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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

>Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to make room for more modern and efficient material.

In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Instead, I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string.

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> In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks.

Some schooling focuses way too much on rote, memorization, etc. But........

IMO, we often get the main point of education wrong. It's not so much direct transfer of useful skills or a body of information-- though these are still important. Instead, I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals.

On a limited basis, practicing the skill of memorizing poetry and reciting it to a class can be a useful exercise. Now you know you can do that, how to do it, and about how long it's going to take. You were also forced to engage with that particular content in a deeper way than a casual, unmotivated reading by a high school student would have resulted in: the overall cadence and structure is cemented in your head as much as the very words.

Education used to be very memorization and recitation heavy. Leaving a little bit in seems useful, even though it was the kind of thing I hated most as a kid.

I agree. I hated the podunk backwoods country town I grew up in, but after 30 years, I have to admit that my schooling was not so bad after all. Actually, it seems to be an outlier in how well it actually prepared me compared to other people's opinion of their schooling.

The thing that I appreciate most about the teachers and the curriculums taught was that they taught me (I would say us refering to all students, but don't want to presume) was how to learn. I should say, the math/science classes did this. The history/literature classes were all rote memorization BS. I did not like those classes an did not do well in them. However, the other classes where I learned how to learn allowed me to become what has been labeled "a self-learner". I can read subject material a few times, experiment, and then "know" it well enough to function. Practice and continued use makes for much better retention than rote memorization. I used to ask teachers for anything that was still unclear, now it essentially is replaced with SO searches.

I noticed an interesting effect in college that other graduates I talked with noticed, too.

One learns how to learn. New material is learned faster and more accurately. One also learns what parts to focus on, and what parts can be dismissed, which helps learn more efficiently.

Yes. Also, though, often you have a body of understanding that can be coerced to just handle the new task.

Over in microeconomics... we draw budget curves, and all the operations on budget curves are a whole lot like operations on production possibility curves, so there's a lot of skill transfer.

We spent 2 class periods on PPCs, and 10 minutes on budget curves. My students better understand how to learn economic concepts, and they have a closely related skill that they can adjust for the new task.

Every lesson, we're accelerating.

Yes, the crossover effect is quite real. I remember my econ class, where the textbook spend a lot of time deriving derivative calculus. Except they never mentioned the words "derivative" or "calculus", because evidently that triggered math anxiety in econ students. So the book went around the horn doing it the hard way, using different terms like "marginal rate of return".

Me, I had a good chuckle over that. I kept all my college textbooks except the econ one, which went in the trash.

That's one way that I'm hamstrung by the College Board. All of my students know or are taking a calculus course (and those that are, are past the limit definition of the derivative by this point).

I would rather be teaching this material with calculus and not just handwaving and saying "the marginal revenue curve is twice as steep as the demand curve!"

But they're going to pass an examination where it's all done algebraically and visually.

[I DO THINK there's some value in taking these algebraic and visual approaches, but there comes a point in the class where they get rather awkward].

Maybe I wasn't quite clear. The econ book did derive, teach and use calculus, it just obfuscated it using different terminology and symbols, to hide the fact that it was calculus.

I think we're in agreement in that --- the algebra-based microecon class I'm teaching is effectively using and re-creating calculus, too.

I've already told students many times we're going to find the area of shapes on this graph, where I'd actually just subtract the curves and take a definite integral.

And the graphs are a really, really nice visual for the subject matter. Being able to point to consumer surplus, producer surplus, tax revenue, and deadweight loss as regions on the graph means you know how all these curves relate. But then we end up doing all this awkward not-quite-calculus stuff.

I tutored a group of students in business school who were, shall we say, not mathematically prepared perhaps especially in microeconomics.

Maxima and minima were certainly one issue because that required calculus, however simple a form thereof. I'm not sure even the simplest formulaic version ever got through. But we're taking about totally not getting solving simultaneous algebraic equations and one student told me I needed to explain "graphs" so it was all mostly a hopeless project.

> Maxima and minima were certainly one issue

Yup-- College Board's preferred approach here is memorization. You get -this- maxima when MC=MR. You get this -other- maxima when MU=0. You get this -other- one when Ed = -1.

