A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute | Hacker News Reader

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

nytimes.com

45 pointslsr740 comments

“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

In my experience this may be empirically false. My 4 year old could barely count, but after spending 2 months in the summer playing a couple of iPad games, he's adding 2 digit numbers and subtracting 1 digit numbers, and doing simple math puzzles. His elder brother couldnt do those till Kindergarten, and I dont think the difference was aptitude.

Yeah, I learned my early math skills primarily by playing math games on a Mac 128k. That person doesn't know what they're talking about - interactive teaching systems can be engaging in a way that pen/paper has no hope of matching.

On the other hand, “[...] if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.” (last sentence from the article)

Playing "Maths Circus" and Lemmings on beige macs were the most powerful educational tools for teachers to use as a reward for good work to get me to perform well. Sadly that stopped a grade or two later, and my interest dropped, and so did my performance.

Hopefully soon our computational freedoms for big actual work won't be relegated to computer monitors. Laptops and tablets are great, but they make you focus/stare at one area for a long time. There is often a wall behind that monitor, we are basically staring at it, for many hours, most of my adult life is staring at a wall.

http://worrydream.com/KillMath/

There's a Microsoft Research concept video that showed people interacting with computational environments within their natural environment. Statistical information could be represented for any data needed, and people were not bound to their seats. Problem is, I don't see things being able to change much for people that work in the terminal.

Basically, what I am trying to say with my thoughts is, the positives of both worlds will interwine and the negatives of both will mostly disappear.

When I think back to when I was in first or second grade I can see a direct correlation between technology and the areas I've always excelled at. For instance, I've always been very strong in History. When I was at an elementary school level I would come home and play World War 2 themed video games, Oregon Trail, Age of Empires, etc. this sparked huge amounts of interest in me, and led me deeper into these subjects. My parents told me a story about how when I was in third grade my class got to go to our school library. I went up to a librarian, and asked her for a book on The French resistance in Paris during the Nazi occupation. The reason why I asked? I had been playing the medal of honor video game. So from my end, I think technology can definitely be a boon to education, as long as you're making sure that the content that children are getting from them is good.

Which apps? Would like to teach some basic math to my 4 yr old.

I've had success with Monkey Math, Math Bingo and Rocket Math, and later Grow Your Garden. I should say its not that you let your 4 yr old unattended with these games, but you work with him - teach him methods but dont give him solutions, stop before he's bored, and definitely let him have some fun time also.

Maybe they don't let students use computers because when you search for information about the Waldorf schools, you get all sorts of stuff about them being some kind of cult.

In my admittedly limited research, I found information about astral bodies, Atlantis, soul nourishment, clairvoyance and and a dislike of the left handed.

From the Skeptic's Dictionary:

Waldorf schools reflect Steiner's education theories, which hold that children advance through three stages....during the first stage, birth to age 7, the spirit inhabiting the body of the child is still adjusting to its surroundings, hence lower grades in Waldorf school offer minimal academic content. Reading is not introduced until second or third grade. During the second stage, ages seven to 14, children are said to be driven primarily by imagination and fantasy, so students are introduced to mythology. After age 14, the third stage, an astral body is believed to be drawn into the physical body, creating the onset of puberty.

From my admittedly limited research I found these quotes:

"It really has become like a cult." "...is more like a cult..." "...has gained a cult-like following." "...a cult hero..." "...is growing a cult-like following..."

Ops... that was my limited research of YC.

I went to wikipedia with my limited research and you can too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education I found quotes like: "The approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning", "In early childhood learning is largely experiential, imitative and sensory-based."

Maybe it's a good thing for kids to be allowed to be kids while they are kids... just saying.

Waldorf schools are based on some crazy-nutty voodoo philosophy.

They also, more or less coincidentally, work really, really well.

more or less coincidentally

That's too easy. How can we know that? On the contrary, it would be surprising if how well the schools work were unrelated to their philosophy.

I think their are just approaching the problem from the wron side. They are right in saying that the computer is being used wrong, but wrong in saying that not using the computer is the solution. I'm more in alignment with what Mr Wolfram from WolframAlpha is saying: Computers can helkp you with tasks that are repetitive and inhuman, you should learn what is needed to solve a problem efficiently. That is actually more in alignment with what the Waldorf system says: Creativity through hands-on. Denying kids access to technology is just stupid, because if you think about your own life: Doesn't technology make it easier and more efficient to get things done?

