Comment by tombert

I was lucky to attend a liberal arts college with a large and extremely pedagogy focused mathematics department, and all of my math classes there were like this. Engaging lectures, if I listened and wrote down everything on the board I would be able to get a B on the exams, even if I skimped on practice. Made it all the way to measure theory this way. They included in class group practice integrated with the lectures, which definitely helped.

St. Olaf College for those wondering.

schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.

> I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades

This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.

I was one of those kids.

Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.

A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.

I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.

I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".

We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.

I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.

> put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.

Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.

I'm guessing your past this option but you could try a Montessori classroom -- less structured and allows children to chase their own pursuits. My sense is its stronger for years 1-6 as opposed to later years. Also it doesn't feel like Montessori tries to grind down the children - school/teachers dependent for sure (same could be said for other systems).

To a large extent, the onus is on the teacher to generate interest. Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.

Yes, but as an university level educator I have to stress that the vast majority of students suck at understanding what they will need to know to be good at the juicy bits that interested them in the first place. Our task isn't just to teach them what they are interested in. Our task (among others) is to prepare them for a life after university in their profession(s) while giving them the practical skill of learning new subjects themselves. For example: Nearly nobody wants to do the math stuff, but nearly everybody will profit from knowing it after the fact (at least in the field I am in). Education is more than knowledge, but if we talk about knowledge it is the systematic accumulation of interlinked ideas and concepts that after a few years turn someone who had no idea into someone who can excell in their field. Nobody who likes to work on cars likes doing taxes, but nearly everybody who lives off working on cars will need to know how to do them. So the question will be, can a society afford to teach people only the fun bits?

I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.

But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.

I think the challenge that teachers have is that being “interested “ in something is a skill in itself. I never played a clarinet when I was a kid, maybe I would have like it, but never did that. If we assume that being interested is a function of household income/structure/ happiness than things get even worse.

Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.

I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.

But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.

I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."

I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another.

And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.

This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.

I was taught (when teaching for the military, actually) that leadership/teaching/etc. often talk about toolboxes but neglect a VERY important one.

You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.

This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).

That's exactly quoted at the start of the article?

"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "

Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.

What they need to figure out is what topics peaks their interest. Kids need exposure to a broad spectrum early, get interested, and then have mentors that know how to run with it and harness that motivation. Later on these kids can tolerate learning more mundane, boring stuff if that brings them closer to a goal they have set for themself. But motivation has to come first!

As someone who have been teacher for some time - students being forced to "figure it out" is the worst way to learn. For every subject you teach explicitly there is always a ton of knowledge to discover if students choose to do it, but being forced to do it very clearly damages students.

https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/no-explicit-instruc...

Seems to me that "figure it out" works better for learning depth of knowledge than it does for breadth of knowledge. That is, I can figure out the computer graphics tricks I need in order to get my project to draw fast, even if they're fairly deep and sophisticated tricks. I'm less likely to figure out, say, the humanities portion of a college education.

Why? At least for me, focused goals motivate more than diffuse ones. I could treat "the humanities" as a bunch of focused goals, but there would be a large number of them. That takes a fair amount of motivation.

Younger children will do what they are told more easily, but making learning a chore they do because they are told to rather than a joy will kill their love of learning and that is what causes the lack of motivation later on.

What aspects of pedagogy did you find most relevant? It does seem sad that in our industry, one where practical learning is necessary, that learning how to learn isn't really taught well. Often the worse ways to learn are those that seemed to be encouraged, mostly because it's the easiest way to monetize content.

> How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.

No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.

That might be fine for someone in the wrong college degree, but I - as a tax payer - need every sixth grader to learn essential the same things. I need kids to grow up able to provide life support for themselves so I can retire as by body fails from old age. I'm investing in the future of many kids I otherwise don't know or care about because making their life better makes mine better.

Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others

Depending on what you mean by "school" I'd disagree. Voluntary tertiary education makes sense, not all chosen professions may need or benefit from a degree.

But primary education needs to be a requirement for every child. Coming from a country with a large illiterate population, it's easy to see how hard their lives are compared to folks with an education but similar socio-economic backgrounds.

Now obviously implementing universal primary education and the details can be debated and need to be context specific.

They were already at a University. None of the students were required to be there. They all had the ability to just leave.

There has been a shift towards too many jobs requiring a tertiary education.

But good luck reversing that trend.

Yep, known as Bloom's Two Sigma Problem[1]. Like most hard problems we know the solution, but lack the appetite to implement.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

With AIs as most staff, this should be very reachable.

I thought I might be able to reach them, because I was never an A student. I was always kind of the underachiever who teachers knew was smart but would get mediocre grades because I wouldn't do the homework. I passed high school because I have a good enough memory to remember what was being taught in class and do fine on tests, but I'd still get middling-to-bad grades in high school because I wouldn't consistently do the homework.

To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.

But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.

I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.

I always felt that large urban centers should concentrate on specialized schools. In large cities there is a critical mass of students to fill specialized schools such as ones for; biology, programming, electrical, automotive etc...

Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.

There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.

All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.

Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.

The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.

Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.

I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class really understanding the subject.

I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.

I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.

Forced, presumably, by the student themself.

I was too. That's why it was so frustrating to me.

Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades.

I eventually more or less figured out how to force myself to learn things I didn't care about, and I did eventually get my bachelors and a masters, but that wasn't until my 30's.

> Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably.

Honestly, these are the most important things to learn. I spend a lot of time with my kids talking about ways to get your brain to do what you want.

Sounds too familiar. But I survived at school and I think that it helped a ton that I went to school at sixties (Soviet Union) – explicit teaching, homework and grades since age six, order in classrooms etc allowed me to practice handling my brain with babysteps since early age. If I look at classes my grandkids are put in – no way I'd survived in such chaotic and noisy environment with so few rules.

In America being willing historically depending on where you live still isn't enough for getting an education, healthcare or voting depending on where you live. But no worries there is a country on the other side of the world moving upwards.

I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.

A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].

Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.

[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.

[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.

Got to disagree, there's been a cohort of teachers pursuing that avenue of thought and all it's led to is colleges that shout down anything that'd pierce the monoculture and employees so politicized they lose some utility in actually doing the useful work that the company or entity exists to perform.

It's a side effect, perhaps, of the modern "main character syndrome". An electrician doesn't need political "leadership". He needs to know how to wire a house quickly, efficiently, and above all, safely. He doesn't need extensive training on how to help bring about a proletariat revolution. That's an example from the trades, but same in the white collar world; my employers accountants weren't hired because of any activism, but because they know accounting rules and regulations so the rest of the business doesn't have to think about those things as much.

If anything, modern generations need reminders that 99.99% of us are NPC's and the best thing we can do for the world, our families and those around us are to be really good, competent NPC's.

Let me also point out we landed on the moon without that view of education. People, on the moon, with all the technological and institutional advances necessary to make that happen.

>because all real problems are political

I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.

That's an odd comment below to see die from crm9125.

I'm not sure what's so offensive about it?

If it was downvoted, what interests could want to draw attention away from those sentences, and why?

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crm9125 13 hours ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]

Also there are about 2 billion children on earth, each with their own different idiosyncrasies. Good luck finding the grand unified theory of pedagogy for that.

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As a math teacher myself I want to say... A parent taking an interest and spending some quality time with their child over a subject can have a huge impact on their motivation to learn. Props to your mom.

There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it.

I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.

I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.

[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(