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A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

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Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#11

Post by craighooghiem »

yeukhon wrote: post #2

I like the idea, but I hope the article would address my question whether or not there are mentors available for office hours. You can certainly learn by trials and errors, but to be honest you'd learn a lot more if there are professionals to help you. Second issue is programming 15 hours a day seems a lot. I can't even stare at my screen for more than 7-8 hours a day. That's a lot of work... I do like the idea, and…

I feel like there are so many other places to find mentors now that it's not necessary to have them at the school itself.

As for the second issue, I stare at a computer screen for at least 12 hours a day - you have to be careful about it (backlighting, fl.ux, etc) but it's possible to do and can result in some incredibly productive days. That said, 15 hours is a long time.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#12

Post by juliendorra »

There is more to it than this idealistic view:

42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees, and all in all not thinking twice about it)

Also, there is no entrepreneurial skills in the program (it's supposedly optional in year 3), no vision of a developer as part of a community (nothing in the program about going to external events, like FOSDEM for example).

Every student student is supposed to work on the same exact problem (exercise really) than the others, as far as I can tell in the same order.

All in all, the discourse on creativity and inclusiveness is really not in sync with how the school is designed.

No teachers doesn't equate peer to peer learning, nor a path to being a great, creative coder anchored in her/his community.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#13

Post by juliendorra »

DanBC wrote: post #7
LAMike wrote: post #4

15 hours a day? On fake problems? Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?

I'm guessing French unions don't want unpaid students doing real work because they want the real work to be done by employed people.

This has nothing to do with unions and all to do with the archaic views on education and developers of the founders.

Note that I teach in a French web school where students do work on real projects from real clients, for free, in year 2 and 3. In another web school where I teach at 'master level', year 5, the project are real paid projects for real clients.

It's totally possible, and I must say, it's even the rising ideology that you have to make students work on "real projects" (with wildly varying definition of what that means); so yes, it's a little bit crazy to see young students working 3 years 15 hours a day on arbitrary exercises, and calling it a school that will produce wildly creative professionals.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#14

Post by cowsandmilk »

j2d3 wrote: post #5

This is probably bound to catch on fast in the us where teachers and their unions are thought (by an unnerving possible majority) to be one of the primary factors in our ongoing economic problems.

a program that only admits 18-30 year olds will replace education of minors in the US?

This article had a catchy headline, but what is described is not much different from how most of my classes were in college. They've just removed the couple hours of lecture and instead just give out the problem sets. There is no democracy in choosing the problems you are solving, or any encouragement to explore things that interest you.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#15

Post by juliendorra »

LAMike wrote: post #4

15 hours a day? On fake problems? Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?

From what I gather the 42 team has a really poor view of anything web-dev related.

They have this idea of creating "hardcore devs", because supposedly they are better and if you can code hardcore you can code anything. (An idea that obviously lead to entire categories of failures, because not two systems are alike, and developing necessitate many skills, including communicating, writing, leading)

Note that this is what I gather in part by talking to a pre-selected student that didn't make the final line (nor she wanted too); and in part by reading the 3 year program of the school, the interviews.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#16

Post by zarify »

j2d3 wrote: post #5

This is probably bound to catch on fast in the us where teachers and their unions are thought (by an unnerving possible majority) to be one of the primary factors in our ongoing economic problems.

Except this isn't really 'school', it's more of a technical college. Students are going to learn a specific skill.

(I could be getting confused by how you folks in the US still call what we call university 'school' in which case disregard my comment :/)

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#17

Post by mekoka »

LAMike wrote: post #4

15 hours a day? On fake problems? Why not teach them basic skills on the frontend and backend and let them work on projects for 15 hours a day?

The article does not disclose what the actual 3 years curriculum will be like, it's merely stated that this is phase 2 of a weed out process that started with online cognitive skill exercises. The remaining 4000 candidates will for the next month be challenged 15h a day on computer problems. Only 800 of them will go on to do the 3 years program, which we really know nothing about, except that on the last year there's a huge project they have to work on together.

There's really nothing more than that, we don't even know if by the end of the month there will be practical projects.

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#18

Post by sieva »

This is really the type of innovation that education needs. Providing solutions for a broken system is very much like putting lipstick on a pig...without the proper infrastructure that can provide the support and challenges that students need, no amounts of interaction, collaboration or analytics will make significant changes (with emphasis on significant).

Although there is a good chance this isn't a "perfect" solution, it's a huge step in the right direction, and I'd like to see more government funding going towards trying new approaches vs funding something that hasn't worked well in a 100 years.

Upvote and a high five to all entrepreneurs working in this field :)

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#19

Post by [deleted] »

juliendorra wrote: post #12

There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees,…

[deleted]

Re: A School With No Teachers, Where Students Teach Themselves

#20

Post by nawitus »

juliendorra wrote: post #12

There is more to it than this idealistic view: 42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women. Less than a classic computer engineering school in France apparently. So much for inclusiveness. (They managed that by only showing bearded old men on their website, bringing a frat-house culture from their experience in older schools, with "fun" bonding games like taping a student to the trees,…

>42 is very excluding for women, succeeding in bringing in les than 7% women.

Having a small percentage of women doesn't indicate that they're excluding women.

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