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

theguardian.com

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

#91

Post by sandworm101 »

GuiA wrote: post #61
ionforce wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if students (or whoever in a power sharing dynamic) are making decisions that are bad for them? How do you veto a bad decision?

I've also worked a fair amount with "alternative" educational structures, albeit in a different country (France). In those kind of pedagogies (mostly Freinet for me), the adults ultimately do have a veto power. However, when you give kids responsibility, something funny happens - you find that they tend to become very reasonable, and you very rarely have to use veto power. More often than not, it's more renegotiation…

How do you deal with the students who outsmart teachers? A lack of rule sets would seem an open field for students to manipulate the adults in the room.

One of my friend's daughters is vicious at this. At 14, for a "career and personal planning" project, she stated career her goal as "porn star" and somehow wrangled a skype interview with a 19yo "mentor" in the biz. She has no intention on following this path, but loves how it drives teachers up the wall. "If billy can want to be a soldier and kill people, then I should be allowed to pursue my dream too." She's a perfectly normal girl, but once she identifies an authority figure as weak she turns them into toys. Put her in a free environment and I'd expect resignation letters within the week.

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

#92

Post by alejoriveralara »

Incredible! Sounds very similar to what schools like Acton Academy and Talent Unbound are doing in the US. I have no doubt that the future of education will come from private schools made by entrepreneurs re-imagining schools from the bottom-up.

I opened the second campus for Talent Unbound in Houston about a year ago, and am now working on building software to help power more of these schools. It's very exciting to be a part of what seems like a world-wide learning revolution!

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

#93

Post by at-fates-hands »

balls187 wrote: post #52
k-mcgrady wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that when you compare the development of a child that went to a regular school vs. Montessori the results are the same.

Something in Freakanomics kids with parents that care enough about their education, did "better" regardless of being selected for in the charter school lottery. Wonder if that is correlated.

While not scientific, my best friend had a boy when he was in his 20's. He was in constant conflict with her and the son was caught in the middle. He's had a tough life and struggled academically until he finally graduated high school.

Fast forward a decade or so and he finally settles down and him and his wife have a daughter. Both of them hold masters degrees and since she's an only child, reading, writing and math were constants during her early development. She loves to learn and is in a language immersion school and has done very well in school.

Yes, there are a ton of factors involved that could explain the difference - a relatively perfect situation (two parent home, parents put time into teaching) with a terrible one (one parent home, bad relationships, no focus on education) but it is interesting to note the differences in the kids attitudes towards learning in each situation.

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

#94

Post by _petronius »

Minor nitpick: "evangelical" is a bad translation of the German "evangelisch" (at least in the sense that many Americans think of "evangelical"). In the German context, this is better glossed as simply "Protestant".

(And the German protestant church, at least here in Berlin, is a vastly more liberal and progressive organization than one would imagine if you grew up in the American south like I did.)

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

#95

Post by pinaceae »

skewart wrote: post #88
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 t…

9bn people - and all of them will be entrepreneurs. there is a world outside of HN and there a lot of folks can barely finish high school.

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

#96

Post by wapapaloobop »

Barrin92 wrote: post #73
fao_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: Godwin. Godwin's law only comes in when something has been compared to Hitler, this person stated a fact: That the law in question was brought in by Hitler.

Well that's not a fact though. Mandatory schooling started in Prussia and was required for children aged 5-14 and the Weimar constitution adopted it as well. This is just the typical "ermahgerd authoritharianism" Hitler comment that always comes up when the American audience hears the word government and Germany in the same sentence, it's a Pavlovian reflex at this point. I'm German and the only groups currently advo…

We have home education and government schools in England. Neither rules out the other. We also have non-religious families who home educate. There are probably secular families in Germany who would like to try too. There simply is no one-size-fits-all model of education, whether we try to impose one or not.

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

#97

Post by rayiner »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #72
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have kids? My toddler won't even eat a cookie that has a corner broken off.

Awesome, my kids would take the cookie out of my mouth as I chew it. I put that down mainly to nurture. IME toddlers will refuse to touch something almost perfect aesthetically then pick up something else out of the dirt, a worm maybe, and pop that in their mouth. Not sure we should be modeling pedagogies to foster toddler temperamentalility.

Why on earth would intorture myself by teaching my toddler to expect perfect cookies?

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

#98

Post by AnkhMorporkian »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #70
centizen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think it was good, it probably was - all I remember about traditional kindergarten was hating it.

I went to a Waldorf kindergarten. I have no negative memories of it, but my mother assures me that I hated it. I suspect that she hated it on my behalf. That said, they apparently voiced strong disapproval of the fact that I could already read, so it's not something I could actually recommend. It probably just didn't come through to the small me.

> That said, they apparently voiced strong disapproval of the fact that I could already read

Strange, I had the same experience in a public kindergarten. I never understood that attitude. I could read at a 5th grade level in kindergarten, but that was treated as an evil thing by the teachers because the material they were trying to teach was far below me. I suppose I can understand that in retrospect now that I think about it though, it must be frustrating to have a kindergartener who doesn't bother listening to a teacher teaching the alphabet, but doesn't even know how to tie their shoes so there's no possible way they could be skipped ahead.

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

#99

Post by themartorana »

This is a child being disrespectful on a monumental level, not outsmarting anyone. It also sounds like her parents are paying a great deal of attention.

She may also be a classic psychopath.

http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/sociopath-psyc...

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

#100

Post by sardonicbryan »

smokeyj wrote: post #76
xanderstrike wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's the value school has When you say value, are you talking about the economic type? Because Susie here is probably better off focusing on her music career than learning long division. I don't see how you can analyze value without quantifying cost and benefit. Even if a better method existed you'd have no way of knowing - especially without more experiments and bigger data sets.

I would agree if she didn't want to learn calculus or linear algebra, but I think long division is a pretty fundamental skill in today's world. How much is my monthly car payment going to be if I take this loan? What is my share of the rent in this house? What are the consequences of running up a credit card balance?
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