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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

#151

Post by finder83 »

ska wrote: post #128
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…

One thing that's missing here is that college really is a "you get out what you get in" situation. As a prof, you see people like this all the time, and hopefully you take the time to try and engage them more, but at the end of the day it isn't your responsibility if they choose to waste the opportunity. The "challenge" in college isn't to make a 4.0 GPA, it's to push yourself to find your own boundaries. Many profs…

I agree in principle...but in practice I think college is much less of an opportunity to make it what you want it to be than you make it out to be. Perhaps at a graduate level or at a top level school you can learn more if you apply yourself more, but at a regular state school, it was really just an extension of high school. I left with the opinion that liberal arts is just a repeat of everything you were supposed to learn during middle and high school with longer papers and more reading, but really just the same content. The only students who had trouble either 1.) Didn't actually pay attention in middle or high school or 2.) Couldn't read or work fast enough to keep up. The major classes were really pretty easy as well as a computer science major, but that's because I was already a programmer...I suppose that's not the norm. At least towards the end, I put a lot of work into it and read pretty much every page, but didn't get a lot out of it.

Many of the same problems plague colleges that plague high schools though...professors that either don't care or aren't very good at teaching, students that are just there for the degree, books that don't really challenge, and papers that just require following the formula "5 paragraphs, 3 summary sentences". Very little learning took place for me in any of that. The learning I did was from outside of college and was from learning what is considered generally graduate school work for C.S.

I really hope that most people's experiences aren't that way, and that colleges do teach young people. It just wasn't my experience through 3 different colleges. An Oxford style school with mentors and customized content probably would have served me much better than colleges that continue on the same factory system setup that is broken at the lower levels.

The workplace hasn't been difficult for me, but I definitely learn a lot more than I ever did in school. I come across actual challenges that require research and stretch me. Perhaps that's just being a software engineer though.

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

#152

Post by thirdsun »

NhanH wrote: post #108
thirdsun wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I'd say there's actually some value in socializing and the concept of engaging with friends and students on a daily basis - especially outside of class. Aren't you worried that your kid might be missing out on those social interactions? There's a lot more to school life than attending several 90 minute classes in a row and calling it a day.

Everytime someone mentions "homeschool", there are always people asking: but what if the kid is missing out on (insert things). How about another point of view: high school students are (potentially) missing out on the opportunity to not wasting their time, to not being unhappy during the 3 years, to truly reach the potential they can be. I did not study high school in the US, but had I have the chance to be homescho…

Fair point of view - but you make it seem as if having a bad time in school is a given. I'm from Germany, maybe it's different in US highschools, but back in my time (29 years old now), school life didn't have much in common with your average highschool movie. Bullying was a rare thing, being "different" not that big of a deal and we generally got along rather well. I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to miss those days.

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

#153

Post by ARothfusz »

Why were they only taking 4 classes per day?

They are 30 minutes longer than my high school classes were, but we had 7+ different classes per day. I'm pretty sure our day lasted till 3:30 or 4pm. We had 5 minutes to get to the next class, and on a big campus, that could result in some pretty good cardio workouts. So maybe inadvertently we were getting those stretches recommended by the author.

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

#154

Post by ufmace »

wavegeek wrote: post #111
bane wrote: post #51

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 guarante…

As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months in the same country will produce a person with real useful usable skills in the language. If you believed that school was there to teach people this is shocking. But it all makes sense on the basis that school is there to keep young people out of the way.

I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you started.

I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained anything at that point by being surrounded by Spanish speech and media.

I think that the first hard part or learning a new language is just bridging that gap of memorizing thousands of new words and their meanings. If you haven't done that, any amount of exposure to the language is mostly meaningless gibberish that you don't know where to start at deciphering. I don't see how that helps you learn it.

For what it's worth, I learned a lot more from using Duolingo for a while than from immersion. I figure a better way to really get started would be to work at that, and translate newspaper articles by hand for a few hours a day, not that I've tried it.

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

#155

Post by throwaway623422 »

treehau5 wrote: post #70
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 can relate to this so much it's not even funny. Don't let your fear of failure get in the way. I currently struggle with the same -- applying myself to a difficult task. Staying focused longer than 10 minutes at a time was difficult -- so difficult I was even suspicious I may of had adult ADHD. Turns out that I don't. What I have is the fear of failing and rejection. The fear of exposing my weaknesses to others, an…

> so difficult I was even suspicious I may of had adult ADHD. Turns out that I don't.

