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I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

scotthyoung.com

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Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#401

Post by necovek »

sokoloff wrote: post #339
DroneBetter wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is not necessarily the case; the coursework could have been produced by a different person from the teacher (although generally at my alma mater the 'module organiser' fulfils both roles).

I’m not sure GP’s point landed. As I read it, it had nothing to do with who created the curriculum or even how much the student learned. “Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.

I am not disputing that being the case in general, but it'd be nicer if they gave me more benefit of the doubt: I tried to give an honest view of actually receiving good instruction, and not enjoying being handed good grades for nothing.

I've responded to them directly what that got me (like great uni entry exam scores with literally zero prep for a maths program, and a couple of semesters of exam passing with minimal prep for a maths/CS/physics majors).

On top of that, I am talking of this almost 30 years later — perhaps I have some perspective and I am not a fresh out of school guy who just loves getting off the hook easy?

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#402

Post by Quarrelsome »

I've always wondered why we don't experiment a bit more around children teaching children. I appreciate it can be a bit of a can of worms but it would help the system be more self sustaining.

The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce around a party specifically seeking to invest, which is difficult and unreliable.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#403

Post by laughing_man »

cortesoft wrote: post #118
fhe wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

based on your description, one reasonable way to 'revolutionize' school might simply allow people (who don't want to be there) to leave.

They were already at a University. None of the students were required to be there. They all had the ability to just leave.

That's the problem with having universities issue credentials. You end up with a lot of people who have no interest in learning but are going to stick it out for the credential.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#404

Post by BurningFrog »

ykonstant wrote: post #288
BurningFrog wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AIs as most staff, this should be very reachable.

Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.

I'm thinking of custom built Teacher AIs, trained in how to teach different kinds of students, and with well defined curriculums.

Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.

There are some early products around:

- https://www.khanmigo.ai/

- https://squirrelai.com/

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#405

Post by dieselgate »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #402

I've always wondered why we don't experiment a bit more around children teaching children. I appreciate it can be a bit of a can of worms but it would help the system be more self sustaining. The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce…

Very interesting... at face value it doesn't seem sustainable, extendable or consistent. Perhaps you need to elaborate more on what you mean about children teaching. That being said the "learn one, do one, teach one" model it great and I recall giving and receiving a lot of peer assistance when I was young.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#406

Post by necovek »

basch wrote: post #282
keithnz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.

There’s a massive amount of duplicated effort in curriculum creation. If the really gifted are documenting their lessons and publishing the framework other really good teachers can pickup where they left off. Having those curriculums in a standard format would go a long way to making components interchangeable and remixable.

Just like in learn-by-doing, I believe some of it has to be done by the teacher themselves — by feeling where the pain is, they'll better focus on what matters.

Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#407

Post by ecshafer »

neutronicus wrote: post #356
simiones wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern Eu…

In the US, it seems like malpractice to teach anything before Spanish IMO. 14% of the country are native Spanish speakers. It's hard to imagine a return on any other foreign-language instruction that would match improving communication between 45 million residents of the country and everyone else, to say nothing of improving communication with citizens of the other countries actually sharing a land mass with the US.

Learning Spanish in school was the single biggest waste of time. 14% of the country are native Spanish speaker! Many professions require some spanish! Those were the arguments back then as well.

However... unless you account that the native speakers and heritage speakers will learn English, making your ability to say cerveza useless. If you aren't fluent and have professional Spanish qualities (like Medical Spanish), its useless. Learning Latin or Greek would have been more useful, at least I could struggle through Cicero in Latin, than saying 3 words in Spanish before the other guy switches to English.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#408

Post by lnenad »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #374
lnenad wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot imagine coming to a place that has a reputation of having higher educated people, and presenting that education is a waste of time. All research has some levels of agenda behind it, and it would be very easy to steer anything the author presents into a direction he wishes. On the contrary, literally every country on earth benefited greatly from education and the results are very visible in all aspects of hum…

My reading of it is not that Bryan thinks education (aka learning) is a waste of time, but that much of what we call 'education' in the US, particularly with respect to higher education (4 year colleges) is just signaling. Very little is being learned. It's just a very expensive and time-consuming way to sort people based on skills and attributes they already had. Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accura…

I strongly disagree (having not read the book and having my own biases). History teaches us that any education is better than no education. Formal education is very far from just booklernin', you also learn *how to learn*, you develop social skills, you network, you start understanding how to deal with administration stuff, how to deal with failures and many other skills...

No country has perfect education, but what we call education is very useful for becoming a society participating human.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#409

Post by pc86 »

tombert wrote: post #70

I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't. I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school. I had students that…

This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#410

Post by simiones »

shimman wrote: post #387
burnt-resistor wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.

I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!

I think these sorts of things are very commonly misleading. The Romanian school system I grew up in for example nominally had way more advanced subjects even in middle school, not to mention high school, than what is commonly taught in much of Europe and the USA. For example, we did a solid two-three months of basic group theory in the 10th grade (sophomore year?) - learning about monoids, groups, rings, fields, proving isomorphisms between various structures etc. These were even part of the Bacalaureat, our equivalent of the SAT. A foreign language (almost universally English) is part of the national curriculum in Romania starting from the first year of primary school. When I went through school, we also used to have a set of canonical literary works that we were expected to read and be able to provide literary criticism on during the national exams at the end of middle school without access to the text; for example, the exam you'd take at the end of 8th grade would ask students to write a ~700 word essay on the main character of a particular Romanian novel; or on the themes of a piece of poetry the exam named, but did not reproduce.

However, the number of students who actually ever understand any of this is typically only a small fraction. In particular for the Romanian language exams, despite the theoretically high level of literary knowledge that it tested for, the actual rate of functional illiteracy between students who passed this exam was >20-30%. A huge swath of students either cheated, or simply memorized entire essays by heart, without even understanding what they meant. Of course, some of us actually did learn all of this from an early age - but this was far less typical than looking at the curriculum, exams, and even exam results would have suggested.

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