Comment by fiziks_hckr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fiziks_hckr | Hacker News Reader

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I've taught in schools from all corners of San Francisco, and can't agree more with majority of what was said in this article, except maybe the money part*, I'll leave a footnote for this.

One day when I was volunteering at one of these schools, a student came up to me showing a picture of a robot how cool it was. When I mentioned that it was relatively easy to build, he got super stoked, told his friends and before you know it, we had a class of 8 students pursuing their own interest, learning CS/Breadboarding/Electrical-Circuits, all student driven, building cardboard-box arduino-based robots afterschool.**

These student led classes were majority black students and pushed forward most by black students. Everything was honestly instantly working great, and at the end of every class my students made to promise not to forget to show up to the next session (I don't recall missing a session, I believe this was out attachment for the course).

Self-driven learning is a thing, and all we have to do is give kids grounds to explore -- in this case to create designs from from their own imagination (ey, isn't that why we're hackers here : D? We can all relate).

* Small class sizes help (or student:teacher ratio of 6:1 ideally). This is the ratio (lower works too) that really works, and I've seen only at really rich schools (see Branson/UHS/Lick Wilmerding) and programs based on it. I've seen this emulated to great success in Summerbridge SF, and too at a summerschool I helped start in the bay area based on project-based/student-led learning, access to technology, and most importantly these small class sizes that enables hosting these free-learning classes.

**Again money is important, materials costs for this class were supported by my concurrent 4 jobs, doing mainly part-time engineering work for startups, electrical-engineering curriculum development for a summer-schools, as well as tutoring.

Small class sizes don't just help, they are essential for this type of setup, which is why it can never work at scale and will not be relevant to 99% of kids in the country. There simply aren't enough teachers.

Their easily could be, we just can't imagine as a society putting this much effort into caring for the young. Especially those of the wrong skin color. The US is the wealthiest country in the world, we could easily change some of the governments wealth distribution to educate all students 8:1

Still no. You would need to triple the number of teachers and greatly increase the number of rooms across almost all public schools in America to get those kinds of numbers. There simply aren't enough people, or enough space to do so. The only viable solution is to find a better way of educating children in these larger groups.

"There simply aren't enough people, or enough space to do so."

The people part is the issue. The teachers I know hate the bureaucracy and policies. Private schools seem to be better at hiring, even when they pay less. Dealing with certain parents is a nightmare too.

If you have a classroom made for 25-30 students, it wouldn't be too hard to partition it in half, then have two instructors leading each half of the room.

I went to a robotics class and a game design class as a kid and they both had something like 20 students with two instructors. It went fine. Sure some of it was introductory instruction, but then we'd build our own stuff as individuals or teams. So there might not need to be much reconfiguration at all.

Maybe if the job and compensation were more compelling we'd have plenty of teachers. And we can come up with innovative ways to use the space we have.

Increase teacher salary to $100k a year and cap teacher to student ratio at 20 and see how hard it is to hire them. I'd go straight back to school to get a teaching cert to change careers, even though it'd be a pay cut. Imagine getting the best and brightest people pounding down the school doors to teach. For reference, that would triple the starting teacher's pay at my local high school.

You have a viewpoint that is shaped by a very niche experience. Your experience was with students that happened into an interest that was itself a project that can drive learning in a handful of subjects. This kind of approach doesn't work so well when the subjects that need to be learned don't lend themselves so well to exciting projects or even when the students don't get to self-select based on their interests.

> This kind of approach doesn't work so well when the subjects that need to be learned don't lend themselves so well to exciting projects or even when the students don't get to self-select based on their interests.

Awesome, as this is really one the core things the original post wanted us to discuss:

_Should we_ require students to study so many things that they don't find interesting?

Some of the original post's thoughts:

> It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

And:

> “How will they learn to read?” you say, and my answer is: “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks, they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the life that unfolds around them.

My take is unoriginal, even summarized by someone else's quote: “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” -- Leonardo da Vinci

And if really can be attributed to da vinci, then one can say same core energy really existed in minds over half a millenia ago.

So I assert that while that this experience granted was indeed an awesome experience, there's a large swath of folks pushing for this "project-based" learning, and more self-driven learning paths.

https://www.pblworks.org/what-is-pbl

What's the harm in allowing students to connect the dots on their own?

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