Don't even get me started on "this number is always negative, so we'll just pretend it's positive sometimes-- though when you do a related calculation, make sure you preserve the sign!" (elasticity of demand vs. other elasticities).

I actually think less technical takes on things like micro and statistics can do a better job of illuminating principles than getting all wrapped up in the math does. (I think I understood stats better when I took it in business school vs. my very math-heavy engineering version--though it was still rather frequentist-oriented.) But, ideally, you still know enough basic calculus to do the actual calculations.

MBA programs have changed a lot since I did one. But math was definitely the real killer for a lot of first-years. STEM undergrads had it a lot easier.

> I actually think less technical takes on things like micro and statistics can do a better job of illuminating principles than getting all wrapped up in the math does.

I agree, but if they go to my room learning a bunch of rules-of-thumb for maximizing economic functions... and then go down the hall to math class and are learning how to optimize by finding places where the derivative is 0... it's kinda silly.

Yeah, but in this case they weren't going to those math classes. Though you could equally well argue, they also weren't going to be solving those microeconomics problems the instant after they passed (or didn't) that particular course.

> One learns how to learn.

A thousand times this! School is obsolete by construction if we only learn specific skills, which might not stay relevant for long. Learning how to learn is the truly useful thing that a good school should provide.

I am baffled by all the comments about how children should learn <specific skill someone think is important>. How useful would have been an education where arithmetics would have been focused on how to use slide rules? And yet, that was a practical, critical professional skill for quite some time.

Learning to use a slide rule gives one an intuitive feel for logarithms that is hard to get any other way. Slide rules are still faster than calculators for approximate calculations.

It also gives one an appreciation for calculators. It's like learning to use hand tools before machine tools. Hand tools impart a feel for the material being cut that pays off when using machine tools.

I agree with you.

Would you teach kids today to use a slide rule? It seems hard to justify for the benefit in intuition about exponents/logarithms.

I was taught to use a slide rule in 5 minutes. It's just one moving part, and you read the numbers off the scale.

Yes, I'd teach kids to use a slide rule. It's not necessary for them to become expert at it, just get comfortable with it.

Why learn exponents? People will never learn compound interest without getting comfortable with exponents. Not learning compound interest will forever financially cripple them. Hell yes, it's worth while.

My accounting class was taught by a former used car salesman. He'd tell me stories about how poor people made very bad choices in financing, and when he'd explain how compound interest worked, they'd assume he was trying to cheat them.

For me personally, knowing math and trig, etc., has provided me a lifetime of payback. Very, very worth it, in dollars and cents.

I'm not saying that math and trig are not valuable.... I'm merely questioning whether a slide rule has the best payoff of those few minutes vs. say, watching Powers of Ten by C & R Eames.

I don't think you cultivate the kind of intuitive understanding of exponents and logarithms you're describing with a few minutes of casual practice with a slide rule.

It worked for me. I never spent much of any time with a slide rule, but played with it enough to see that yes, adding logarithms to multiply worked like magic. (This was in high school.)

My first semester at Caltech had slide rules in the bookstore for $125 (mebbe close to a grand today). By the end of the semester, they were $5, and disappeared by the 2nd. I've never seen a tech revolution hit so hard and so fast.

The trouble with calculators is they impart no feel whatsoever for the math behind it. You get a string of 10 digits that is "The Answer". People get led astray by that all the time, including professionals. It's amazing how these people defend obviously wrong results because the calculator gives "The Answer".

Yah, we don't use calculators much, either.

Graphing calculators used to be nice to occasionally use to help build an intuitive sense of the "shape" of a function. Now I often use Desmos for the same thing.

I was a long term sub for 8th grade science a couple years ago. It was fun to use Desmos for linear regression as they collected data points-- to see how each point changed the line of best fit before these students had learned L.R. in any rigorous way themselves. It made students excited to get each next point in our experiment and make predictions about whether they believe the line, etc. (And whether we can safely extrapolate past the data we have...)

In the competitive math series I coach, one of the 3 rounds allows calculator usage. Usually using the calculator is a trap instead of doing something clever, but sometimes the calculator is the best way. I think it's kind of neat that they built it this way, because it requires building the intuition to realize whether you're really facing a problem that is purely calculation.

