481–490 of 528 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's weird that you're not telling us what "things they shouldn't be" are. There are plenty of things I think kids shouldn't be learning.
It's an edtech platform for kids - forgive me but I somewhat doubt there's porn on there
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're literally describing equity. The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible. I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thin…
> The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible. The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also wo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
being intelligent doesn't make one better than others The only issue here is with the attitude that a career in the trades is somehow inferior to getting a degree. It is not. I have many friends and family who work in the trades. They are intelligent, hard-working, resourceful people who take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. They both produce and repair useful things (houses, cars, factories, and countl…
> The only issue here is with the attitude that a career in the trades is somehow inferior to getting a degree I made no such claim - the word I used ( commit ) was chosen with care, and is neutral. > They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned. While trades are a decent choice; let's not overly romanticize them. The ones making…
Is the roofer going to suffer a lot later in life? Yes. Is the CNC operator going to have problems down the line? Probably not.
> The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen).
Most office workers outside of tech are not doing so great either in regards to pay. Customer service roles are even worse.
To me, a lot of the companies in the space seem to be more concerned with how to maximize dollars sent to them and not as much about how things are improving or better with technology. Tech should be a tool to help the learning, it doesn't have to be each and every part, and I feel like the ultimate goal of at least some of the companies was to create an all-in-one solution for every problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades. Students should be re-evaluated every year. I've been at the bottom of classes and the top of classes in the same subject! Also as others have pointed out, please stop crapping on the trades. I've met plumbers who are damn good at math calculations (needed for complex hydroponic heating systems!). Not to mention plenty of people i…
> Also as others have pointed out, please stop crapping on the trades I never "crapped" on the trades like you imagined I did, they are a perfectly fine career choice.
> I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades.
Which has a lot of implications:
1. That someone who is bad at math has to go into the trades, ignoring that many trades require quite a bit of math and that plenty of college degree programs hardly require any math at all 2. That kids are being told in 3rd grade that they have to go into the trades based on math scores, as if that is some sort of "punishment". I know you said that you used the word "commit" to be neutral, but it is less than neutral when used in comparison to the unspoken alternative of non-trade jobs which are silently implied (in the very least through the American cultural lens) to be "better".
Also you didn't reply to the actual meat of my comment:
1. Schools have cut funding to gifted programs, denying resources to students who need them 2. The same students can be gifted in one area and behind in another, meaning resourcing isn't some binary "lift these students up and put these students down" decision.
Also I'd add that gifted programs typically require very little additional funding, if any. In a large district a gifted program just takes a bunch of students out of other classrooms and puts them into a classroom together. There is no additional cost for teachers, it is just a shuffling of what classroom students are in.
This means aside from the incremental cost of bussing students to a school with a gifted program classroom, there isn't even a resourcing issue for gifted programs!
The choice isn't "gifted programs or remedial education programs". That entire narrative is not based in reality and it only exists to cause arguments between different advocacy groups.
I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…
But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.
It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even ov…
So tech bros have become experts in pedagogy. What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced. Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal…
I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level. The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaint…
This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.
In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.
I worked for a couple of years in edTech and the reality is that all you need is a good teacher, pen and paper, and a chalkboard.
Would you be willing to share any (anonymized) anecdote(s) that helped you see this reality? I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any differen…
The education guru of that company talked a lot about Estonia, Finland, and Singapore as models of the best education in the world (pre college). These countries get consistently good PISA scores. And guess what? Close to zero tech in education in these countries.
Some papers were released that showed fine motor control (eg pen and paper writing) has deep implications in cognitive development.
And then slowly we've started to see all the consequences of phones, tablets, social media etc on gen z and alpha. I don't think it's controversial to say kids should not be using these devices and there's plenty of research to prove it. Obviously schools in many countries are now banning them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral). I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, consideri…
I got kind of double-lucky in my case too. When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also did…
Happy for you that you found your niche!