My sister-in-law has taught at a Waldorf school for years. The school the article describes sounds typical. Waldorf is actually based on an extremely deviant philosophy. They get away with it because they deliver results. In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests.

> In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests.

Out of every 10 tests they have 9 standardized tests club a randomly-chosen 10th standardized test to death?

No, they learn how to look at context to determine what words mean in a given situation.

I was going to write "dominate" but thought I'd go for a little something different :)

By the way, I hope I didn't sound like a believer in standardized tests. As far as I'm concerned they're for meat-packing plants. The fact that our schools are child-processing factories is a shame (probably the single thing I'd change about our society if I could). All I meant was that Waldorf schools would be a lot more vulnerable to mainstream condemnation if their kids didn't out-perform on those tests. You can't respond to criticism by saying, "just look at these children, they're happy and grounded". But you can sure say, "what part of the 99th percentile do you have a problem with"?

Where my sister-in-law teaches, their results are at the top of our province (Alberta), which itself has a reputation for having one of the best school systems in the world. We're usually compared to Finland in this respect - which scares me, because the truth is that our schools suck, so it's an indication of how bad things are elsewhere.

Hmmm. Kids from affluent families who likely have highly educated parents working at high tech companies do well on standardized tests created to cover the entire spectrum of children? nowai

Please don't interject that kind of rudeness here. The school my sister-in-law teaches at has little in common with your demographic description. It's bland middle class with mild (very mild) alternative tendencies. What it has in common with the school in the article is basic Waldorf principles: eschewing technology in the early grades, emphasis on imagination and handwork and so on. The Silicon Valley aspect of the article is a red herring, no doubt because it's attention-getting, but perhaps also because the author doesn't realize this is simply an instance of a type.

Edit: I was unfair to the author. The article clearly discusses Waldorf schools as a type.

There seems to be a false dichotomy being made between hands on education and the use of technology in the classroom that bothers me a bit; why should they be separated? I see no reason why a collaborative, hands on approach to education is precluded by the use of technology.

The developers of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) have an after school program called Program by Design (http://programbydesign.org/) and one of the things they found was that some of the students started wanting to learn more math because they needed to know how to add things to their programs! The extreme view presented in this article seems to be based more upon fear of technology than any kind of understanding of it.

We send our kids to Waldorf inspired schools. Most schools (especially public schools) give me a sense of dread, like a twelve year prison sentence would. The Waldorf schools have a warm, human feel that actually makes me a little jealous of my kids. I would rather my kids be raised as whole humans, not little test-taking machines.

Could the Waldorf schools be a reaction to the new concept of simply dumping one's child at a school to be raised?

The schools themselves have been going for about a hundred years, so they aren't a reaction to it. Perhaps some parents are. I hope so. Unfortunately, I think the social trend is the other way around. Where I live (Canada), debate tends to center around how wonderful it would be if children could be raised by day-care workers before being handed off to school workers, so the parents can go be workers someplace else.

But if you don't waterboard your kids and beat them, how will they learn to function in the real world?

I went to this school for kindergarten through the first half of sixth grade. Being an elementary school student I was less familiar with their guiding philosophy than the actual execution. But I can say that they did some things really well for an elementary school child, one of which was not burdening their students with homework. This gave me free time to read everything I could get my hands on, which I think has been incredibly valuable to my development and later education.

But I left when we were covering fractions for the 3rd year in a row (when I was in sixth grade), and I felt completely stifled and unchallenged. I have no regrets that my parents sent me there, but at least when I was there, the execution of the philosophy began to fall apart when I turned 10.

For some context, I am now a CS and Physics major and don't feel that an unfamiliarity with computers when I was 8 hampered my math or computer skills at all.

Well, there's a limit to the practical use of gadgets in the classroom. Learning human interaction, motor skills, and other parts of being human are best done with other humans.

It's also pretty clear to me that equating computing to the use of Word, Excel, and Google leads one to the conclusion that computing is easy and not a big deal to pick up. Naturally, as a software engineer, I disagree vehemently with that.

I think that some level of real (not turtle or other games) programming should be taught from middle school on to the point where a HS grad can successfully write a small program to deal with the small needs of life: things like accounting, sophisticated searching for files, etc.

I believe - have faith - that a programming-enabled population can do some pretty amazing things when set free to do them. All it takes is the knowledge and the eyes to see what can be automated to do so.

