Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

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crispyambulance

    > ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue...

You're right. And that DOES WORK.

It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" (https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn).

The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics.

This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.

Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.

I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one.

I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests.

I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify.

To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.

    > Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement.

I think it could to some extent. For some students doing self-paced, online learning for lectures and then following that up with individualized/small-group problem-solving and discussion with peers/tutors/teachers certainly does work.

But kids in early high-school and younger? Someone really needs to be there for them all the time.

BTW, I also had a math instructor that got miraculous outcomes by finely grouping students within each classroom according to skill. She would individualize attention to each group, and then move individual students up or down to different groups depending on their ongoing performance/mastery. She literally had what I would recognize today as a kan-ban chart on a blackboard in the classroom and we, the students, were the projects/products. Thinking back about it now, it must have been a herculean effort. It was also the 70's in a Catholic school and she had total autonomy. I seriously doubt a talented teacher could get away with something like that today.

> I seriously doubt a talented teacher could get away with something like that today.

That's so much of the problem right now. My wife teaches and to be blunt, she is not treated as a professional. She is subject to the exact same kind of intrusive rules that minimum wage phone reps are subject to.

I'm going to do everything in my power when I have kids to send them to the most elite institutions possible from pre-K all the way to college.

Having come from nothing and seeing the vast difference in quality of education and outcomes, and seeing how terrible public schools are (even the good ones!) is really eye opening in one sense and not entirely surprising in another.

Seeing extremely un-intelligent kids from my high school go on to become public school teachers isn’t very reassuring.

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