Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#31

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:27 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #20

gwd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Year groups are still important socially After you left High School, was there ever a time in your life when you hung out with people of exactly the same age? The fact that everyone spends 13 years of their youth doing it now is an artifact only about 100 years old. > I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. I'm pretty sure Montessori schools do something like this.

I found that it expanded a lot as I got older. In the early years people in the year above and below were like strangers. By the end of high school, I knew all the people in adjacent years, plus siblings. At uni there's only a few years there, so I guess it doesn't really count. Once I started worked it all stopped mattering, I have retired friends as well as ones that have just started work. But for little kids, it…

The Montessory philosophy isn't that the age doesn't matter. It's that it matters and children of different ages benefit from mixing.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#32

Post by em-bee » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #27

lordnacho wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's a problem, just that you're gonna tend to have similar kids in a clump. That clump is gonna have some people ahead and some behind it. But the clump is gonna move at some sort of pace. > so no, plus or minus a year does not matter even for a 3 year old kid. Anyone who has kids is going to disagree with this.

If GP meant "there's no difference", they're certainly wrong; a four-year-old is obviously 33% more advanced than a 3-year-old. But the question here was about socialization -- can a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old satisfy one another's needs for peer socialization? Is a 4-year-old who socializes with 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds but no other 4-year-olds being socially deprived somehow? I think the answer there is clearly…

a four-year-old is obviously 33% more advanced than a 3-year-old

that would require that all children develop at exactly the same pace which is simply not happening like that.

see my other comment.

i do agree with the socialization.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#33

Post by mattxxx » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #28

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-breaking here. But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( ev…

> But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). From what I've witnessed consulting, this varies greatly by company size. I once heard a Vice P…

> "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company. At that point, people mostly go to work to play politics. Occasionally, as a side effect of the political maneuvering, work sometimes gets done."

From working at a big company, this is accurate.

> But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference.

That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics to do it.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#34

Post by ltfey » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:34 PM UTC

swayvil wrote: post #29

ltfey wrote: post #13

School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…

Social media is very much like corporate in that arbitrary assertion backed with absolute power (downvoting, censorship, banning, cancelling...) runs everything. And anything can be asserted. Up is down, black is white, beautiful is ugly. And you'd better go along with it or you're out. Call it hive-corporatism. It seems to be a natural social formation.

I agree. I don't know what's "natural" because I don't think human nature is well-defined or stable; most humans seem to reflect the context they are in. Otherwise, you are absolutely correct, and this problem is not limited to the corporate adversaries or "the right". It is truly systemic.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#35

Post by arvinsim » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

eadmund wrote: post #21

ltfey wrote: post #13

School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…

I think that's needlessly cynical, and moreover does not align with my own experience in large and small corporations. I think that most folks in a corporation are trying to do well and do good. What you don't see is that 'politics' are one of the merits the corporate meritocracy is optimising for — and that 'politics' is just a single word shorthand for 'dealing with human beings.' My experience has been that yes,…

> 'politics' is just a single word shorthand for 'dealing with human beings.'

No wonder why we are so messed up if this is the bar that we set and condone.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#36

Post by lordnacho » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #25

lordnacho wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's a problem, just that you're gonna tend to have similar kids in a clump. That clump is gonna have some people ahead and some behind it. But the clump is gonna move at some sort of pace. > so no, plus or minus a year does not matter even for a 3 year old kid. Anyone who has kids is going to disagree with this.

i have kids. the age difference matters for the development of each individual kid, but it us rather useless as a measure to compare the development of different kids. in the first few years, the development of each kid is so different that no two kids of the same age are alike. you can have a four year old with the maturity of a two year old, or a three year old going on five. a wider age range allows children with…

This I can agree with. I benefited a lot from having older cousins around.

At the moment I have a kid who is asking me about chemistry, and I can't just wait 5 years for him to get to that age where they teach people specifically chemistry (as opposed to general science). There's no reason I can't tell a 9 year old about valencies and that kind of thing, so why does school wait with it?

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#37

Post by znpy » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

nisegami wrote: post #15

lordnacho wrote: post #3

I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but th…

School is glorified babysitting until university. Actually learning is just a convenient but ultimately secondary use of that time.

> School is glorified babysitting until university.

This is true, this is a harsh truth.

You can see the effect in actual (real world) consequences: no one cares if you learn nothing at school and no teacher is ever fired for low learning outcome in their students. But the immediate moment a student gets hurt, for any reason, then hell is unleashed on the teacher, lawyers get involved, a the teachers is now actually risking something.

School is glorified babysitting, until university when you're on your own, age brackets mostly don't matter, and the burden of learning is onto you (professors don't care).

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#38

Post by em-bee » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #30

em-bee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

montessori does exactly that. the kids are grouped into batches of 3 years, and each child can study the material at their own pace. i don't know how they handle the transitions from one group to the next though. maybe an extra slow kid that hasn't mastered the whole material in 3 years will tack on an extra time. and i think that faster kids will spend the extra time teaching younger kids. i also expect that in a 3…

I have never seen anybody implement the exact Montessori idea for anybody that isn't very young children. For the very young, the answer is that the material isn't exclusive to the classroom so they will learn it sooner or later. There are plenty of people that adapt it to older children, but the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away. At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get ride of the synchronicity…

the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away.

the term "montessori" is not protected, so many schools claim to use montessori, but aren't really.

from https://montessori-ami.org/about-montessori/montessori-12-18

The school for adolescents is for young people ages 12 through 18. Sometimes the young people are divided into two groups of 12 to 15 and 15 to 18 and sometimes all six years interact in one environment, depending upon the size of the school.

so in fact instead of the batches going away, they may grow to an even wider age range. the same for elementary.

At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get rid of the synchronicity at university undergraduate courses. It's almost trivial there and seems to have no downsides.

that's how universities work in austria and germany. and it makes a lot of sense. the older you get the less the actual age matters for what you learn.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#39

Post by ltfey » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #16

ltfey wrote: post #13

School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…

Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-breaking here. But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( ev…

In school, you get multiple noisy grades per year but the noise cancels out. That's what averaging does. You might get a B or even a C when you deserved an A, and vice versa, but your grade-point average will, in the long term, approximately reflect what you put into your work.

In corporate, there's just as much noise, but rather than getting smoothed out over time, it accelerates. In corporate, some guy can turn off your income, even though you're good at your job, because a manager wants to show off that he "can make tough decisions" and impress his own manager--either to get a promotion, or to get into someone's pants. It's random and bad things happen for no good reason, and we're prime to just accept that this is "just business" but we shouldn't have to. We can build better systems, by far, than the ones we've got.

Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

#40

Post by tonyedgecombe » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:41 PM UTC

t8sr wrote: post #19

mrslave wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I do a (respectable) on-line degree in this structure? While I'm fantasizing, the second unrealistic requirement is affordable. ;-)

The Open University. It’s reputable (although by no means in anyone’s top 10 rankings), let’s you go your own pace and the tuition isn’t too bad.

>although by no means in anyone’s top 10 rankings

It's always vying with Cambridge for the top place on student satisfaction.

Also there is limited ability to vary your pace according to difficulty. Once you start a unit there is a schedule you need to follow to be ready for the end of period exams. In fact I'd argue that without that schedule pressure many people would struggle to complete each unit.

You can vary the number of units you take in a year but that's before you really know how difficult the work is. I had to abandon one unit so I could focus on Topology as it was much harder than I expected. It would have been nice to just take a bit longer but that option wasn't available.