, in my mind, is to teach you the how and the why of things, not just to get to an answer.

I already loved math by the time I got into that class, but I attribute him as the reason that I love formal math so much.

[HappMacDonald]

I can recall that one motivation that helped to drive me when I was very young (K-2 at least) was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do. Like there was this ladder I could climb to in a sense help to advance to a more sophisticated peer group; even in relation to academic concerns like reading and math.

So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)

[tombert]

> was a sense that "more advanced" meant that it's what the older kids could do.

That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over.

When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already a fairly typical "beginners language", and my dad actually already had a book on learning Python.

Wanna know why I started with C++ instead? Because one of my classmates told me that it was too hard and that I wasn't smart enough to do it and only professional software engineers can.

I wasn't about to let some kid tell me I wasn't smart enough to do something that I knew I was capable of, so that afternoon I begged my parents to take me to a nearby used-books store and buy me a "Learn to Program in C++" book, and started on that. Eventually I also found a copy of the Sams "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" book that I read through online.

I still kind of have that mentality; I learned how to use Isabelle because I felt that that's what the "grown up" computer scientists use. I learned how to write Haskell because that's what the "smart" software engineers use. I learned how to use Vim as a teenager because that's what the "good" coders used.

It's probably not the best way to motivate yourself, but it seems to have worked out ok for me.

[graemep]

I think the problem with your argument is that you are placing teaching as something done to students at the centre of your view, rather than something done by students. It assume classroom learning. That rules out any really different approach. The fundamental problem is trying to revolutionise schooling rather than learning.

> They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Then they should not be there. That is the fundamental problem. Especially at that level why is anyone there who is not even motivated enough to study? Someone might not like ever undergraduate level course they need for a degree, but they should be able to push themselves through the boring stuff.

At school level, its difficult to make things work in a classroom setting with a fixed curriculum. Once I took my kids out of school they largely learned what they found interesting until they started studying towards doing exams. I made sure they learned core skills around reading, writing and maths, but they still had a say in what to do and how. A lot of it can be done by pursuing other subjects or hobbies. With the exams they had a choice (discussed, and they had to do maths and English language) but they had a choice) of what subjects to do and made choices that suited them, including some less common subjects (such as astronomy and Latin). Again, motivated and requiring very little actual teaching (they both entirely taught themselves Latin, and did other subjects with minimal help - although we did have tutors for English literature and classical civilisation, and varying amounts of parental help with other subjects).

A lot of the best universities (in the UK, at least) have tutorial systems that rely heavily on small groups rather than lectures (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews - that I know of). A lot more individual attention is a long proven method of getting better results.

At school level it might look very expensive, but that is balanced by needing a lot less time per student. A few hours of one to one a week is cheaper than school.

[mymythisisthis]

I always felt that large urban centers should concentrate on specialized schools. In large cities there is a critical mass of students to fill specialized schools such as ones for; biology, programming, electrical, automotive etc...

Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.

There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.

All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.

Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.

[simiones]

The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.

Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.

[graemep]

Why does it have to be a fixed curriculum? Individualised learning can still cover everything important.

> The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have.

Do they actually have it? Do you think schools that have fixed a fixed curriculum are successful at teaching this to everyone? Try picking some average people and asking them to explain Boyles Law, or why and how Rome became an Empire or the causes of the Second World War.

Is the level of minimal knowledge the same for everyone regardless of talents? Some kids will know before they are teenagers than most adults ever will about any of the topics picked, and many more.

I am confused about why you think knowing Latin somehow excludes knowing history of physics or biology.

You are arguing from a position of not having an experience of eduction outside the school classroom setting. I am speaking from experience and from having actually read up on the evidence.

[notnullorvoid]

> nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.

It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.

> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.

> [...] isn't interested in learning.

I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.

No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.

[CobaltFire]

I was taught (when teaching for the military, actually) that leadership/teaching/etc. often talk about toolboxes but neglect a VERY important one.

You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.

This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).

[nickwood_dot_io]

Absolutely.

I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).

Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.

I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.

Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.

Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.

It's the circle of liiiiiife......

[vitally3643]

Almost all such attempts start with the flawed assumption that there is One True Way to teach literally every person in the same cookie cutter fashion.

The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".

Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.

[red-iron-pine]

> I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"

[tombert]

I thought I might be able to reach them, because I was never an A student. I was always kind of the underachiever who teachers knew was smart but would get mediocre grades because I wouldn't do the homework. I passed high school because I have a good enough memory to remember what was being taught in class and do fine on tests, but I'd still get middling-to-bad grades in high school because I wouldn't consistently do the homework.

To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.

But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.

I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.

[b33j0r]

I had the opposite experience. I saw college kids who didn’t know where the F5 key was on the first day write smart matlab and python programs by the midterms.

I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.

I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.

[weirdmantis69]

That's true. I'm frustrated for example in how they teach math at my kids school. They don't do rote memorization of how to multiply. No quizzes, no reciting... they teach the conceptual parts of it which is fine, but without memorizing I feel they will never have fluency. And my daughter never did get fluency in math now I'm drilling my younger son every day.

[deepsun]

Yes, and I probably was that student in school.

The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.

Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.

[dboreham]

Both my parents were teachers so I thought I had some idea, but it wasn't until I ventured into the middle school to assist a teacher with a coding class (probably this was 10 years ago now) that I learned something about education.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Also, there is no 'right way to teach', but there are 'right ways of teaching'. This difference being that people can respond very differently to the same approach, so many approaches are needed to be effective.

[hurril]

I was one of these "smart students" but it really wasn't that I did not want to be there. I was a lazy, or complacent, f*ck. I've have had to learn how to learn and how to have discipline late(r) in life.

[j45]

How to teach isn't always aligned with how to learn.

How children learn is not how adults learn.

[j45]

That's an odd comment below to see die from crm9125.

I'm not sure what's so offensive about it?

If it was downvoted, what interests could want to draw attention away from those sentences, and why?

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crm9125 13 hours ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]

Also there are about 2 billion children on earth, each with their own different idiosyncrasies. Good luck finding the grand unified theory of pedagogy for that.

[pc86]

This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?

[tombert]

I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class really understanding the subject.

I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.

I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.

[Jolter]

Forced, presumably, by the student themself.

[atoav]

I am teaching for at the university level for 6 years now, with 5 courses per year.

The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.

The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.

When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.

So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.

Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.

[bradleyjg]

I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?

Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?

[tombert]

I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.

A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].

Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.

[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.

[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.