71–80 of 126 posts
Instead of buying more/better equipment, teachers, or technology why hasn't anyone tried to buy a better student? I'm fairly certain that if you paid elementary students cash for better grades you would see a huge jump in achievement for the average student. A small amount of money to us feels like a huge amount to a kid, and there are plenty of studies showing that rewards increase performance for basic and mechanic…
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The grade may or may not be a "big deal" as you mention, but it is certainly and with total absolution, a reasonable thing to ask about. Do you agree?
I don't agree. Interview time is limited and valuable. Sure, you could ask the candidate about anything thats not illegal to ask. But why waste time on irrelevancies? Asking about a single low grade when the candidate has an otherwise respectable GPA is just wasting a chance to ask a better question. If I saw a junior interviewer do it, I would be tempted to share some ideas of stronger questions to ask in the future…
As far as interviews and economic value I'm sure I beat you on both metrics by a vast margin. Also pointless and silly, but you try to bring up your "hundreds" of interviews, LOL, sonny boy.
animations and lessons about “growth mindsets,” “grit,” and “mindfulness.” Dear God. We have growth mindset and grit here at this regional institution. There are students who take General Chemistry 1 (read: 10-th grade chemistry) three times with three different instructors, everyone with a different teaching philosophy, and they still don't give up. Wow. That's some grit there. This time they failed, but they can al…
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> "hmm what happened here!?" as they would point to my C+ Man that would be an instant turn off for me. Having said that I'm unlikely to end up in a room with folks who would say something like that anyway, mostly because I wouldn't make it past the resume filter... for good reason, and a good outcome for everyone involved probabbly.
Which is weird. Because as GP inpugned, how are a bunch of hyper-conventional learners going to 'disrupt' education? We have a lot of people who haven't been served by the current educational system. Wouldn't you rather hire people who did poorly in school and yet were still very successful in their careers and find out what they know?
Too much of my schoolwork was hypotheticals that were questions no one would need to ask (and obviously so to me at the time), or by rote memorization of facts and figures, without teaching much understanding of why those things are important to know.
Overall, I agree that the promise of tech in education never manifested, or at least hasn't yet, and the last decade was full of half-baked or poorly conceived ideas. But I'm worried there's some baby in that bathwater... I started my career in K-12 education, first in the classroom, then as an administrator, and thanks to a coding bootcamp, am happily pursuing another career as a software developer. I have plenty of…
Initially, I agreed with most of the failures Audrey listed. Though I started wondering if such a lengthy list could be sustained, and lo and behold, about halfway through the article I sensed a large drop in quality, with the author seeming more focused on rhetoric and being "right about others being wrong" instead of providing an objective and insightful perspective.
Some examples: #52. Virtual Reality - I think her gripe is with VR being hyped too early, but from her writing, it sounds like she thinks the entire field is already dead and buried for education. Which would be ridiculous. The friction with VR right now is the technology; it is too physically limiting for the benefits > the cost of change. For anyone with an open mind who has tried VR, however, I think it's obvious that it will be the future in some shape or form. Whether it's this decade, or the next, or in 2040 who knows but dismissing an entire field like this really reduced the author's credibility in my eyes.
#49. Yik Yak - Never used it myself, but from what I've heard it was anything BUT an ed-tech app..?! It's listed as a defunct social media and chat app... Guess the author was clutching at straws here.
#48, #38, #6, etc. - Author seems to have a completely unjustified pessimism toward any sort of coding that isn't related to the traditional CS pathway. I can only speak for myself, but as someone who made poor decisions out of high school and is now a (pretty decent) self-taught developer, I find the author's conclusions totally wrong. Learning to code was the single good adult decision I've made - I've found a lasting passion, and I can make positive contributions to society. Without it, I'd still be sitting around depressed all day.
