No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down • Hacker News Board

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#81

Post by michaelcampbell » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #27

Every time I come home from a mind-numbing eight-hour Scrum meeting, I feel frustrated for having accomplished absolutely nothing. Then I realise that this is what school was like, every single day. I'm sure some people prefer to be force-fed instead of learning on their own, but self-organised schools as in the OP should at least be an option for people who know what they want.

Funny you should say this. We have a mixed "agile" set of teams where I am; some are pure scrum, some more Kanban. This article reminds of the same discussions had at work of those 2 styles.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#82

Post by ams6110 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

tamana wrote: post #19

frozenport wrote: post #11

I went to one of these as a child and learned nothing. It became a real struggle to learn in a time efficient manner. I would strongly discourage parents from choosing this kind of education for early learners as it doesn't include various social skills like how to sit in a classroom, address a prompt, etc.

How early is "early"? Grade 1-5? Kids younger than that don't need to sit in a classroom. What does "appears a prompt" mean?

> What does "appears a prompt" mean?

Guessing, but I'd say it means "respond to a verbal question" presumably from an instructor/superior.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#83

Post by specialist » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

ada1981 wrote: post #49

Sudbury Valley Schools are the gold standard as far as I can tell from my research. (I spent a number of years as an education/students rights activist; built and ran the country's most famous education blog back in 2009; and have otherwise been doing advocacy work for a couple decades) They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens who understand how to share limited resources and…

Thanks for the link, thanks for your efforts. I'll definitely read up on sudval.org.

"They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens..."

Word.

I've run democratic teams. The empowerment is real. I can't explain it; it feels like magic. Those experiences have transmuted me into a full throated advocate for democracy.

Democracy, in its multitude of forms, is very much a technology. Just like arabic numerals, management, offset type, etc.

"No grades or grade levels..."

I'm hoping your sudval.org link says something about achievement models for education, as an alternative to testing regimes and grades.

My son is an Eagle Scout. He wasn't a very good K-12 student, but he rocked the Scouts. That achievement is largely self-directed, but also structured with concrete outcomes. With plenty of mentoring both up and down. I wonder why learning can't be more like that?

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#84

Post by justanothernoob » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

dylukes wrote: post #47

wapapaloobop wrote: post #7

We school-educated people associate learning with authority and it's hard for us to truly grasp that education takes place most efficiently under conditions of freedom. Repealing Hitler's 1938 law against home education would be an important step for Germany.

I disagree. We associate schooling with authority. Learning may or may not co-occur with schooling depending on circumstances. There is only a focus on "learning" until maybe 5th grade. What you do in school after that isn't making sure you learn so much as making sure you know a base set of things. Thereafter there tend to be two types of successful students: the ones that chase A-grades ("good students"), and the o…

I'm curious- do you mean to say those two tropes are in respective order to the "good students" and the "okay students"?

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#85

Post by stared » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

An obligatory reference:

A. S. Neill "Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing" (1960), especially chapter 1 (about the Summerhill school itself). The schools started in 1920s, and sadly, we made no progress in that direction in the last century.

Link: https://trisquel.info/files/summerhill-english_1.pdf

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#86

Post by justinator » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

xanderstrike wrote: post #42

nibs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unschooler here. I am the only unschooler from my 12 person cohort of hippie parents who did not go to University. And I am doing okay. So I think school basically has no effect. Mostly just daycare. It is good at that, though.

Sounds like your cohort was great. There was an "unschooled" girl in my college friend group who was failing remedial math and science classes in her third year. She never wanted to learn basic mathematics (we're talking long division here), so she never did, and she did not understand how to motivate herself to learn about something she wasn't already interested in. She didn't end up graduating despite the small, pr…

That also sounds like your typical, "genius" who excels at one thing, but finds frustration in other subjects that aren't as easy to pick up.

Still. You would think that there would be a correlation between music proficiency and maths.

"Because I absolutely had to", is a pretty good motivator. I've lost a lot in life, and had little support:

"Why did you start a business at 20?"

"Because I absolutely had to."

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#87

Post by throwaway2016a » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #27

Every time I come home from a mind-numbing eight-hour Scrum meeting, I feel frustrated for having accomplished absolutely nothing. Then I realise that this is what school was like, every single day. I'm sure some people prefer to be force-fed instead of learning on their own, but self-organised schools as in the OP should at least be an option for people who know what they want.

If you're talking about sprint planning that sounds like you must have one month sprints and you should probably cut that down to something shorter. I've found 2 weeks to be the most effective. If you don't have one months sprints and still have a 8 hour meeting than your scrum master is not doing their job.

Also, I would hope that you at least come out of the meeting with point values on all your stories for the next sprint and a defined sprint backlog. With each story having clear definable completion criteria and clear consensus around what the goal of the story is. If you are, that doesn't sound like a waste of time. If you aren't... back to your scrum master and their job.

If you're talking about the actually daily scrum meeting... get out of there as fast as you can. I've seem meetings go a few minutes long but that is 7 hours and 45 minutes too long. We get upset when our meetings are longer than 8 minutes for a 10 person team.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#88

Post by skewart » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

pinaceae wrote: post #74

so, this method is great for the outliers, kids like hawking or tony hawk - kids that are driven by themselves, don't need no guidance, help, discipline. there is a reason asian kids outperform others, and it's not montessori. and yes, school is about performance as kids will grow up and will need to be able to earn for a living. work, compete. school is optimized for the average kid with average parents. all the HN…

I'm guessing the reason this is getting down-voted is because the article makes it pretty clear that the Berlin school's aim is to _teach_ kids to be motivated and disciplined. It provides a lot of structure along with opportunity cities for more self-directed learning.

That aside, highly structured, rote memorization-only education may well help kids achieve the highest test scores, and it may well be the best way to prepare kids for middle management and clerical jobs - the kinds of jobs for which there has been great demand throughout the 20th century. It's not really clear that it does a great job of preparing kids for creative, academic, entrepreneurial or executive leadership roles. And it's certainly not clear that it is the best way to prepare kids for jobs - or ways to earn a living - that will be in demand throughout most of the 21st century.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#89

Post by 2suave » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:21 PM UTC

The title should read "No grades, no timetable, and no degree". As much as I like the idea behind it it's simply not a feasible concept in today's society and it's competitive environment. In fact, I'd even wager that the pupils of that school will be ridiculed by their fellow peers for attending such a school. Not to mention that admission boards of prestigious universities would never give them the time of the day. With such an "education" it's literally impossible to compete in today's society.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#90

Post by lllorddino » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

> such as coding a computer game instead of sitting a maths exam.

Okay I suck at math but am decent at programming and the last time I checked there is a bunch of math in game development.

I agree that some subjects in school are useless but if you give a kid the option of doing whatever he wants versus learning math (which most would) then I'd say your school system sucks.