I want to thank you so much for writing this. I feel like I've heard this story a million times, but every single time it ends in the author self-diagnosing AD[H]D. This is literally the very first time I've ever heard of someone suspecting they had it and then ruling it out.

It's a relief to hear that there might be other possible causes of common problems.

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

#156

Post by ufmace »

kirsebaer wrote: post #142
pdonis wrote: post #61

The money quote to me is this one: "I was struck by this takeaway [#2] in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing." What strikes me about this is how none of the solutions the author offers fix this problem. In fact, it's unfixable with our current concept of what a school is. No amount of monkeying with how classes are taugh…

Exactly, school is a prison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DJAZ-ByV0 It would be nice to see more attention on unschooling-style homeschooling and also on non-coercive schools where children are free to play and explore for themselves, so-called "democratic free schools" like Sudbury Valley School in MA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI

I've been thinking more like that lately, and came here to say pretty much that. School is an inherently coercive institution. I think it's designed to snuff out independence and creativity and churn out people who blindly follow orders, who will be good corporate peons, Army privates, or something similar for their masters, and outcomes other than that are achieved more in spite of it than because of any attempts at positive change in the system.

I don't know exactly what removing it would look like. I tend to think it needs to be less of a top-down organized system. More people doing whatever feels interesting to them at the time and getting as much help and support at it as we can practically provide, whether that's building cars, writing computer programs, reading about history, playing sports, or just screwing around for a while. I think that people inherently want to learn and do stuff, and you'll get much better results just letting them go do what they want to as great of an extent as possible than by ordering them around and restricting their options as much as possible.

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

#157

Post by smsm42 »

wavegeek wrote: post #111
bane wrote: post #51

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 guarante…

As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months in the same country will produce a person with real useful usable skills in the language. If you believed that school was there to teach people this is shocking. But it all makes sense on the basis that school is there to keep young people out of the way.

There are two problems here: approach and motivation. Most of the schools, as you correctly notice, are places where undersocialized youngsters are warehoused so that they don't get in trouble and don't cause trouble themselves. For the worst of them, they are just a temporary place to store them until they are grown up enough to put them in prison. OTOH, on the student level many of them lack any motivation to learn, and create an atmosphere in the class which is not conductive to learning. But schools can be different - I've witnessed it myself, within the same school even, where one teacher can take you in a year to knowledge which will still serve you decades after, and another may tread water for years and produce a negative outcome.

For example, I had very good teachers in math and physics (and I am still benefitting from their work) and spectacularly bad teachers in English (not my native language) - which I remedied by outside study both in the family and commercially and consistently was way ahead of school requirement, the school was pretty much useless for me, and in literature, which had profound negative effect on my appreciation of literature that took me quite some time to overcome.

I don't know if there is an approach that allows to solve it in a systemic way. I think if somebody invents it, he or she would be a benefactor of humanity on the level of Fleming, Pasteur and Borlaug.

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

#158

Post by tim333 »

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…

There may be similar ways to game thing as an entrepreneur. There seems to be a lot of activity out there reminiscent of copying the other kids homework.

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

#159

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ufmace wrote: post #154
wavegeek wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months in the same country will produce a person with real useful usable skills in the language. If you believed that school was there to teach people this is shocking. But it all makes sense on the basis that school is there to keep young people out of the way.

I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you started. I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained anything at that point by bein…

>my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time //

So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people spoke English?

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

thirdsun wrote: post #152
NhanH wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everytime someone mentions "homeschool", there are always people asking: but what if the kid is missing out on (insert things). How about another point of view: high school students are (potentially) missing out on the opportunity to not wasting their time, to not being unhappy during the 3 years, to truly reach the potential they can be. I did not study high school in the US, but had I have the chance to be homescho…

Fair point of view - but you make it seem as if having a bad time in school is a given. I'm from Germany, maybe it's different in US highschools, but back in my time (29 years old now), school life didn't have much in common with your average highschool movie. Bullying was a rare thing, being "different" not that big of a deal and we generally got along rather well. I sure as hell wouldn't have wanted to miss those d…

[deleted]
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