What you're doing sounds very good.

Hard science, i.e. math and its applications, teach you how to think, reason, etc. Rote memorization stuff builds identity, whether you are aware of it or not. It almost doesn’t matter what you learn, what matters is that everyone around you knows the same stuff.

In between stuff is weird, it’s where people complain about ‘politicizing science’ and ‘being fed up with experts’, etc. It’s where the wavefront of known facts changes too quickly for any kind of mass education to catch up.

>Hard science, i.e. math and its applications, teach you how to think, reason, etc.

Although, especially in high school but to a more limited degree in intro level college courses as well, you still end up memorizing a lot of formulas in a course like physics--one issue being that you probably haven't taken the calculus yet that you need to derive those formulas. Of course, you often end up knowing formulas you use all the time off the top of your head anyway. But you presumably could derive a lot of them if you had to.

I had the same experience, I hated high school...but I have to admit, the school in our lil town of 15K people was pretty dam good. Not a lot of electives, but we got really good grounding in basics: 4 years English, 4 years math (up to basic calculus), 4 years science (including physics, chem and bio). We even had an 'Environmental Studies' science class - and that was back in the 80s.

I also found it gave us a more 'self learner'/ 'figure it out' attitude. Contrasting with a lot of my peers and younger, it seems like 90% of what they ask is just a google away... Also, being able to reason about unknown error messages or system behavior seems to be a challenge for a lot of them.

You may enjoy this:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

:D I've come across it before, but thanks for refreshing my memory of it.

So, for background, I am now a teacher. This year, I'm teaching:

* Middle School: Competitive math (MathCounts), Competitive robotics (FTC), Intro to Circuits (undergraduate EE curriculum slightly simplified and slowed down), Mechatronics Lab (3D design, embedded software, and controls).

* High School: AP Microeconomics (College level economics course), Competitive robotics (FTC), Spacecraft Systems Engineering (hoping to get a launch grant to put a small satellite in orbit).

* Clubs: HS Investment club, HS Space club, upper elementary math and robotics clubs.

I'm all about things being student led and student owned; this is especially true in my team classes (robotics and math). Even the others, I try to attain this to the extent possible.

On the other hand... Look, we've got a few hundred bodies around. We need a bell and to know where students should be. And my students do need to learn to work on things that are not necessarily their first choice of what to do, because for a lot of students this would be Fortnite 24/7. And for a lot of subject, there are pieces of information that are useless on their own until you've built a whole conceptual loop around them.

The piece makes an argument for market forces. Unfortunately, market forces often push things in the "wrong" direction. Parents want their kids to take lots of AP classes because it is helpful to get into college and also saves college tuition. But I feel like the microeconomics course I'm teaching is a lot worse than the one I'd teach on my own... I dare not stray too much from the dictates of the College Board, though, because students need to pass that test. Parents also like "rigor" of students working meekly and quietly because it seems like it's a quality signal (and it often is, but too much of anything is crap!).

What we really need is:

* Rigorous, controlled educational research so that we can know what works and what doesn't in what populations. Spoiler: everyone is just making it all up as they go along or, at best, following new educational trends with very little research support for them

* An educational system that actually respects and implements that research.

* Respect, safety, and adequate resources for teachers. (I do extraordinary things with my classes in large part I teach in a very easy environment-- from class sizes, organizational support, resourcing, and student behavior).

Which country and state you’re in? I am praying I can look forward to something like this when my kid goes to middle school here in CAlifornia

I'm in California-- SF Bay Area-- but I'm teaching at a private school.

> Respect

is a two way street. Teachers routinely blame the parents for any failures in the classroom.

> safety

absolutely.

> adequate resources

I never learned more than at Caltech where the material was taught with blackboard and chalk, and the students used pen and paper.

The best and most fun lecture I ever gave was with whiteboard and dry erase pens. The scheduled speaker had not shown up, and the organizer asked if anyone could fill in. I volunteered, and had done no prep and had no slides.

What also made it fun was the interaction with the audience and I'd just go where those interactions led.

I don't do this normally, because everyone expects slides, and the conference organizer provides no mechanism for blackboards.

