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Comment by blasdel | Hacker News Reader

Zed, you do not want to go anywhere near an education graduate school. All these opportunities are yours except D.Ed. — Attempt no landings there.

If you think you've been a poor fit at some companies, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Education departments attract some of the very worst students, people pathologically stricken with know-nothingness. The graduate schools then take the more craven among them, the ones that realize that their school-system contracts give them huge automatic raises for getting higher degrees, often paid for too. They often come out as worse teachers after having had the recently recycled fad pedagogies pumped through them, which they then regurgitate in a game of telephone onto their students.

If you want to work on some stellar CS education stuff, try to talk your way into Kay's VPRI. Stay the hell away from Ed schools, they'd make your blood boil.

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Oh I know Education departments are mostly crap. Thanks to Constructivism and the influence of stupid communist dogma from Paulo Freire.

You don't understand — those are the good parts

The rest is far, far worse.

Say what you like about the tenets of Constructivism, Zed, at least it's an ethos. I'm surprised that you'd have beef with it — you don't even like Papert's Constructionism?

As easily misinterpreted and misapplied as liberation pedagogy can be, at least it gives the non-subject-matter-experts something to apply themselves at, something they could actually help children with even if they're as dumb as a bag of rocks. It's definitely not a good fit for you, but it's far from worthless.

I'm a scientist mostly, so I prefer Direct Instruction from Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley C. Becker and learned quite a bit about how to teach effectively from them. What's interesting is DI is the only method with solid evidence backing its success. Lots of it. The others are mostly just bullshit rhetoric.

Would you like it if you weren't the author, director, and performer of the script?

DI does have it's merits — it does keep bright assholes like us from dominating the classroom as students in a mixed setting. You can also get through the material a lot faster without getting mired in repetitive interactivity, but the script has to be perfect, or you can skip past a crucial facet without noticing, and there's very little opportunity to get back on the rails, especially because from the lecturer's perspective the resulting complaints are difficult to distinguish from the usual whining.

Part of the problem with curriculum design is that trials generally only occur with either uniformly high-achieving or uniformly delinquent students, both of whom can abide nearly any method if it's intentionally delivered.

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