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Comment by rixrax | Hacker News Reader

Monoculture? I don’t think teaching is binary. There are of course universally really awesome teachers, as well as terrible ones. But between them, there are all kinds of teachers with all kinds of teaching styles and crazy experiments. It may not be equal for everyone, but I think it’s much better than monoculture.

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Just a little empiricism: During my studies, 95 % of the teaching was somewhere between "not good" and "horrible / comically bad".

There were just one or two persons in the whole faculty known for good teaching. This was acknowledged by all students I came in touch with.

--> There is a kind of teaching that is uniquely perceived as "good" among the people I came in touch with.

The same holds for teachers known for really bad teaching.

That written, teaching _was_ mostly perceived binary.

There was fairly little overlap where teaching styles were perceived "good" from some and "bad" from others.

Then include heterogeneity of approach in your ranking system. Even if we do this we still have a rank order from which we can select the N best and give them a scalable platform through which they can reach large numbers, and be better off than under the archaic approach of a bijective mapping from random teacher X to Y students (Y less than 200), where the quality of X is probably dominated in a Pareto sense by any single teacher in the top N.

Caveat here that I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I would also say that this fits well with the part of the teaching process that can be scaled with no downsides, eg lectures. But TA sessions etc can't be scaled as well and such an approach wouldn't fit.

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