Also, blackboards are problematic for a larger venue, they work best in a normal sized classroom.

I lecture a whole lot at the whiteboard. I use slides a lot, too. And demonstrations. Or I make students come up and demonstrate.

It should be a little unpredictable what class will be like each day.

That all sounds excellent.

> > Respect

> is a two way street. Teachers routinely blame the parents for any failures in the classroom.

I teach in a great environment, but my public school peers are frequently berated by parents of students that complete no work.

Even in my environment, I am pretty constantly "talked down to" by parents-- there's the implicit assumption they're better than me. I have enough confidence from past successes in industry and life to shrug it off, but I could easily see it becoming demotivating. Someone with my skills can easily find more lucrative and less challenging work.

> > adequate resources

> I never learned more than at Caltech where the material was taught with blackboard and chalk, and the students used pen and paper.

I teach computer engineering with pen and paper.

I mean things like "a living wage", "time to prepare for your classes and go to the bathroom", "not sticking 40 middle school students, including many with severe behavioral problems, in one room", and "not having to buy pencils and other necessities for your students with your own money".

There's also a whole lot of nice-to-haves that make a difference. The $15 set of refillable whiteboard pens that have a very wide nib and make huge dark lines are very useful, but ain't no public school teacher going to get those over worn-out Expo markers. Candy bribes and stickers used judiciously as prizes to fuel classroom competition make a difference. Etc, etc, etc.

> berated

Sure, there are rotten parents. No excuse for them. But I'm talking about a general disrespect teachers have for parents. This is manifested in not wanting any input from parents, not wanting to hear from them at PTA meetings, not consulting parents in any way shape or form about the curriculum. Teachers do want parents to volunteer, but only at their direction. No collaboration.

As for pencils and paper, pencils cost a few cents each, and the playgrounds of the schools I attended were littered with pencils. Paper is so cheap people throw away reams of unused paper all the time.

Me, I prefer the more expensive $5 gel pens, but they'll last me a couple months each.

P.S. My dad taught at university for years. He grew up in the Depression, and his thrifty ways followed for the rest of his life. He'd bring home used paper - such as exams printed on one side of the sheet, and blank the other side. His notes and drafts and accounts and tax records were done on the blank side. I have many boxes filled with those papers. When they were inadequate, he'd buy boxes of newsprint, the cheapest paper possible, and write from edge to edge in tiny script. Nobody could get more out of a piece of paper than my dad :-)

> But I'm talking about a general disrespect teachers have for parents. This is manifested in not wanting any input from parents, not wanting to hear from them at PTA meetings, not consulting parents in any way shape or form about the curriculum. Teachers do want parents to volunteer, but only at their direction. No collaboration.

It's easy to blame teachers for this, but in public schools generally greater than 100% of instructional time is already spoken for. Administrators and regulators are heaping requirements upon teachers to cover material. Then, because not enough time is allotted, the only option is to cover it badly and quickly.

Also, because many teachers have inadequate planning and grading time, it gets really tempting to do what you did last year; veteran teachers tend to work >125% of contract hours already.

I'm open to collaboration. Unlike most teachers, I have a lot of flexibility in how I run most of my classes. But AP Microeconomics? Pfft. I don't have the luxury of caring what your suggestions are about how I run that class. I have 34.5 equivalent-block-periods of material to cover in 35.5 equivalent-block-periods, and I'm sure there will be a fire drill or something that I need to reteach that will claim that buffer.

This is just a snippet of the high level plan (lesson plans go into greater detail), showing how I'm forced to think about a class where there's explicit heavy curriculum requirements: https://i.imgur.com/YQk5LBP.png

> As for pencils and paper, pencils cost a few cents each, and the playgrounds of the schools I attended were littered with pencils.

That's nice. You are still trying to shame someone who is making below a living wage to purchase it, and many other things, for other peoples' children.

> I don't have the luxury of caring what your suggestions are about how I run that class

You can't expect respect for that. (BTW, other teachers have told me their reason for not caring about parental input is they were trained professionals and parents were ignorant fools.)

