Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher | Hacker News Reader

Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher

nytimes.com

83 pointssperant27 comments

By the way, one thing I have discovered (the hard way, mostly) in teaching as an adjunct is that there is no penalty for being boring but there can be a penalty for being interesting, at least for many values of "interesting." I wrote a post "How do you know when you’re being insensitive? How do you know when you’re funny?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2014/12/22/how-do-you-know-when-your...) that deals in part with these issues.

The tedium of the school system is real, but it is also in part a reaction to a simple nature fact: A single unhappy student (or parent) can cause a great deal of stress and a great number of problems for a given teacher or set of administrators. Consequently, the default of the individual teacher is towards material and processes that are inoffensive—and easy to grade on a pass-fail basis. The worry for many teachers and administrators is about the worst-case scenario.

I used to wonder why school is so boring and I used to promise myself that if I were in charge it'd be different. Now I know why.

...high school is wondrously efficient at making interesting things dull..."

Ain't that the truth. I learned that not because I recognized it my day to day as a student, but because I had one or two teachers in high school that were absolutely exceptional (I was lucky, some kids encounter none) and the droning background noise of the rest of education became very stark in comparison.

It's impossible to teach hundreds of students a year and make everything fantastical the whole time (not to mention that some kids will never give one f*ck about US History or whatever their natural predilections dictate) but man oh man does the current Common Core driven, test-everything, no-rote-learning-except-test-all-rote-learning way of looking at education just crush students.

And you don't have to ask a student - most teachers today will bemoan the degree to which their hands are tied to properly educate and, more importantly, make learning fun, by bureaucracies run by educational theorists who have never spent a day in a classroom.

Standardized testing really doesn't help this either. Yes you could take a couple of weeks to do a deep dive on an interesting topic to get the students engaged, but to pass the test they need to be memorizing the same dates and names that everybody in the country has to memorize in order to pass the test.

Granted, most teachers were doing that anyway, but for the few who bucked the trend they were reined in by the SOLs.

I can think of three high school classes that were great because of the teachers (an English class, a geometry class, and a shop class), and maybe three that were great because of their self-learning nature (my first programming class, an engineering class, and an after-school electronics+engineering class taught by the shop teacher).

For everything else, I've got to agree. Take my US History class. I think it's important to know the events that shaped our culture, know roughly the order they came in, and about when they happened and why. The name and date of a 19th century law involving share croppers? Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it.

"Sure, I'll be able to write an essay on it for the test, because I know that's the requirement, but ask me 6 months later, and I won't be able to tell you much about it."

Here's a secret: That's the point of the class. School is mainly there to teach you to take assignments, follow directions, and cough up results on demand, irrespective of whether you actually care about the subject. It's a much-in-demand business skill.

> Here's a secret: That's the point of the class. School is mainly there to teach you to take assignments, follow directions, and cough up results on demand, irrespective of whether you actually care about the subject. It's a much-in-demand business skill.

I get tired of people dumping on schools.

The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into.

There are many reasons for people to not like school (social aspects--both personal and community--certainly being a big problem), but, I have ZERO sympathy for anyone who complains that it was boring, uninteresting drudgery from an educational standpoint.

Yes, everybody has bumped into the teacher that is retired-in-place--these people exist in any long-lived institution including companies. But, dear God, most teachers are desperate for any student to show even a modicum of interest in what they are teaching. Even in the worst schools, there always seems to be a handful of teachers lighting the way.

If you found your education boring, it's because you didn't exert even the minimum amount of effort necessary to get the attention of those teachers. And that's your own damn fault.

Even assuming that bad teachers are the norm, there's always an interesting way to look at any subject. A curious mind will find those. Start by reading the textbook - again, some are awful, but most aren't.

> "The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into."

I almost stopped reading after that bit and I kind of wish I did.

there is some, some truth to what you are saying. but to paint this picture that "the problem with school" is the students.... is disingenuous at best, completely ignorant at worst.

> The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into.

So, we agree there's a problem. It's immaterial if the issue is in the school itself or in the students. The material fact is that the tool you're using (the current educational system) isn't having the effect that you want (imparting useful information and useful ways to think about it).

Say that I've got a polished, high-quality product, heavily advertised, easily available, and cheap. But: sales numbers are terrible. Is it the potential customers that are the problem, or is it something about the product? Put another way, is it more useful to fight against the nature of the customers, or to modify the product into something that will convince them to buy and use it?

