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Comment by tabtab | Hacker News Reader

Somebody once said, "Bad teachers prepare kids for bad bosses, which they are likely to encounter." While I agree with that to some extent based on actual experience, taken too far it can hamper education. If you flunk math or English because of a bad teacher, it can set your entire education behind schedule. Perhaps make sure the difficult teachers are not in key subjects that have course path dependencies. Similar for books. (You will encounter poorly-written instructions in the work-place, which difficult books prepare you for.)

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Random anecdote. I once had a terrible English teacher. I was transferred into the class midstream (for unrelated reasons). After my first class I went to my new teacher and said, "I really love writing. In the previous class the teacher was planning on having a creative writing section. Will we have one in this class?" At which point the English teacher replied, "Writing has nothing to do with English and only one teacher in this school thinks otherwise".

I was a bit disheartened, but as English was my favourite class, I decided to just enjoy the other aspects of the class. We had a midterm exam for which half of the grade was an essay question on a novel we had been reading. I admit that I wanted to impress my teacher, so I read the book over and over again, practically memorising it. When I wrote my essay, I was able to quote passages of it. I was reasonably proud of my effort.

Imagine my shock when my paper was returned and I received a 0 for the essay! The only comment on the paper was "Terrible". In tears, I went to my teacher and asked, "What's wrong with the essay? I studied really hard and even added a lot of quotes". The teacher seemed surprised. "Oh. You actually care about this. Well, your essay was badly written. The quotes were nice, but everything else was terrible. I couldn't give you any marks".

Very frustrated, I went back to my parents and complained. They read my paper and to their credit they said, "Well, I wouldn't have given this a zero, but it could use some improvement". Then they taught me how to write. I spent the next 3-4 months writing essays every day because I was so frustrated.

Fast forward a few decades and I still love writing, thanks to my parents. I have mixed feelings about that teacher. Truly, she was messed up in serious ways. She tended to give high marks to cute boys that she tried to chat up after class. She would also randomly form some kind of hatred for individual students and would do her best to crush them under her heel. However, she was the first teacher who ever told me that my writing sucked. All my other teachers were so focused on my enthusiasm that they forgot to give me criticism. Without my terrible teacher, my parents wouldn't have intervened and I think I never would have learned to write.

It's a weird world.

I read the whole comment, but got stuck on the fact that the teacher said writing had nothing to do with English, but then gave an exam where half the grade was writing an essay. Weird.

Yeah. It was super weird. Over the years, my guess is that the rest of the department made her do a lot of stuff she didn't want to do. If particular students (like me) worked hard on those things, she punished them as a kind of retribution. I never could figure out what she thought English was about, though. She was super keen on reading literature and it was mandatory to fawn over famous writers. I couldn't figure out where she thought these books came from and how famous writers became famous. As I said, completely messed up. I transferred to a different school at the end of the year (my family was moving around), but I heard she had a nervous breakdown and retired from teaching, which is probably an incredibly good thing.

There's an interesting anecdote in the chess world. Mikhail Botvinnik [1] was a longtime former world champion and would go on to become the 'patriarch' of Soviet chess, which would dominate the world scene in chess for many decades. In the early 60s a child was invited to Botvinnik's school for an assessment and possible training. Upon evaluating the child and his games and 'feel' for chess, Botvinnik remarked, "This boy has no clue about chess, and there's no future for him in this profession."

The boy he was talking about was Anatoly Karpov [2]. Karpov would go on to become world champion once Bobby Fischer failed to defend his title. But far from winning by default he took the title and held onto it for many years becoming one of the most dominant and active world champions of all time. He ceded his title only once once Garry Kasparov came onto the scene.

And really I think these sort of anecdotes are rife among many who go onto achieve great things. One of the many reasons I think the current trends in school of trying to encourage and reward children, particularly taken to the extreme with things such as participation trophies, are likely deeply misguided and being driven by intuition rather than data in an area where the latter often contradicts the former.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Botvinnik

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Karpov

Early soviet 60s story is hardly reflection on current trend in schools.

I think that this sort of thing happen because it is hard to impossible to determine future development of child. Misjudging happen to both future winners and future losers. Same kid is often judged differently by different adults and same kid can perform differently one year then the other. Same adult can have bad day and badly judge kid or simply badly judge most of them.

Being told that you are bad by authority sux and you will remember it. And for winners it is good anecdote to tell later on, when they know it turned up false.

The question is what effect does coddling vs doubting have on an individual's personal development? Does actively praising individuals, regardless of whether they 'truly' deserve it, encourage them to work harder or does it encourage complacence? Some research I've read has indicated that the praise itself is what ends up being desired, with a diminishing interest on the field from which the praise was derived.

Ultimately the preponderance of these 'driven by adversity' anecdotes is something that I do not think is a coincidence. It certainly also worked as a motivator in my life. Had Karpov been openly praised and supported from the start would he have become the person he did? Had Karjakin not been hailed as imminent world champion from his youngest years, might he now stand above even Carlsen?

And these are genuine questions. I don't know the answer and I don't think anybody does. But it's something that I think is important since, if this turns out to be the case, it could mean that the educational path places such as the US have set upon could be entirely regressive.

> The question is what effect does coddling vs doubting have on an individual's personal development?

That is false dichotomy. Not just that you contrast complete extremes, you ignore options like "say what you really think". There is also massive difference between who says it, whether that talk is same as other say or rather outlier.

For example, in here, we are talking about kid meeting high level person in a chess official situation organized by school or camp. Bad chess players would not even go to that meeting to be evaluated. Quite clearly the kid was already in program, already seen value in chess and likely was once in a while praised by others.

> Does actively praising individuals, regardless of whether they 'truly' deserve it, encourage them to work harder or does it encourage complacence? Some research I've read has indicated that the praise itself is what ends up being desired, with a diminishing interest on the field from which the praise was derived.

How old the individual? What stage of learning the individual is? That matters a lot. Never ever believe anything nuanced about child raising and treatment unless age is specified. Are we talking 16, 12, 7, 3 years old? Are we talking about someone new to activity, trying to figure out whether they like it and whether they could be good? Or rather experienced player who already like it and all his socialization and identity centers about that activity? There are massive differences.

> Ultimately the preponderance of these 'driven by adversity' anecdotes is something that I do not think is a coincidence. It certainly also worked as a motivator in my life. Had Karpov been openly praised and supported from the start would he have become the person he did? Had Karjakin not been hailed as imminent world champion from his youngest years, might he now stand above even Carlsen?

Do you know that Karpov was not openly praised as he learned? There is an anecdote of a single criticism. Was the "you dont have what it takes" really the only feedback he got? That is unlikely, because such kids would never ever met Mikhail Botvinnik. Such kids would be removed from chess program and redirected elsewhere.

> And these are genuine questions. I don't know the answer and I don't think anybody does. But it's something that I think is important since, if this turns out to be the case, it could mean that the educational path places such as the US have set upon could be entirely regressive.

It is not that US is flawless, but they do have good results in education in a lot of places. They are country of differences, with both awesome results in some places and pretty bad results in others.

But what you need to do to bad bosses is fire them, or leave them. That's hardly what a school teaches you to do in case you end up with a bad teacher.

Not always easy during an economic slump.

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