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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>* I'm all for moderation but the kids I have come across in my K-12 experience, if they're not paying attention, are generally pretty bored out of their minds with whatever else is going on in the classroom. Which begs the question; whose fault could that possibly be? The child's or the adult in the room?*

Well, the kids are supposed to learn things, not to be entertained.

Sometimes the two can coincide, and it's great and inspiring when it does, but the idea that learning must be an entertaining activity only does a disservice to learning, and hampers the progress of the learners. Sometimes it's just hard practice with no fun, and it's done for the sake of learning, not for giggles.

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Completely agree.

The kids who wanted to do well always learned the material no matter how boring the material was taught and the kids who didn't want to learn didn't learn a thing even with the most engaging teacher. Teachers can only do so much.

Kids are not so binary.

Plenty of schools have random assignment for students yet teacher A's students vastly outperform teacher B's students. Sure, the best student in B is generally better than the worst student in A but they are still generally behind the best in A.

Do you have any research to back this up? I'm curious.

Yes, I am not sure what part you want support for. But, if this interests you I suggest you do a little research on your own.

(http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Staffingst...)

I have done research and haven't found that "plenty of schools have random assignment for students yet teacher A's students vastly outperform teacher B's students".

I'm very well aware of studies showing that teachers make an impact. That much is obvious. What I'm not aware of is any significant group of schools that regularly use random assignment.

Here is one interesting example: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21407 However, this really comes down to researches not being idiots.

If you mean at the school level, that's a policy choice which is far from universal. However, their are a lot of schools and a meaningful number do random student assignment.

Stand and Deliver was based on a true story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante

Learning the right things, in the right ways, is entertaining. I'd argue that school is neither about learning nor about entertainment. School is that experiment with the monkeys and the ladder. Its original purpose was making mindless factory workers. Students became teachers who taught more teachers and so on. What is the actual purpose of school nowadays? It's a place where you can leave your children while you work and it's a checkbox on a CV.

The school I attended was founded in 1206. I don't think training factory workers was a top priority back then.

Schools exist for the same reason that farms and factories exist: it's a lot more efficient having specialised workers (in this case teachers) who can do the job far more effectively (in this case teach 30 or so children) than having every person do it themselves (in this case every parent take a large portion of time out of their day to teach their own child individually).

The alternative to school was for girls to help out around the house until they were married off and for boys to either learn their father's trade and then do that for the rest of their lives or get apprenticed off to whoever could take them and then do _that_ for the rest of their lives.

School helps children create a life for themselves. If children don't learn anything there they'll find far fewer paths open to them later on.

The kids are fed a sugar cereal diet, get no exercise, and are told to sit still and learn damnit. Meanwhile the rest of their existence is highly stimulating video games and instant gratification.

I blame the adults.

The kids who are at school because they like to learn don't need a teacher. The other kids should learn to hunt and be strong.

Since when is just being able to hold a student's attention 75% of the time entertainment? It's much more nuanced than my original comment, I understand, but the assumption that simply removing the device (which I agree is the way to go) will suddenly get kids involved in their learning doesn't take into account all the missteps that occur before the child or teacher enter that classroom. Whether it's staffing, fiscal planning at an admin level that reduces actual classroom instruction, lack of classroom management PD for staff that may need it or a permissive parent.

> the assumption that simply removing the device...

I don't think anyone is suggesting this is the silver bullet, but it's one less distraction towards the goal of getting kids to learn things and also to learn how to learn.

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