> You are still trying to shame someone who is making below a living wage to purchase it

$4 to supply all your students with pencils. You brought up the pencil thing. Besides, you should move to Seattle where public schoolteachers make 6 figure salaries, have a pension for life, gold plated health insurance, and 2 months off per year.

> > I don't have the luxury of caring what your suggestions are about how I run that class

> You can't expect respect for that.

Rock vs. hard place? If I go off track in one of these classes where curriculum is tightly specified, quantitative indicators nosedive and I get crucified by parents.

> Besides, you should move to Seattle where public schoolteachers make 6 figure salaries, have a pension for life, gold plated health insurance, and 2 months off per year.

I make ~$59k/year for a 104% teaching load in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Teaching my circuits class, I've bought a few hundred dollars in soldering irons and integrated circuits and breadboards for my classroom. The school borrows my old digital storage oscilloscope and other tools. I also end up pitying the robotics teams and buying them lots of stuff.

I got rich in industry so this works OK for me, but...

And yes, if I went and got a master's degree, I could make a bit more in public education, in exchange for a much worse classroom environment and lower level of respect. Still would be nowhere near the pay I could get elsewhere.

You should have said you bought electronic equipment for your students in the first place :-) I can respect that.

I see that pencil trope all the time. In Seattle, they run a school supplies drive every year and pencils figure prominently on the donation list. This is a school system that spends $16,941 per student, and yet begs for $.05 pencils.

"San Francisco Unified School District spends $17,464 per student each year" sez google. I infer your complaint is misdirected at the taxpayers, and should be with mis-spending by the school administrators.

> I see that pencil trope all the time. In Seattle, they run a school supplies drive every year and pencils figure prominently on the donation list. This is a school system that spends $16,941 per student, and yet begs for $.05 pencils.

Read actual teacher accounts of what they spend kitting out their classrooms.

And yes, public school systems spend massive amounts per student, and then still expect charity from everyone: employees, parents, the community, etc, to fund normal operations and provide normal supplies.

Your digs at mandated curriculum, how cheap the supplies are, etc... are really beside the point. They're like yelling at the front-line customer service rep who has no power to affect the things that concern you.

Public school systems are often kafkaesque. Classrooms with 40 students; administration that externalize all problems to the teachers and refuse to address behavior problems; IEPs for 20 of those students mandating "preferential seating" and individualized teaching interventions. Curriculum that is garbage and overspends classroom time. Asking teachers to develop massive amounts of materials themselves. Or alternatively to only use provided material with no enrichment. Sometimes alternating between opposing harsh policy lines every few months.

Yes, there's some moderately high comp'd teaching jobs out there (lol not mine) and some situations which fare better on respect and autonomy (like mine). But if it were such a sweet gig, we'd not have teachers leaving the field in droves and a shortage.

[And the intrinsics of the job itself are wonderful-- teaching successfully feels great. You really have to try hard to screw it up to make teachers miserable, and that's what our society does].

I've heard the pencil trope from you, as well as other teachers, not administrators. When the school spends $16,000 per student, and can't get pencils, it just doesn't add up.

> Asking teachers to develop massive amounts of materials themselves.

Another thing I cannot comprehend. How many 5th grade teachers are there in the US? 10,000? How many lesson plans have to be developed? 10,000? This is absurd. Any other industry would share lesson plans. Teachers also tell me that each summer for their grade, they have to develop the 5th grade lesson plans all over again. I asked why not reuse last year's? One teacher told me she had to customize them for each student. I asked her how she could customize them over the summer when students weren't assigned to classes until school started. She didn't reply.

> You really have to try hard to screw it up to make teachers miserable, and that's what our society does

More like that's what socialism does. The public schools are a service provided by the government, and exhibits all aspects of socialism. Your observation that the public schools are Kafkaesque is right on target. More money will not fix them.

Something doesn't add up.

> I've heard the pencil trope from you, as well as other teachers, not administrators. When the school spends $16,000 per student, and can't get pencils, it just doesn't add up.

The school is perfectly capable of getting pencils. The local public school teachers get $150/year for supplies and classroom decorations for ~30 kids. And they get yelled at if their room ends up looking spartan.

> Any other industry would share lesson plans.

