Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by treehau5 » Sun, Oct 26, 2014, 10:10 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #94

treehau5 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Staying focused longer than 10 minutes at a time was difficult I found an unexpected solution in working with someone else - that is - not working alone on the project. The more social interaction is involved, the less I am affected by procrastination. You have to make yourself visible and accountable to other people, to feel shame if you slack off, to feel energized when you make progress and then discuss it with…

This is definitely true!

I did my best work when we were on the pairing machines. However, we stopped using them as much because some of our work is so siloed. It was a shame. I am always looking to pair with people, but its very difficult I have found. I tried the online things, like the "#PairWithMe" initiative. No dice so far.

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

#162

Post by sopooneo » Sun, Oct 26, 2014, 11:13 PM UTC

When I was a student teacher I asked permission to do this and, without exception, was met with baffled looks. What specifically are you hoping find out? I was asked. Why would you want to that? my mentor teacher wanted to know. It's not that anyone had objections, they just couldn't fathom why an adult would want to do it.

My biggest take away was how out of control and unpleasant lunch period was. Also, how much the kids got yelled at during class transitions.

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

#163

Post by LittleFishyChan » Sun, Oct 26, 2014, 11:20 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #96

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…

Maybe schools should use a system like Spaced Repetition (or Anki) that integrates in an intelligent way the repetition of old material with learning new things. It works very well for foreign languages, but could be adapted to other subjects.

There is too much blowback and ignorance in regards to how memory and thinking works. We have been horribly brainwashed into thinking that all memorization is bad and that focusing on "critical thinking skills" is superior. In order to think any thought, memory is required. Rather than memorizing useless facts, schools should use spaced repetition from the first grade onwards to ensure long term retention over important ideas and concepts. This needs to be implemented on every level of our education system. Far too much ignorance and bureaucracy stands in the way of this ever happening, but at least those tools are in the hands of any autodidact that wants to use it.

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

#164

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Oct 26, 2014, 11:57 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #68

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…

Standardized tests even more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent. How do you do this? I mean if a test asks you to solve 3x^2+5+2x=7, how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such? There is a difference between gaming a test (in the sense of not knowing the material, but still passin…

>> how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such?

This is actually possible, if you've been taught to solve problems instead of being taught to apply magic formulas. Of course, one is rarely taught math this way now.

Let me try. Suppose you have 3x^2+5+2x=7. Now, you have no idea how to solve for x. But what you could solve? If you had something like (ax+b)^2 = c, then probably this would be easy for you to solve, right (of course, provided c is not negative, won't get into that now)? We just take square root of both parts, and then it's a simple linear equation. Now, we can notice we can also get rid of a, for simplicity, by dividing both parts by a and get something like (x+b)^2 = c. Which in our example should represent 3x^2+5+2x=7 or alternatively x^2 + 2/3x - 2/3 = 0. But how we find proper b and c?

So, is there a way to make that equation look like that with suitable values? Let's look at (x+b)^2 = x^2 + 2bx + b^2. We have 2bx = 2/3x which means b = 1/3. So we have (x+1/3)^2 on one side, and on the other side we have to get 2/3 and also additional 1/9 which is the b^2, meaning c would be 7/9. So, x + 1/3 is sqrt(7/9) with + or - sign (since square on non-zero root always has 2 options), and x would be that minus 1/3.

As you can see, we used no special magic formula - only thing we needed is how to write (x+b)^2, which is easy to see just by multiplying (x+b)*(x+b) by hand.

You can do cubic equations this way too, but it is considerably more laborious. Look up Cardano and Vieta methods. Doable but I wouldn't enjoy doing it by hand too much.

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

#165

Post by sjg007 » Mon, Oct 27, 2014, 12:18 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #103

[deleted]

This is actually terrible. Kids peak at all different times and mostly learn from peers who are more accomplished than they are. And to avoid the cache-22, the most advanced kids of course might learn from a teacher or kid of a more advanced year.

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

#166

Post by bzbarsky » Mon, Oct 27, 2014, 2:07 AM UTC

ARothfusz wrote: post #153

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.

