Comment by mattwilsonn888 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattwilsonn888 | Hacker News Reader

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> On the contrary. Part of TFA’s point is that, like many other fields, outsiders usually have a much poorer idea than they think of the hows and whys of teaching.

So you're saying those attempting to restructure the classroom should not take into account this blog post? You seemed to fail to recognize the value of this blog post, or sharing knowledge in general: you give others an express pass to knowledge that you have gained through first hand experience. That is the meat of the article: common pitfalls new teachers trying new ideas fall into - if your goal is to change education you must experiment, and if you are going to experiment, this blog post is invaluable.

Forever more an experimenter attempting a classroom restructuring who read this post now has artificial first hand experience to draw from - to state that anyone attempting to do such a thing should ignore this piece and generate first hand experience is asking them now to retread mapped territory. Unless your prescription is that people shouldn't experiment - a notion which warrants no respect.

> So you're saying those attempting to restructure the classroom should not take into account this blog post? You seemed to fail to recognize the value of this blog post, or sharing knowledge in general...

Oh come on, this isn’t Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it’s a blog post of “things I didn’t understand until my first year on the job”.

TFA is a great post! It’s particularly interesting to laymen, and maybe rookie post-secondary faculty who have been taught a lot about their subject and very little (if anything) about how to teach. But none of it’s novel for anyone who’s been on the other side of the desk.

Talking about education practice in public forums is hard because everyone has a stake, and everyone thinks their experience as a student or parent plus a little common sense makes them an expert. Again, see literally any HN thread about education. TFA does a great job of reminding laymen that often those Chesterton fences are there for a reason. But sorry, I don’t think it’s a rejection of the idea of “sharing knowledge in general” to say that “visionaries attempting to restructure education” probably shouldn’t be laymen.

So, okay, “on the contrary” in my OP was a little strong. Not that anyone shouldn’t read it. But just because something is new to you doesn’t actually make it new.

I'd like to see in a forum for dentists a thread where they offer clever suggestions for how to change software development. Clearly, all these dentists have used plenty of software before.

They would have seemingly great ideas like "programmers should get 10% of their pay docked each time I encounter a bug in a program" or "the real solution is to hire someone to test the program from start to finish before releasing it".

I bet programmers on Hacker News would be livid upon hearing these suggestions, but seem to have no problem announcing their clever solutions about other disciplines (not excluding myself).

Terrible analogy. What authority might a team of QA testers have on restructuring the methods for software development? Perhaps not as much as a software developer, but certainly enough to grope at and possibly conceive of new and useful ideas. A student is a QA tester for a classroom, they are not a dentist using a program, they were involved in the entire process and saw basically every mechanism with varying levels of ignorance on motivations.

Comparing a student to an end product consumer of software development is an embarrassingly long stretch - teaching is an art, but its not that complicated nor disconnected from its patrons.

Students are users of a class, as much as a dentist is a user of a dental software application. Neither were involved in the making of the class or software. Both were delivered the experience as designed by the course staff (instructor and/or TAs), or software team. Both only see the final product after months or years of development, done by specialists trained for many years even before that.

The error you're making is stating that "students are involved in the entire process" which is laughable. Many classes have gone through years of iteration, and even new courses take many months to develop before students set foot in the classroom, not to mention the years of experience and education needed to get the instructor to the point that they can even make a class in several months.

The only way you can refute is by being obtuse. QA testers and dentists using software are not the same, not at all - that was the premise for my whole point and you refuted it by pretending I didn't say it.

I assume you are a teacher, so what's truly laughable is that I must explain this to you: teaching students is at least a factor more intimate than delivering a finished piece of software or other commodity to a user - its also a factor less complicated to deliver a MVP. If we are talking textbooks, then you're objections apply - I would hope teaching in your mind occupies a distinct space from textbooks.

Surely many students displeased with instruction will be ignorant with some nuances and limitations of structuring a class, but the gap between good prescription and naive wishes is not a half career's worth of experience when it comes to teaching. I'm sorry to burst your bubble: Teaching is not rocket science, it is not software engineering - the prestige a teacher earns comes from either their qualifications in an advanced field or their effectiveness in imparting knowledge (or perhaps their proclivity to allow cheating depending on how you measure).

There are surely many teachers instructing arithmetic that understand teaching better than doctorate professors. Are you going to tell me that a piece of writing outlining common pitfalls, an earnest reader, and a creative mind really get you no further than a fresh, apathetic track-following graduate when it comes to innovation? Get real.

If teaching is the only thing that makes you good at teaching then I guess we should ignore all sharing of information about it, even from those who are good at it. Well, or we could just ignore your sentiments about who should be allowed to innovate in public.

Get real, man. The whole post is premised with "these are the first things you learn on the job when you try and innovate the classroom." I'll repeat myself again saying that any educator who actually is going to try and change parts of the protocols, procedures and practices for the better (rather than just say it can't be done every-time an idea crosses their path) are either going to learn the hard way and waste time, or take into account posts and experiences like this blog post lays out and not waste time trying what's been proven to fail.

Your argument, if it has any relevance to what I wrote, is that these teachers shouldn't innovate because they don't have experience teaching. Okay, well you can spend twenty years running a classroom in all the old ways you like, and you still won't have gained much valuable experience when it comes to new procedures, considering you haven't tried any. When it comes to innovating or experimenting, the most valuable experiences are those related to attempts at innovation and experimentation, so its quite obvious the opening moves and results to those attempts are invaluable to anyone trying to change things.

And yes, like it or not, people sharing their wisdom like in this blog post will make new teachers in general much wiser than the generation of teachers the author was in when they first started - that's the point of sharing knowledge graciously. Teachers, new or old, who have first hand experience or who take writing like this to heart absolutely are better equipped to innovate the classroom than those who have not. The experience only mantra is ironically enough antithetical to pedagogy in general.

> Your argument, if it has any relevance to what I wrote, is that these teachers shouldn't innovate because they don't have experience teaching.

Haha okay, if you want to read my post that way there’s not much anyone can do for you.

If you can’t understand why “visionaries trying to reform education need to read this entry level blog post, and having read it I will now do the exact thing it warns against” gets eyes rolling there isn’t a whole lot else to say. I get that TFA seemed really exciting and innovative to you. It isn’t. It’s a surface-level précis of things any practitioner knows. Which is fine! Because, once again, it’s written for laymen.

If you actually want to dig into the nuts and bolts, here’s a book recommendation that explores some of the points raised in TFA in depth: https://www.amazon.com/Grading-Equity-Matters-Transform-Clas...

You seem to be veering. I don't even know what TFA is, and I certainly wasn't talking about it - get a grip man. Are you seriously trying to tell me that information about opening moves that don't work isn't going to be useful to new teachers? Get your act together.

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