Please don't diss the turtle. I was too old for the Logo scene (by quite a bit, actually) but I learned (and grokked) recursion reading an article about Logo and turtle graphics. I made Gödel, Escher, Bach a much easier read in '80 than it would have been otherwise.

I went to Waldorf for 10 years (preschool - 8th grade).

Didn't get a computer until I was 12.

Now > http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/19/how-two-te...

“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

Ugh. Also read as: "Something I haven't seen doing something I don't expect it to? Ridiculous!"

The correlation between students at Waldorf schools and prestigious schools later is extremely easily explained by a single character: $

That said, something different than our current, standard public-school fare probably stands a decent chance of doing better. Anything with more attention to the methodology stands such a chance. But I'd be willing to bet that many of the successes also simply reflect parents that are more aware of their children's education.

Your specific comment about "$" may be false. Waldorf schools in urban areas are indeed $15k+/year/kid, but there are Waldorf schools in rural areas that charge far less for tuition. Not having kids myself but knowing parents of kids who go to Waldorf schools, your second statement seems more accurate: from what they say the parents are very involved in the schooling - in fact the Waldorf methodology is insistent on it.

I think that this approach is basically absurd. I easily learned more during my lunches in the computer lab, going through HTML, CSS and then JavaScript tutorials or writing batch files to do silly things than anywhere else during my time in middle school.

Not only this, but (especially further on, in 7th and 8th grade), I learned other subjects more effectively thanks to computers. I still remember The Crucible because I made a website (complete with red text in Chiller, uncontrollable music and animated drops of blood for the background) for it; I learned factoring by writing a simple JavaScript game for it.

I think this easily beats spending weeks cutting up fruit and shunning technology. Had I not been playing around with computers and the internet since a young age, not only would I probably not have found my true calling--CS--but I would also probably have had a worse education in all the other fields as well.

I agree with the philosophy. Foundations of learning should not be built on use of Google as a search engine. Foundations should he a mix of the things necessary for brain and personality development.

Its synonymous to the debate about letting kids use calculators for simple (or not so simple ) math problems.

Isn't it sad that the computing experience is now defined as using Google? What a waste.

Curiously, it's in Los Altos. So are the first schools to adopt the Khan Academy platform.

Rich freethinkers.

Is that good or bad?

Good on both points in my book.

(Was going to say "rich hippies" but thought better of it. I mean freethinker in the original sense, someone who doesn't follow norms.)

I went to a Waldorf type school (called a multi-year back when I was in elementary school). My classroom was 90 kids, grades K-3 in a room that was four classrooms with walls knocked down. No desks, self-directed curriculum, etc. I was in a 4-6 after this, which was more structured but still self directed.

http://fsd.k12.ca.us/rollinghills/multiage.html

This was my program. My sister and I went through it. To this day a lot of us still keep in touch with our teacher.

It was not strict Waldorf, more inspired by it and still is to this day.

wow these "tech" worker parents are seriously pretty messed up. I'm pretty sure my early computer use and curiosity led to my current career as a software developer, I can't imagine not knowing how to use a search engine until eighth grade, I was messing around looking at HTML code and stuff in like 5th or 6th grade

One thing that saddens me in education is the death of Long Division. I took a couple math-ed courses in college and I was shocked when I learned that most it's not being taught in most schools. It's "too hard" and it's "useless", some say, so it's being taken out of the curriculum.

Bullshit it's useless. Multiplication tables are memorized lookup tables. That's "rote" but important, but it's not when math starts to become interesting. Long multiplication and division are the first time people have to use an algorithm for a problem too difficult to do in any other way. And yes, it needs to be done by hand and if it takes a few months for the average student to get it right, fine. It's important. Not the actual skill of dividing 83914 by 203, but the process of carrying out a mechanical algorithm by hand.

Should computers be a part of education? Absolutely. Should programming be taught in school? Yes. Should we abandon the process of running algorithms by hand, as a mechanism for understanding rule-based computation at an early age? No.

Interesting fact: early computers (in the 1940s) were not competitive with human "computers"-- savants whose jobs were to do arithmetical calculations. They were actually slower. What made mechanical computers such a win was that they could keep going and remain reliable, whereas human computers would start making mistakes after 8 hours.

If you've gone through the humiliating process of trying to calculate a 6-by-6 determinant by hand and getting it wrong, you understand this, and you know why the rigor offered by mechanical computation is so important. If you haven't, it probably doesn't make sense to you.

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