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Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

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Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#51

Post by bane »

I found this interesting. I worked for a few years teaching technical subjects to mid-career adults and ended up adopting an educational theory not too dissimilar to the author, but for mostly different reasons.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251569

I remember high school very well, and it was a pretty torturous experience. If you could design an educational program that was almost guaranteed not to be a conducive learning environment with poor mastery outcomes, the public k-12 system in the U.S. would probably be it. Even worse, when they measure educational outcomes, the place systems like South Korea's at the top, a system that's absolutely optimized and excels at the lowest possible form of learning, rote memorization.

In the previous discussion, I point out that I believe students need to "complete the circuit", go from input/reception to output/production to say they've learned a topic. In today's school environment, if this happens at all, it happens by accident:

1) The teacher gives a lecture, information is shoved in

2) The students do homework and tests, okay, the students "produce" what they've learned, usually a brain dump of what they've memorized, but let's be honest, not a demonstration of learning or mastery.

3) The homework and tests get an impersonal grade, the "feedback loop" necessary to complete the circuit. But if the student got it wrong? Too bad, the lesson is moving on anyways. There's no time really spent in education to have the student go back with this new course correction and see if they got it now. And out of schedule help in most schools is woeful.

Because of this systematic failure, by the time many students are involved in "advanced" topics in high school, their foundational knowledge is so flimsy and filled with holes that new topics are like turning a strong fan on in a room with a house of cards. Yet the professional educational establishment seems unable to figure this out and correct it.

Keep in mind, without even a template of any kind, we're all fluently able to learn a complex language, a mass of complex social rules so complex that libraries are full of books describing them and how to sanitarily complete a digestion cycle on our own (everybody poops) before we even show up for day 1 of 1st grade. Keep in mind that we spent the first two of those 6-7 years not even being able to talk - so we did all that in about the same time it takes to get through high school. If we learned as much in our 4 years of high school, we'd all be leaving with the equivalent of advanced degrees in physics.

Children can learn at phenomenal paces, yet it takes years before students accumulate any worthwhile new skills in this kind of environment -- skills that should take them weeks or months.

School is doing it wrong.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#53

Post by bane »

pbreit wrote: post #40

Wow, 7:45 sounds awfully early. And out at 2:35?

I lived in a rural area during this time in my life. School started at 7:30am, the school bus picked us up at 6:30am, which meant I had to be up at 5:30-6:00 to eat breakfast, shower and get ready for the day.

This meant a 9:30 bed-time.

This also meant that I got home by about 3:30-4:00 depending on traffic. An hour for dinner gave me 4.5 hours to study. Let's be honest, I also took an hour for free-time otherwise I wouldn't have any. So 3.5 hours to study every day.

In college at least, when you plan your schedule, you should plan 2-3 hours of study-time per week for every hour of class time. As you can see I really only had time to study 1 subject a day, maybe 2 if I didn't give myself free time by that standard.

Recipe for success? Ha!

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#54

Post by torbit »

derekp7 wrote: post #5

Why is this so surprising? Wasn't every teacher a high school student at some point? Is the experience so traumatic that they completely forget what the schedule was like once they become teachers themselves?

tldr the person got old, and realized they were old.

In HS I had English, Physics (very fun and active), Drafting (elective), Algebra (1or2), spanish 1. Caring a full backpack was worse for me. I remember it tearing apart on top from the weight

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#55

Post by nilkn »

Sambdala wrote: post #13

I remember high school. During class I hid whatever book I actually wanted to read at the time inside the class book and drowned out the teacher. If homework was worth >10% of the total grade for the class (so that you couldn't get an A from tests/quizzes alone), I would copy the homework from someone else the period before. Tests & quizzes are so gameable it's a complete joke. Standardized tests even more so. Withou…

I know tons of high school students who attempt the strategies you just described. The great majority of them barely scrape by with Bs and Cs and they do indeed crash and burn in college. You are not even remotely a representative case.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#56

Post by nilkn »

vacri wrote: post #41
folz wrote: post #4

Saved you a click (from the top comment the last time this was posted): The three points from the article: > [1] Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting. > [2] High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes. > [3] You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long. People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negat…

People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel) They don't wonder it at all; it's not some mystery solved by sitting in a classroom. Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. Items 1 and 3 are common in the working world, and there's a few jobs out…

I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me. Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch or walk around often wasn't an option.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#57

Post by jqm »

I found her description of being tired in an icky way very good. I remember feeling exactly that way at the end of the day in high school.

I also agree with her suggestions. Short bursts of information, plenty of chances for physical motion, participation rather than passive listening. I believe all of this would have greatly improved what I got out of high school.

Oh, and also cutting out a significant portion of the bullshit and indoctrination which was passed off as eduction but which was not. That's a different topic though I guess.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#58

Post by aarohmankad »

jschwartzi wrote: post #36
aarohmankad wrote: post #15

This is one of the reasons I like my school. Points 1 and 3 in the article are pretty close to nonexistent. [1]: We operate on a 4x4 schedule (4 classes August - December, 4 classes January - June). So we sit in one class for 90 minutes, a good time to focus on a task and get it done. [2]: Issue 2 is a problem with every school I've been in and seen. I can't think of any school that has managed time in a way that wil…

My experience with a 4x4 schedule was that I would lose focus about 15 to 20 minutes in, start trying to work whatever homework the teacher had assigned, realize I didn't understand it, refocus on the lecture, and realize that I had missed half of it. The only reason I graduated High School on time was because one of my math teachers gave out D's. This was really only an issue in Math classes, where we were expected…

Your math teacher sounds like a bad teacher. My calc teacher is very much the same, but he heavily focuses on being able to teach us how to learn on our own (i.e. looking up new concepts on khanacademy/other resources, looking for practical applications to theorems we learn, etc.)

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#59

Post by ploxiln »

nilkn wrote: post #55
Sambdala wrote: post #13

I remember high school. During class I hid whatever book I actually wanted to read at the time inside the class book and drowned out the teacher. If homework was worth >10% of the total grade for the class (so that you couldn't get an A from tests/quizzes alone), I would copy the homework from someone else the period before. Tests & quizzes are so gameable it's a complete joke. Standardized tests even more so. Withou…

I know tons of high school students who attempt the strategies you just described. The great majority of them barely scrape by with Bs and Cs and they do indeed crash and burn in college. You are not even remotely a representative case.

Yeah, but isn't it annoying being told you're the equivalent of a representative case? When you're not?

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns

#60

Post by vorg »

I recently spent a year as a full-time language student in a college (in China, so more like US high school in many ways) after teaching English for 10 yrs, and also unexpectedly discovered point no. 1, i.e. how tiring it is to sit down all day, and almost never did so as a teacher. Even after 1 year I was still often yawning after 2 or 3 hrs of near continuous sitting, and always got up to walk around outside for 5 or 15 minutes during breaks. Most other students were much younger, usually 20-ish, and often stayed sitting in class during breaks. I don't know how they do it, but maybe it's just their age, or maybe they haven't done a job where they're on their feet all day for 10 yrs.
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