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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

#411

Post by bccdee »

Edman274 wrote: post #357
RealityVoid wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as always, we like people to be good at their jobs instead of being bad at their jobs. But, I think teaching skills, juuuust like any other skills can be taught and improved. So if we want good teachers and educators we need to build them up, not just relie on a few good ones to carry the day. I personally reject the notion of competency in this as a matter of "giftedness", as something you either have or don't…

You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of t…

> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers

…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.

> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence

What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.

So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#412

Post by pc86 »

somenameforme wrote: post #341
bluGill wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)

Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?

If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#413

Post by jkid »

This goes back to something I’ve harped for years with friends and colleagues - the mistake of trying to revolutionize the education system is to treat it like an isolated case.

Schools are a function of families and the community. You can’t improve 1 without simultaneously improving all 3 at the same time. The key thing is family - because it’s actually the family that’s the bedrock and the first educator. Miss educating the family and the whole endeavors is lost.

After school, methodology, all these things, when you need to improve education you need to build a movement around doing so.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#414

Post by Shalomboy »

I think the author hit the right notes here; we do know how best optimize learning for high marks at a classroom-level, we do struggle with improving outcomes for students who need extra help, and we do bore students to tears when they outpace their peers. Over their lifetime of schooling, students regularly a standard deviation above or below subject-matter-expectations do breed resentment for the parts of the institution that inconvenience them, and we would probably do well to fix that if we want to avoid ending up recreating "Idiocracy" from first principles. I wish more folks were more reflective on their own opinions like this.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#415

Post by bccdee »

graemep wrote: post #249
whiplash451 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a large extent, the onus is on the teacher to generate interest. Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.

> Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students. That is the problem. It should not be forced. People naturally love learning and its a matter of facilitating that. Not going into details here as I have recent comments on this and other threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409530

I know a lot of people who believe this, and I think it just doesn't bear out.

I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.

I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.

Kids aren't just a blob of flesh that will some day become an adult. People don't take them seriously as individuals, but they should. That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#416

Post by aerodexis »

Shalomboy wrote: post #414

I think the author hit the right notes here; we do know how best optimize learning for high marks at a classroom-level, we do struggle with improving outcomes for students who need extra help, and we do bore students to tears when they outpace their peers. Over their lifetime of schooling, students regularly a standard deviation above or below subject-matter-expectations do breed resentment for the parts of the insti…

[dead]

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#417

Post by bradleyjg »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #164
Animats wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know what works: a 1:5 staff to student ratio. At that ratio, method matters less. Beyond that, it's a productivity problem.

Yep, known as Bloom's Two Sigma Problem[1]. Like most hard problems we know the solution, but lack the appetite to implement. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

The study picked an artificial and useless proxy.

What did tutored students go on to do? Were they over represented in Nobel Prizes, hedge fund billionaires, heads of state?

Or did they do well on a meaningless test and then forget all about whatever they “learned” just like everyone else?

The entire field is absolutely littered with this problem. Everyone is targeting cholesterol and not all cause mortality.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#418

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

g3f32r wrote: post #353
zipy124 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly quoted at the start of the article? "Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. " Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" meth…

> students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically? When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based le…

It seems to me that exam scores are a better metric of the underlying thing we care about, the ability to accomplish things in the world, than solution skill when faced with novel problems. Even if you're a very innovative person leading a project to do something entirely unprecedented, most of the tasks you need to do, text you need to read, etc. will not be novel.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#419

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #30
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that t…

Isn't this just solved by better student teacher ratios, which you could totally have in public schools if they were funded better and societally we valued teachers more? What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?

Outcomes aren't any better with lower ratios. The best-funded public schools have funding higher than anywhere else, in the world, and have poor outcomes... it's not a funding problem. And it's difficult to "value teachers" when we learn of these outcomes, it runs counter to human nature.

Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#420

Post by bjourne »

necovek wrote: post #396
bjourne wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.

Perhaps worth reading through the rest of the comment too? I had other teachers where it was easy to pass and get good grades (As even), but I did not call them out as good. Before jumping to conclusions, maybe ask for context too? In particular, this was a high school for gifted math kids, and what I learned through regular classes let me pass math uni entrance exam in the top 10 (out of ~500 students) with no extra…

Well, I don't know you, your teacher, or even what subject we're discussing but you wrote that you did "not have to bother with homework and assignments". Perhaps you would have learned more if the instruction had not failed to make you study? :P
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