Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 254 posts

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

#201

Post by mk89 »

jostylr wrote: post #104
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 work at Arts&Ideas Sudbury School in Baltimore, 8 years old at this point. I have been with them for two years. There is no veto. There is simply discussing the issue and revisiting it if necessary. While it is always possible that a disastrous decision will be made, anecdotally, it seems to be exceedingly rare. Students want the school to succeed. They want to be safe and respected. When you start from those place…

I have been always curious to know the outcome: how do they become when they are 25-30 yrs old? Do they perform exceedingly better than other students? Are they more brilliant? Or ... smarter?

I am also curious about something I hope you can answer. I guess (big assumption!) that most of these pupils share similar backgrounds, like families with good/high education, high income, etc. How would it work if we put these kids together with students with different backgrounds, e.g., parents with severe problems, very low income, bad language, etc.?

And how do these kids react when one or two bullies (a group of outcasts (?)) of try to overpower the democratic "state"? Or ... what happens when one kid more "ambitious" than others is trying to manipulate them? How do they react?

Do you have any articles about this?

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

#202

Post by jostylr »

germinalphrase wrote: post #180
jostylr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Arts&Ideas Sudbury School in Baltimore, 8 years old at this point. I have been with them for two years. There is no veto. There is simply discussing the issue and revisiting it if necessary. While it is always possible that a disastrous decision will be made, anecdotally, it seems to be exceedingly rare. Students want the school to succeed. They want to be safe and respected. When you start from those place…

How do parents react if their child doesn't choose to learn academics?

It is very important for the school to make it clear that this can happen, is likely to happen, and that they need to be okay with that. This can certainly be a deal breaker.

Also a deal breaker is unlimited screen time. Or the freedom to go off-campus (with an age appropriate buddy system). Or any number of other things that giving a human being responsible freedom really means.

It is easy to give freedom to those whose actions you agree with. But that's not really freedom. Being happy with letting people make choices that you strongly disagree with is when you know you truly believe in freedom.

Of course, there are always boundaries to freedoms which is where it gets messy. We base our rules on the good of the community, not the individual. But even that can be abused. It takes honest dialogue to work it all out.

All parents have to face a time when they must let their child be free. We advocate for that being earlier rather than later. Some embrace it, others don't.

What we try to convince parents about is that they can best support their child at our school by enjoying their time with them at home and accepting them for whomever they choose to be that day.

And if a parent is into mathematics, then they should share that joy just as they might share the joy of whittling wood toys because they want to share their passions, not because they want the child to learn those passions.

A lot of parents in this culture have a problem with letting academics be optional. And by academics, I mean mathematics. No one seems to care much about anything else except maybe parents of 5 year olds and reading.

I have years of experience dealing with adults who have been traumatized by math education. They come to me believing they are bad in mathematics, that they cannot handle it. In a single semester, I get them from 7th grade algebra up through calculus and statistics. They start doing guesstimations in their daily lives. The nightmares of the math monster under the bed fade away and they are empowered. So what exactly did their K-12 academic education do for them?

Even the ones who do well, one has to wonder at the spoon-fed nature of traditional teaching. The hard part of learning is not answering the questions, but asking them in the first place and getting started in the right direction. Traditional education sweeps all of that real activity of academics under the rug. They have to. You cannot teach someone those skills. They have to acquire them by their own experiences dealing with their passions and interests. And failure cannot be socially stigmatized.

We want to empower human beings to be their own amazing selves. This is not a message most can embrace, but some do and the results are inspiring.

By the way, about reading, a great article is http://schoolingtheworld.org/a-thousand-rivers/

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

#203

Post by fao_ »

wapapaloobop wrote: post #96
Barrin92 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We also have non-religious families who home educate.

A fun anecdote for you: Most of the parents I've met through the local Home Education community have been PhD-level academics, that extremely dislike the education system -- they simply don't believe that schools are the best way to learn, and decided to set about making sure that their children get the best education. Only a minority of this group hire tutors, as well -- most prefer unschooling.

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

#205

Post by Ntrails »

barry-cotter wrote: post #190
mordant wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens who understand how to share limited resources and cooperate. The more pertinent question is whether the citizens they produce can read and write, know how to multiply and divide, can name the parts of speech, and have at least a passing notion of the history and culture of their respective countries, regions, and locales. Somehow, I do…

> The more pertinent question is whether the citizens they produce can read and write, know how to multiply and divide, can name the parts of speech, and have at least a passing notion of the history and culture of their respective countries, regions, and locales. They learn how to read and write. Children are learning machines. They figure out how to do things that are a lot more complicated than learning how to rea…

> People learn to perform quite complicated mathematical operations in the course of their lives, through experience.

