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Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

In April I left google to teach people how to code. I teach for free and I focus primarily on low income adults who are making less than 30k / year in the bay area.

Throughout their lives, my students have felt that they were 'behind' and they are not good enough. This mindset creates adults with low self esteem, which then prevents them from learning. Many times, they nod their head in understanding when they really meant (I have no idea what is going on, but I'll burn the midnight oil and learn it on the Internet after the class). This mindset is incredibly destructive and forces people to memorize things instead of taking the time to understand things.

Recently, we have switched to a curriculum where everyone learns at their own pace. The ones who are ahead are tasked with teaching and helping others. The ones who are slower will teach the next batch of students and take their time to really learn the material. This works for us.

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It's interesting that you bring up learning pace as such a strong signal. Most of the material I've read focusing on learning types and effectiveness seems to gloss over the speed that one learns (which I imagine must vary with material) and a great deal of coursework is very rigid with regards to schedules.

I wonder, ignoring for a moment the practicalities of this, if a freeform educational system, allowing students to "rank up" at their own pace, might be worth persuing. What's the benefit of forcing slower students to rush through their work, and requiring that faster students move only as fast as the rest of their class allows?

I suspect a lot of students don't have the discipline to cope without a schedule and hard deadlines.

> The ones who are slower will teach the next batch of students

Could you expand on the reasoning behind this?

Presumably, they are not teaching material that they are still struggling with. Are they teaching the previous material, which they have understood?

If you are having students teach each other, I would have thought that quicker-to-learn students would be better candidates to teach the material.

The best teachers are the ones who had to learn the most. People who just "get it" are bad teachers because they didn't have to go through a process to understand.

I think, from a different perspective, teaching things can help you to understand them more deeply - so if there are areas they are still unclear on, the next set of students can help ask the right questions so they can learn.

I notice this myself when I'm teaching people things - in many cases I erroneously come off as "the expert" in things even when I mostly gained expertise in it by responding to the very questions that people are asking.

That's not always the case, but the notion of "unconscious competence" is relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

"Unconscious competence" is particularly rife in the functional programming community. An inability to explain does not necessarily mean you just "got it", but if you've understood it, you can't necessarily explain it.

That's an interesting observation. This hasn't been my experience. I think it may partially also just be misunderstanding, though. There are obviously more than just 2 groups of students: those that get it with no studying and those that struggle with the material.

I'll agree with you that the top part of the distribution that "just get it" are not going to be the best teachers. But, I doubt the bottom portion are either. Rather, students in the middle, who struggled to understand the material, but ultimately came to a good understanding are the best group.

Granted, I'm just speculating and leaning on my own experiences. So, I really am interested to hear otherwise.

How does one join your program? :)

Currently, only through referrals (from current students) and we find people through our local library (We volunteer there every Saturday to help people learn how to code. When we have openings we invite them to join)

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