The article covers this:

  (Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day)

The reality is that in a typical 1-hour class with 5 minute breaks between classes on a big campus you lose the first 5 minutes of class to people arriving late and the last 5 minutes to everyone packing up their books so they can rush our the door. So you get 50-minute classes, or about 5/6 of your nominal instruction time. And if you have to do a lab or something, you either have to do double-period classes or stick to labs that can be effectively completed in 40-45 minutes (because you need time to set up and clean up too).

So enter block scheduling: the idea is to lengthen the classes to 90 minutes or so and alternate days when they meet. You still lose 10 minutes of each class, but that's 8/9 of your nominal instruction time, not 5/6. And teachers get a bit more flexibility in terms of what things can be done with a class. The drawback is that if you lecture for the full 80 minutes, the outcome is typically not so great: it takes an exceptional lecturer, or an exceptional student, or for some sorts of material both, to pull off someone still being able to absorb information in a lecture that's longer than an hour.

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

#167

Post by bzbarsky » Mon, Oct 27, 2014, 2:11 AM UTC

bcaine wrote: post #14

intopieces wrote: post #10

I do wish that my school had had the block scheduling this school seems to have. We had 8 periods in a day (school was a half period) and they were all ~50 minutes. This is barely enough time to accomplish anything, and days where the classes were shorter (teachers' meetings) then each class was worthless.

The problem is that it's near impossible for a student to pay attention during longer classes. I think you're trying to measure accomplishing things by the amount of material you work through during a given class, instead of by the amount of information the student actually absorbs during that time. That seemed to be one of the main points in the article, just getting through material was a terrible way to look at cl…

It really depends on the class.

Lectures of any sort longer than an hour are pretty painful. Science lab classes shorter than an hour are likewise pretty painful. Designing a schedule that can accommodate both is not easy and people typically don't even try (though they should!).

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

#168

Post by nine_k » Mon, Oct 27, 2014, 2:25 AM UTC

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…

As one of my colleagues once told to one of people like you, "I celebrate your existence because it guarantees my job security".

Do yourself a favor and study what you're actually interested in, seriously. Avoid places where you have to or even can coast, because it wastes your time and gets you used to wrong things. Also, such positions are usually dead-ends career-wise.

/* To tell the truth, I spent little time in university classes because they were too slow. I learned the same topics, and some more, myself, and worked a lot with professors on actual research. So I had pretty high [equivalent of] GPA and graduated well without much 'coasting'. */

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

#169

Post by pyre » Mon, Oct 27, 2014, 2:48 AM UTC

ObviousScience wrote: post #125

pyre wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up-thread there was a comparison from office workers to high school students. Do you really think that the "average office worker" has a chair (in the price-range of an Aeron), an office with a view, and a flexible schedule?

As a paper pusher during college, I had a $400ish chair, a desk with more than enough space to spread out the documents I was working with and the keyboard I was using, and could get up and take a quick break whenever I felt like it, just to stretch my legs, go to the bathroom without asking, grab a quick bit of food, or whatever. I could snack at my desk as I saw fit. While they preferred I not take personal calls a…

Most of these comments follow a similar pattern:

  

  Therefore, I believe that my experiences are
  fairly representative the entire population.

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

#170

Post by yummyfajitas » Mon, Oct 27, 2014, 4:54 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #164

yummyfajitas wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standardized tests even more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent. How do you do this? I mean if a test asks you to solve 3x^2+5+2x=7, how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such? There is a difference between gaming a test (in the sense of not knowing the material, but still passin…

>> how do you solve it without know the quadratic formula or some such? This is actually possible, if you've been taught to solve problems instead of being taught to apply magic formulas. Of course, one is rarely taught math this way now. Let me try. Suppose you have 3x^2+5+2x=7. Now, you have no idea how to solve for x. But what you could solve? If you had something like (ax+b)^2 = c, then probably this would be eas…

tl;dr; If you are really good at math, but didn't follow the math curriculum closely, you can probably rederive most of it. I'm not sure this counts as "gaming" a test. I'd describe it as "understanding the material really well and getting a high score."

Remember, the goal of an exam is to measure if you have the knowledge. Whether you got the knowledge by studying hard in a traditional classroom setting as scheduled by a syllabus is irrelevant.