With the greatest of respect, I do not think a child is going to learn significant mathematics beyond arithmetic by "living". Give them a book and an interest? Sure. A little direction and help? Better. But the number of people who can invent calculus from scratch is pretty low.

> most of what most people need

Ugh.

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

#206

Post by ckastner »

e12e wrote: post #171
pekk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those experiences have transmuted me into a full throated advocate for democracy. And if a majority of wolves vote for a sheep dinner?

The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation. If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus - voting doesn't have to have centre stage. Voting makes sense for simple decisions, where little discussion is needed. It's a pretty poor way to foster participation (You voted, you lost, you can't complain). That said, sometimes the sheep needs to be eaten. If that is ta…

The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation.

Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.

If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus, voting doesn't have to have centre stage

And yet in practice, the only reason for a political party to hear all (including its opposition) and to seek consensus is to seek the number of votes need to pass a rule. Therefore, in practice, voting does take the center stage.

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

#207

Post by erlehmann_ »

sandworm101 wrote: post #91
GuiA wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

I think one should congratulate that girl for both identifying vulnerabilities in the egos of adults and for actually finding a real contact in the business. Her argument makes sense, btw: Killing for money is vastly more evil than fucking for money!

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

#208

Post by misja111 »

GuiA wrote: post #67
bbayles wrote: post #13

My partner became involved in Montessori a few years ago, and I've been really impressed with how it works. If you don't know much about Montessori, here is my "in a nutshell" version: It's a method of schooling usually associated with preschool and elementary education. There are mixed age groups (e.g. 3 to 6) in classrooms. There is at least one adult who gives one-on-one lessons on how to work with "materials." Th…

Alternate pedagogies (Montessori, Waldorf, etc.) seem to work quite well for early childhood education, but I'm very skeptical of them for middle school, and especially high school (what Montessori defines as "3rd stage"). The reason for this is that extremely few people I've met who went to such high schools came out of them with levels in science/math that could be reasonably qualified as decent (and often borderli…

I can confirm. Montessori education is great for kids under 12. For middle or high school, it was actually Maria Montessori who said, when asked what she saw as the best education for teenagers, that it was useless to try to force adolescent to concentrate on intellectual work. Instead she recommended an Earth school, where children would live close to nature, eat fresh farm products, and carry on practical work related to the economics of supplying food, shelter, transportation, and so forth.

The Montessori middle- and high schools that currently exist, at least in Europe, do not follow Montessori's advice at all. Instead they have a kind of half hearted mix of regular education with some elements of lower age Montessori, such as more responsibility to make your own homework planning. For many teenagers this is not a good combination and they drop out.

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

#209

Post by tremon »

ckastner wrote: post #206
e12e wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation. If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus - voting doesn't have to have centre stage. Voting makes sense for simple decisions, where little discussion is needed. It's a pretty poor way to foster participation (You voted, you lost, you can't complain). That said, sometimes the sheep needs to be eaten. If that is ta…

The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation. Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured. If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus, voting doesn't have to have centre stage And yet in practice, the only reason for a political party to hear all (including its opposition) and to seek consensus is to seek the number of vot…

Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.

That's just one mechanism. Your right to participate is also ensured by freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the ability to get your name on the voting ballot.

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

#210

Post by e12e »

ckastner wrote: post #206
e12e wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation. If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus - voting doesn't have to have centre stage. Voting makes sense for simple decisions, where little discussion is needed. It's a pretty poor way to foster participation (You voted, you lost, you can't complain). That said, sometimes the sheep needs to be eaten. If that is ta…

The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation. Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured. If you have participation, where all are heard, and real work is made for a consensus, voting doesn't have to have centre stage And yet in practice, the only reason for a political party to hear all (including its opposition) and to seek consensus is to seek the number of vot…

>> The key point of democracy isn't voting, it's participation.

> Your right to vote is the mechanism by which your right to participate is ensured.

It's a shallow form of participation. Being educated, informed, and being part of the decision process - drafting bills, finding alternatives - forming political parties, being part of committees , being available for election, all the work that is done before a vote his held is arguably more important. And if most people aren't involved in that part, you don't IMNHO have what can reasonably be called a real democracy.

It's of course much easier to just present "the people" with the choice of a red or green bike shed, rather than discuss alternative economies that might make the nuclear plant less relevant.

Post reply on HN