#25. Thiel Foundation - FWIW, I'm not a fan of Thiel at all but I do agree that we are in a college bubble. Audrey's snarky comment "Here’s one look at what some of the past Thiel Fellowship recipients are up to. Yawn" seems totally unjustified here. I haven't been through the list, but IIRC Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum) was a recipient of the Thiel Foundation. Regardless what you think of crypto, Ethereum has had an enormous impact on the blockchain landscape. Whether or not Eth itself is successful, it's unjustified to write it off as "meh" if only for the downstream effect it has on other areas of innovation. I think money is a terrible indicator of "success", but if we're going down that route, Eth currently has a market cap of $14.5 mil+, which would make Thiel's investment a good one (though I don't believe he had a stake).
#13. Blockchain Anything - It's sad to see the author's piece decline from what were some really valuable insights earlier in the article down to this Buzzfeed-esque drivel again dismissing an entire field. I'm not saying blockchain will or won't be successful. However, for any new & poorly understood technology, it's easy to just google "reasons why technology X sucks", link to the first 5 articles, and win over readers who don't know better.
Again - it's a shame the author appeared desparate for filler material as the list grew longer. It's particularly a disservice to herself because she made some great points at times. Adopting a more balanced tone would have been desirable. This way it'd be clearer to see that EdTech really does have huge potential for an industry that desparately needs a total remake; it's just been executed very poorly for the most part. P.S. Lol at the author downplaying the impact of YouTube on EdTech. I'm not a huge fan but half the material for my course these days are links to YouTube videos. There is a slow but clear shift to tertiary education that is 100% online.
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Maybe im just mediocre but it doesnt seem like a big deal. Sometimes you get a shit teacher and check out. The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's is real alarming
The grade may or may not be a "big deal" as you mention, but it is certainly and with total absolution, a reasonable thing to ask about. Do you agree?
It's a waste of time, and thus unreasonable thing to ask about, wasting a candidate's time and the interviewer's time in revealing how little the interviewer knows about effective interviewing.
animations and lessons about “growth mindsets,” “grit,” and “mindfulness.” Dear God. We have growth mindset and grit here at this regional institution. There are students who take General Chemistry 1 (read: 10-th grade chemistry) three times with three different instructors, everyone with a different teaching philosophy, and they still don't give up. Wow. That's some grit there. This time they failed, but they can al…
I've been a CS course instructor and you brought up a great point. There is always a balance between not to discourage students who could achieve, and the reality that there are those would be much better off doing something they can actually succeed in and feel much better about themselves as a result, instead of repeatedly trying and failing. I stopped teaching a while ago but I heard that this has become more prev…
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I agree that Khan Academy is pretty decent but these days the project appears to have lost its direction. Most videos are low quality and could be improved. This non-profit has received millions in donations but has little to show for it. Most of the money appears to have been spent on programmers/web devs to simply organize Khan's already created videos. Some decent work went into the little math problem software as…
I feel like the nonprofit is doing OK. Content is steadily being created. I feel like the quality is relatively high. They purchased Duck Duck Moose and the resultant Khan Academy Jr is pretty good. They introduced a mastery learning system which is very good IMO. The classroom management stuff is OK. A whole lot of resource is going into localizing the content for different languages. They're also running a model sc…
The author seems to miss the boat super hard on > 6. "Everyone Should Learn to Code" Her argument seems to be that teaching more kids to code, will result in more people ending up in a toxic tech industry. This may be true. But the tech industry will never, ever change until we expose more kids to engineering as a choice. If we can cause a greater number and diversity of children and young adults to consider engineer…
It's not far-fetched to consider that exposing kids to an hour of code daily could make transitioning to a programming career much more feasible in their later life (whereas without this exposure, programming might seem like untouchable black magic). Heck, I think the reason my own transition to being a dev was relatively smooth is because I was obsessed making HTML websites as a kid. Despite not touching it for ~15 years, even that exposure proved invaluable in picking up the skills relatively fast
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I disagree, unless you are hiring straight out of college and the C+ is in an immediately relevant or "red flag" class. I can't imagine being asked this. I studied philosophy, I'm interviewing to write software, who cares about my grades?
You submitted your transcripts. I am going to ask about your C+. It's a reasonable thing for me to ask you about, don't you agree?