If most people are unmotivated, I don't think it's reasonable or constructive to just say "all well, they should've just tried harder". I think it's more useful to assume that they aren't inherently slackers and diagnose and fix the problems in the system to improve the experience for the students and the outcome for society, overall.

> It's immaterial if the issue is in the school itself or in the students.

Um, that is, in fact, kind of a VERY big deal. If the problem is the students, your solutions are mostly about fixing things outside the school.

> The material fact is that the tool you're using (the current educational system) isn't having the effect that you want (imparting useful information and useful ways to think about it).

I somewhat disagree with this. The system appears to be generating a certain average level of education. We would like the system to be generating a higher average level of education. No one has yet shown that there is a better way of doing this than the current system, sadly, without expending a lot more focused resource than people are politically willing to exert.

> I think it's more useful to assume that they aren't inherently slackers and diagnose and fix the problems in the system to improve the experience for the students and the outcome for society, overall.

The problem isn't that students don't want an education--the problem is that there is almost always something right now (sports, guys/girls, video games, Facebook/Snapchat/Line) that they want more.

This is what a school is fighting against. Good luck.

> No one has yet shown that there is a better way of doing this than the current system, sadly, without expending a lot more focused resource than people are politically willing to exert.

John Holt wrote "how children fail" and "how children learn" at least 40 years ago. John Gatto wrote "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" 25 years ago.

The education problem is very well defined, but it can't be fixed or addressed because of inertia, and because of who benefits from the status quo.

> John Holt wrote "how children fail" and "how children learn" at least 40 years ago. John Gatto wrote "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" 25 years ago.

Holt is not a particularly good figure to cite to back up your assertions. "Education" books are like most "business" books, very little research and data to back up scores of anecdotes. This doesn't automatically make him wrong, but many of his ideas have been overturned and refuted by actual research and investigation.

However, your point stands and we are in agreement with the fact that there is no political will to expend the resource required to improve educational attainment.

We've got the example of places like Finland, that are supposed to be much more successful than U.S. schools. They've got the same distractions, technological and social, that are available in the rest of the world.

It's a very different country than the U.S., but it gives me hope that there's a better way to structure our school system.

> It's a very different country than the U.S., but it gives me hope that there's a better way to structure our school system.

I am watching how they integrate refugees to see if the "system" or the "homogeneity" is the cause of better educational outcomes.

So far, the "system" seems to be losing to the "homogeneity" argument.

That's a very comforting idea. There's a scarier idea: school is not there for anything. It's not meant to teach you to conform, or to avoid conformity, or to remember who Douglas McArthur was, or to make you forget; it's not meant for anything. It is not meant. You are incidental to all this, and so am I, and so is everybody else. There is no purpose. There is no goal.

Heh. Well, they failed at teaching that, then. I've learned to quickly do the things that interest me and leave the rest languishing on a "to do" pile for as long as I can justify.

Could common core be saved if the NLCB mandatory testing and rating of schools be removed?

It's the testing and what's being tested that sounds mind killing.

IMO, the whole idea that all children must exit school knowing the exact same things is the problem, not any specific thing like NCLB or Common Core. The people designing our education system appear to think of children as a raw material to be processed into a uniform commodity, and that's where all the trouble comes from.

Also, in a similar vein: SlateStarCodex Gives A Graduation Speech http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...

In the same vein, sure, but an order of magnitude more grim. And more beautiful. I'll recommend this article until the sun burns out. Or until the educational system gets its act together -- but I repeat myself.

My high school was an interesting experience. It was a poor area and they expected few of the students to go to further education - but rather than use that as an excuse to treat the students like losers, the school tried to include some of the spread of college and vocational-school classes. I ended up taking lessons on archery, welding, video editing, and Latin, among other things.

The article was fun to read, deceptively informal. In fact the writing is brilliant. Almost every sentence has some delightful, unexpected word or phrase instead of cliche. It also relies heavily on sound. Even when you read silently, you hear the words. So alliteration, echo, rhyme, and rhythm are still important.

I thought the writing was boring. I had to skip around to get to the part where he hated schools. Then he didn't really make any conclusion anyway except "less structure, lol"

I'm with you: I found it rambling and unappealing.

If you liked the writing, check out the 1988 novel The Mezzanine by the same author (Nicholson Baker). He's also written about Wikipedia (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia...).

During high school I became aware of community colleges and it actually occurred to me that all the homework and stress involved with maintaining a high GPA simply wasn't worth it. I took easy electives and barely passed everything else.

Lovely read.

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