Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

This is the main reason I am ambivalent about the typical school (even the best ones I know about, and from first grade up through the undergraduate level). Compared to the amount of time spent, relatively little is focused on mastering all of the metacognitive skills required for expert problem solving in any domain. Almost all work is done at the shallowest surface level with shallow delayed feedback and an overemphasis on punishing minor errors or non-standard output formatting, and on judging/ranking the students. There is a parade of 'content' to get through, but little chance for students to work on problems which are truly difficult (for the student at their current level, e.g. taking more than a few hours to figure out a single problem) or larger-scale projects of personal interest. Very seldom is the work revisited or iterated. Ideas and methods from one discipline are seldom applied to another. Students are systematically discouraged from taking any kind of risk. (This is not primarily the fault of individual educators: scaling close personal attention from experts is just uneconomical given current societal resources available for education, and schools have many difficult constraints on pedagogy.)

A unique approach to scaling personal attention I've seen work wonders is having a good teacher choose several well-performing students per course to voluntarily tutor the next generation on course-wide group projects. In very few years there were about ten capable tutors, each personally and closely helping just one or two 4-5 person groups on large assignments -- overall grades, student satisfaction and projects' quality skyrocketed.

>There is a parade of 'content' to get through

Did you know that the content is also shallow? According to E.D. Hirsch [1], one of the reasons low-income and other marginalized groups do bad in schools after elementary school is because they lack the exposure to "cultural vocabulary" and end up feeling like a fish out of water when any more challenging material comes up.

So in line with the spirit of the OP, some of the "tooling" that we need in education is simply a deeper understanding of the national culture that all well-educated people have naturally adopted.

For instance, you could help low income students by simply having them watch shows like The Big Bang Theory and then maybe have a discussion about it in class. (And I say this as someone who doesn't like that show. But I know it speaks a very strong cultural language used by well-educated Americans.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy

For me, a big turning point, in learning anything really, came when I started looking at the bibliography/references. Any text can be considered "introductory", and I believe all classes are. If you really want to go deeper, you have to go to the references and study outside class, and no one tells you this.

I don’t think watching TV sitcoms is going to cut it. If you look at the density of ideas, richness of references, complexity of sentences, etc., pretty much any written material (novels, nonfiction aimed at teenagers, magazines, newspapers, ...) blows those out of the water. The teacher would do better to just read to the students for 30m every day, instead of having them watch a show for that time.

It's almost as if school was designed to create labour for factory work.

Although this is interesting: http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

I study at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. In each one of my courses all students devote countless hours to solving the problems the instructors throw at us, there is explicit assistance given if you need it and each problem you solve is then corrected & graded (if you want).

It‘s very satisfying, say in an algorithms class, to come up with an algorithm that satisfies the given runtime requirements, often taking ideas from multiple basis courses - and this is expected. It‘s always explicitly stated that the goal is not to, say, remember an algorithm like Dijkstra by heart, but to internalize how to come up with such an algorithm, as the exam is also structured around coming up with new algorithms.

I doubt you have to come up with Djikstra-like algorithms on your own, do you? (The Dijkstra algorithm is kind of groundbreaking and famous.) Applying Dijkstra is actually what we had to do once in one exam at TU Munich. It was the "Sechser Bremse" task though.

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