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

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

#101

Post by Zircom »

lordnacho wrote: post #93
Zircom wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WGU is an online, fully accredited college that does exactly that. You pay for 6 months at a time and can do as many classes as you're able to complete within that time frame. I just started at the beginning of February and have already knocked out an entire course in the past 10 days, it's honestly the best experience I've ever had with schooling. I like to work at my own pace because my motivation to get things don…

And WGU is short for what?

Western Governors University sorry

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

#102

Post by dragonsky67 »

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.

This has been evidenced by the big push to get kids back into face to face school during the pandemic. It is very rare for any discussion promoting this to even mention education let alone propose that face to face education is better than what has been happening over the last couple of years.

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

#103

Post by quacked »

austinl wrote: post #73

> Looking back on it, most of our essays were not good. They were rubbish. It makes me cringe to look back at my high school essays, like I was trying to write with a thesaurus. Thankfully, senior year, a friend who went on to write professionally edited one of my essays. He crossed out almost every adverb, and over words like "utilize", he wrote "use". It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask t…

I agree with everything you said, and had the same problems with writing when I was younger. However, I would say that it's not so much that students don't have anything to say, it's that they're not allowed to write about the things they actually care about in a way that is natural to them.

Someone who's had three years of practice writing free-form persuasive essays about the non-school approved topic that they spend all their time thinking about (the NFL, girls, video games, etc.) is going to have a much easier time picking up the structured five-paragraph essay format than someone who was forced to write a bunch of five-paragraph essays about books they hated.

All of the greatest essays I read now are random in length, style, topic, and presentation--why did I have to write somewhere between 50-100 structured essays about books and historical events I didn't care a whit about when Aldo Leopold was out there just dashing off whatever he was thinking about? The progression went like this:

1. I hated writing about historical events and books.

2. I graduated college.

3. I started reading unstructured essays about topics I cared about.

4. I started writing unstructured essays about topics I cared about.

5. I started writing about historical events and books.

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

#104

Post by astura »

csee wrote: post #10
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…

> Year groups are still important socially Disagree. Year groups perpetuate immaturity. They are also very socially unnatural, a mere byproduct of going for scale in the education system. That is fine, but if we can achieve scale without year groups (which we could under your proposal), that would be better.

How are kids being around their peers "socially unnatural?" At the very least it's not more "socially unnatural" than posting on hacker news.

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

#105

Post by astura »

Zircom wrote: post #89
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…

WGU is an online, fully accredited college that does exactly that. You pay for 6 months at a time and can do as many classes as you're able to complete within that time frame. I just started at the beginning of February and have already knocked out an entire course in the past 10 days, it's honestly the best experience I've ever had with schooling. I like to work at my own pace because my motivation to get things don…

>fully accredited

None of their degree programs ABET accredited, if that matters to you.

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

#106

Post by bsder »

thenerdhead wrote: post #64

I think there's two things. 1. The school system has been broken for many years. Learning from people who are not passionate about what they teach is the main concern I have. You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever vs. "disengaged" students who will be able to tell you how bad their teacher was. I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is…

> I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging teachers around the world doing an amazing job.

I'm not sure I agree about online. One thing that Covid forcing everybody online really drives home is that the psychological change of mode to a "place of learning" really matters.

I saw this in several of my friends with children. They initially tried to make education at home functional--they did okay. Two of them then got a teacher and created a little "pod" (4 students max) in their local area with a couple of other parents. Their children did MUCH better.

This was for younger children (5-8 years old).

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

#107

Post by xboxnolifes »

astura wrote: post #104
csee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Year groups are still important socially Disagree. Year groups perpetuate immaturity. They are also very socially unnatural, a mere byproduct of going for scale in the education system. That is fine, but if we can achieve scale without year groups (which we could under your proposal), that would be better.

How are kids being around their peers "socially unnatural?" At the very least it's not more "socially unnatural" than posting on hacker news.

It's socially unnatural because as soon as you leave the schooling system, it stops happening.

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

#108

Post by somedude895 »

halgir wrote: post #14
hhmc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young children are not famously good decision makers, and it's easy to imagine them making very limiting choices that they would later come to regret.

Young children are also famously voracious learners. That is, until institutions like schools get in the way. Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.

> Young children are also famously voracious learners

That really depends on the environment a child grew up in. When I see parents who delegate their child rearing to an iPad with Cocomelon on 24/7 I'm quite sure that kid won't benefit from unstructured self-paced anything.

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

#109

Post by esyir »

BeetleB wrote: post #66
bko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly opposite in almost every way. Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of bus…

> Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. Not where I work. They hire people who they think will make them look good, and it's not always by hiring the most productive. They'll deny promotions to their most effective workers out of fear they will leave. They block transfers. Companies make…

I don't get this "promotion = leaving". I'm pretty sure there's a very sizable chunk of people leaving because they're stuck.

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

#110

Post by esyir »

francisofascii wrote: post #58
bko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly opposite in almost every way. Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of bus…

> But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of business and be out-competed. Yeah, you would think so. To some extent you are right. But I think corporations are still very inefficient and get away with promoting or hiring less than ideal candidates. Why do they not get out-competed? Because the competition is also flawed in similar ways.

Well, to provide a different case, compare the situation of the US corporate space to the US government. Both are flawed efficiency wise, but boy does the one with no incentives behave as expected.
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