Learning by Doing
dewanemutunga.com
dewanemutunga.com
My colleagues and I often discuss how we would've found it helpful if during our childhood we were taught pragmatic skills such as budgeting and resolving interpersonal conflicts—skills that we require on a day to day basis.
I feel like all schools should be preparing students in this way.
This is where many people undervalue the experience of having even a menial job at school age. I'm sure this school is amazing and this kind of experience at a younger age sounds great, but the best "real work" experience is "real work". That where you interact with strangers, adults often from different backgrounds than you, who aren't present because they're paid to watch for your interest, where you get a paycheck, and where you can be fired. I don't think that's an experience for which a school can provide an adequate substitute.
It takes a lot to do the serving job well, you have to learn how to:
1) Communicate well, both listening and speaking
2) Keep track of many different tasks at a single time (put in orders, take out orders from the kitchen, get someone extra sauce, etc)
3) How to make people happy, especially when they're upset
Those are just a few things you'll get better at by being a server. I had five jobs before I started my career in tech, and serving in my opinion was the hardest, and I didn't do it for as long as the other jobs I had. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't teach me the most about human to human interaction.
A side bonus to serving is that you'll have much more respect for the people in that industry. It's not easy, and it's not the best paying, but being able to understand the waiters and waitresses serving you will help you make their lives easier, thus resulting in better service for you and those with you.
There are classes, sure. They also manage a garden, and their own cafeteria. There is a week or two class trip every year -- a trip they are partly responsible for and that actually works well rather than being a horror show.
And there is emphasis on social skills. Not some simplistic "zero tolerance" punishment policy, but, well, I guess, real understanding. Anyway, my friends say it is night and day compared to what their daughter was encountering, before.
This is in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota -- say, a nearby town. My friends are in construction and health care. They do ok, but are not rolling in cash. But, they made this work for their daughter.
I can only think, if I'd had the chance, I would have jumped at it. My school system was far from "bad", in the demographic sense. But their daughter's experience is night and day, compared to mine.
Kids should be learning how the real world works. Something families and home circumstances don't always provide. And I see no reason for schools to be prisons of boredom and the lowest common denominator. They should be able to harbor diversity, including but not only academic diversity, just like the real world does.
Learning by doing, indeed.
8s, 9s, 10s, 11s, 12s : USD $44,300/yr for 2017/2017 https://www.cityandcountry.org/page/admissions/tuition
What we want to know is the integral of U(t) for t in [0, inf), the rate of users joining at time t integrated across all time.
But U(t) = H(t) + E(t), where H is hard to measure (feedback, effects over time, etc) and E(t) is some "simple" to measure function.
What people actually measure is E(t) over a short time window, say t in [0,1], because H(t) more or less contributes a constant in such a small window. This is then used as a proxy for U(t), to adjust their strategy.
The problem comes in that H(t) might dominate E(t) over the "lifetime" integral of U(t), while seeming irrelevant in the short term you can measure. (Think users from establishing a reputation.)
If your optimizations from your measurements increase E(t) at the cost of H(t) (as they often do -- knowingly), then it's possible you've actually decreased the "lifetime" integral of U(t) while making all "positive" adjustments.
It's the stats equivalent of leaving the trail up a mountain that passes through foothill valleys -- just going "up" without a plan is unlikely to climb a mountain, you need some broader vision.