[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.

[atoav]

I guess in my case it has to do with the aspect that I am teaching Media Technology and Electronics in an Art university. The students studying here are the 5% that made it through the selection process, but math and physics aren't typically a big part of that.

Meaning it is kind of like teaching a language in a engineering school: sure it is needed, but you can't just go all hardline on your requirements if you teach that class, otherwise you're going to lose everybody, because someone who studied engineering may have done so precisely with the background that they were bad with languages during school.

Same here. Art students are generally not the abstract maths type (although there are exceptions). My goal is to teach them at least that maths can be a very good tool in their belt if they want to know how things will work out before put into reality.

I still try to demand a lot of the students and they will certainly leave better educated than they entered. I just have to do it more in a boil-the-frog-way, presenting math as a way that allows us to avoid having to do unnecessary work or spend unnecessary money. This works pretty well.

I could of course also do it like my predecessor and just do a lecture on the physics of light, writing down equations nobody will understand and then have 90% fail and curse at my existence. But I don't really see the point of why I would want to do that in terms of the outcome.

[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!

[graemep]

The wikipedia article you cite is marked as needing citations.

The research shows whole word learning does not work well in a classroom setting. it works well one to one. If parents do it as a game with kids it works. Its worked for at least two generations in my family and we all learned to read at least a bit before we went to school, or outside school, or in a different language and alphabet (English at home) we learned in school. Well ahead of school in the latter cases, despite a phonetic alphabet in school!

> t 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

They disengage because they are forced to do things that are disengaging. As other have commented kids enter schooling enjoy learning, and a few years later have lost it.

> A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division,

Why do long division? There is lots of maths that is interesting. We are talking past each other here. I am saying the curriculum learning demotivating, and your answer is that kids need to be forced to do curriculum learning. I have specifically discussed maths in other comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409430 and there are links to more detail about some of my experiences with maths from the blog post I linked to already.

> Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?"

If they needed to ask, they are already doing it wrong. I certainly never did anything like that. I cannot even imagine why you would ask a child that.

[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.

[graemep]

Quite the opposite. A better education overall makes you better at maths, and more able to think critically. Killing kids love of learning is not the way to a better education. Drilling and memorising does not help you learn to think better. Engaging with things you are interested in does.

I find it very frustrating that people just refuse to believe there cannot be a better way to do things despite all the evidence (many, many academic studies) and the experience of people who have tried doing something different.

> If you cannot compare costs per unit

You are missing the point. You can make learning to do these things fun so kids want to do it. They will find a need for basic arithmetic to do something else and learn at that point.

> do not understand basic biology

Why not? Lots of people do not know basic biology after going through the school system.

> or cannot compare evidence

Why would someone who follows interests not be able to compare evidence? Every field has arguments and requires evidence.

For all these, my experience (and the available more formal evidence) is that allowing kids to follow interests (with guidance, help, suggestions as required) leads to far better results than forcing them to sit through a rigid and boring curriculum.

[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.