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Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

Looping is stupid though because whatever small benefits accrue they don’t justify teachers learning a new curriculum every year as they bounce from grade to grade. I want my grade eight history course taught by someone who knows grade eight history well. I don’t want it to be taught by someone who spent the last three years on completely unrelated topics in previous grade’s history.

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Typically, schools that loop do so in fixed-size windows (often 2 years, so K/1, 2/3, etc). Often, teachers for the looped grades plan curriculum together. This tends to minimize the effects of unfamiliar subject matter and the kids' changing social/emotional maturity.

(Source: I helped to start and taught at a charter school in the early 00's. For better and for worse, that school grew into a fairly large charter management organization. Classroom management - which boiled down to convincing a lot of very jaded kids that we actually cared about them - took months at the beginning of each year, and no substantive academic work was possible during that time. Looping in two-year windows struck a good balance between amortizing that cost and preserving teacher expertise.)

Have you talked to actual teachers about the concept? Based on what you’ve written here, what I understand from teacher friends, and my own child’s experience with looping, you all have a very different outlook than what I’ve witnessed and heard.

My son had his 1st grade teacher loop; he loved her and she loved him. It was a joy to have him feel comfortable with his teacher two years in a row. As a kid with a harder time socially as well as an anxious personality, it was wonderful for him to feel at ease two years in a row and have that stability! In addition, it was especially great for us as we received a unique look at his progression at that age.

No one was REQUIRED to loop. The teacher as well as the student and/or parents could request a student not loop.

Some schools do require it.

Then looping might work for the first few grades of grade school. Maybe up to grade 4 or 5? If a teacher can’t handle that curriculum I … don’t think they should be teachers.

If a teacher can't "learn" the next year's curriculum faster than the children they are teaching, there is something very wrong with the selection and hiring process for teachers...

It’s one thing to learn from a teacher who knows the material and a wholly different experience to learn from someone who knows the material.

My literature professor in high school knew literature. His class was amazing. He spent each period bringing the material to life and telling stories from authors’ lives, the background behind each story and poem, additional anecdotes etc, and really put the whole thing in context. Then for the last 10 minutes he explained what we needed to know for the standardized curriculum.

It was great

That sounds more like he knew the subject (literature) rather than knowing the material (n'th grade literature). In my experience the people best equipped to do something like that are people that have knowledge beyond the class they teach - the high school teacher that has a phd in the subject they are teaching, the university teacher that is currently involved in research etc. Especially in physics and mathematics I think this is relevant, as there are many times where questions naturally lead into topics from a much more advanced level. Like say the teacher explains that 3 isn't divisible by 2 and someone pupil says it is in fact divisible and the answer is 1.5. A teacher with solid knowledge of abstract algebra, that knows peanos axioms, and how Q is constructed from Z will be better equipped to deal with that.

On the other hand I could see how teaching one and the same class over and over might lead to a bored teacher and a narrow perspective.

A teacher can learn the curriculum far faster but any educator will tell you they do a better job of teaching a lesson when they’ve already taught it before. Looping literally means every lesson you teach will be your first time teaching it. It’s silly to give up on all the advantages that come from adapting a lesson after seeing what works well and what doesn’t. The challenges from having a different teacher in grade two and grade one aren’t larger than the benefits of having a grade one teacher who’s delivered the same lessons many times and constantly improved them.

> Looping literally means every lesson you teach will be your first time teaching it.

I don't think that's literally true, even if you're correct that looping for more than a year is suboptimal. A proportion of teachers are teaching a curriculum for the first time even "without looping" (i.e. looping for only a year). With two-year looping, teachers only take a year longer before they're teaching a curriculum they've taught before.

Is there any advantage in looping for less than a year (e.g. changing teachers each semester)? What's the optimal amount of looping?

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