Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

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"I'm a classroom teacher and I'm totally not obsolete, here are talking points on effective teaching methods, which only a person like me can perform!"

I don't buy it.

I didn't pay attention in class for most of my school time and that was before any of the more modern distractions existed.

To do well in school, you need to:

1. Capture and memorize factoids that will be on the test

This can be done the roundabout way by taking notes, which does help with memory retention. It's however far more efficient to just copy other more diligent people's notes and memorize those.

2. Understand mechanisms and systems

This requires you to work on your own, try things, figure things out, getting error feedback. Schools are notoriously awful at this, with 20+ kids you just can not spend the time to give meaningful advice, to give enough feedback in a timely manner. You send kids home with homework and they get results a day later or worse. The kids that do really well here usually get help from parents/siblings/externals.

Neither of these require teachers to do any classroom work.

Of course, there's the whole social and daycare aspect of schools which can be beneficial or oppressive, depending on the teachers and environment. Let's just not pretend that actual learning needs a classroom environment, or that it's better in classroom environment, because we don't actually know that yet. Classroom teachers talking their book doesn't help.

Fully agree.

For 1 you need preproduced material: Wikipedia, Khan academy, Anki cards. Teachers only act as gatekeepers here.

For 2 you need interactive toys like a Logo Turtle or Minecraft. Teachers act as coaches.

A teacher's job, if they're doing it right, is not to provide continual feedback to 20+ kids, but to create a space which focuses them on learning a particular skill or achieving a particular goal. Kids learn best when working with other kids, usually by modeling one another and taking the best bits as they go. It's continual exploration with an expert on hand to help when they get stuck or see some basic skills training.

I think part of the reason teaching is the way it is currently is because if you create that space for kids to work with other kids then anywhere from 20-60% of them will slack off or disrupt others. Not that it doesn't happen with the current system but it's less visible.

Like you say, it's not visible. We are forcing children to sit idle and pretend to listen to the teacher, which is an entirely unnatural thing for to them to do for several hours per day.

I would argue that children would actually learn a lot more social skills by interacting in this "disruptive" and "slacking off" kind of way, especially nowadays where children are otherwise locked up at home by overprotective parents. Those skills are far more valuable than whatever trivia the curriculum is mostly made up of.

Increasing break times I think would have a better effect at improving children's social skills. Perhaps it's a difficult pill for educators to swallow that the most important skill children learn at school doesn't involve them.

By that standard pretty much nobody is doing it "right".

I'd disagree. As someone who has been in teaching nearly two decades there is a large contingent of capable teachers who are doing it right. Some do it within the system their school or district has set up and some in spite of it.

> It's however far more efficient to just copy other more diligent people's notes and memorize those.

I did this a lot and while it was the optimal approach for passing tests, my note taking skills are quite poor today. Though I don't know if taking my own notes would have helped improve that or not.

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