Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

The education system is broken and has been for decades. The supporters of the system re-characterize criticism of the system into "attacks" on teachers (ie. union membership) and demand more money.

The establishment "won" their side of the argument in many states -- states that richly compensated employees (the payscale in most NY school districts ends at $110k, plus 65% pension for life) and administrators (typical school superintendents make $175k in NY) and built lots of new schools. Yet those investments yielded marginal "value" at best.

Until recently, the critics were mostly focused on religion (ie. Catholic schooling dominated education in many areas until fairly recently), monetary issues (taxes) and ideological stuff (unions suck).

That seems to be changing now. Movements like the Khan Academy are bringing scientific methods focused on outcomes to education. There was a recent "Freakonomics" podcast talking about how the New York City school system is experimenting with multi-modal learning, which seems to be successful in its early stages.

But this is already occurring for students enrolled in extracurricular math programs like Kumon that accelerate their math skills. Khan Academy isn't doing anything that Kumon isn't already doing other than adding a few more science subjects.

Could also mean that some teachers don't want the headache of dealing with a class with even greater disparities in skill and knowledge. It's hard enough dealing with a couple students bored in class cause they already know it. It's even harder to deal with half the class bored cause they already know it.

Or it could really mean anything. Removed from context and the teacher's deeper reasoning, these quotes are largely useless. Maybe it was just the really lazy teachers who didn't want to deal with kids asking more advance questions who talked to them. Could be -anything-.

Trying to squeeze more analysis out of this will just result in all sorts of confirmation biases regarding teachers and the education system.

I think the innocence behind that statement comes from the difficulty a teacher will face if s/he must teach students with diverse learning needs (child A is learning timestables while child B has moved on to trigonometry).

That said, I think a teacher should suck it up for the sake of students in this sort of situation. At worst, we find ways to reorganize teachers and students based on students' self-progress.