Yup! We have things like teachers-pay-teachers where you can make a few bucks sharing lesson plans. We have some districts that give teachers a small amount of funds to use this.

We have other districts forbid teachers using any resources not provided by the district or the teacher themselves. Often "quality concerns" are really code for "we want someone local to blame if there's something in the material we don't like".

> Teachers also tell me that each summer for their grade, they have to develop the 5th grade lesson plans all over again.

The main reason you need to do this is if there's a major schedule change or upstream curriculum requirement change. Though, it's reasonable to plan to throw away 20-25% each year for other reasons.

For my classes, there's a lot of drift. I don't need to teach as much basic material in the robotics programs because I have veteran students and a lot of the knowledge spreads by osmosis. In turn, I need to e.g. figure out how to tell a bunch of 7th and 8th graders who haven't had linear algebra yet about state estimation filters this year.

Also, ... cookie cutter using common curriculum isn't great. My school purchased me the "best" set of economics slides. There's a lot of stuff I can get across clearly in a fraction of the time. There's other stuff that I feel I need to hammer harder, and have to cobble together other materials and my own creations to fill that in. I'm adjusting things for the specific class that I have (e.g. a very math-strong econ class this year), and I'm adjusting things for my specific strengths and weaknesses in lecturing to the class.

Finally, if you just try to duplicate last year's class, it's probable that you won't have the energy of presentation and excitement and effectiveness. You need to have new lessons to look forward to and some degree of discomfort / newness that you're experiencing with the class to be the best possible educator, I think.

> More like that's what socialism does. The public schools are a service provided by the government, and exhibits all aspects of socialism. Your observation that the public schools are Kafkaesque is right on target. More money will not fix them.

Again, you're not arguing with what I'm saying. I've already acknowledged we spend lots of money on schools for the most part. On the other hand, teachers from other countries with public education mostly shake their heads at what public school teachers in the US need to deal with.

> other countries

The grass is always greener effect, and who knows what really is happening in foreign schools without being there. They may be just telling Americans what they want to be true. A more interesting comparison is with local charter schools.

> We have other districts forbid teachers using any resources not provided by the district or the teacher themselves.

Haha, just use them anyway. It's not like they're going to check. Besides, the teacher can reuse what he used last year, or copy one from a fellow teacher. There ought to be quite a surfeit of materials from other 5th grade teachers in the same district. There ought to be lesson plans coming out of their ears if each teacher was redoing them every year.

Most teachers I had just followed the Teacher's Edition of the textbook. I didn't see any evidence of lesson plans.

Perhaps in high school things change from year to year, but they can't be changing that much, and why would 5th grade math change?

Personally, I rarely reuse lectures I give. This is because the technology changes constantly, my old lectures are available online, and when I get invited to speak and the conference is paying the bill I think it's disrespectful to use old material. Also I just get bored with what I did before :-)

> I infer your complaint is misdirected at the taxpayers, and should be with mis-spending by the school administrators.

I never directed a complaint at the taxpayers-- though it should be directed at the voters. Society expecting/normalizing teachers to pay for supplies out of their own pocket is the problem.

Education keeps getting more and more expensive and lower and lower quality across the board. Especially in universities, but also in K12. Administration and waste gobble up more and more.

It seems like your responses expect teachers to paper over all the systemic problems. Their employer demands they teach excessive amounts of curriculum? Well, they'd better listen to parents, too, even if this is impossible, or else get no respect! School districts don't actually buy supplies or resource classrooms sufficiently? Well, teachers had better fix that!

The teachers cannot fix the public schools, I agree with that. But they shouldn't keep repeating the obvious propaganda like the Great Pencil Shortage :-)

The solution is, and you know this is coming (!), free market schools.

A half-step in that direction are charter schools, which the teachers unions fight tooth and nail.

I've never talked with a public school teacher who had anything positive to say about charter schools.

> The teachers cannot fix the public schools, I agree with that. But they shouldn't keep repeating the obvious propaganda like the Great Pencil Shortage :-)

If teachers are shamed into buying supplies for their room, it's not propaganda.

> A half-step in that direction are charter schools, which the teachers unions fight tooth and nail.

Charter schools are pretty complicated from a policy perspective. We're not talking about the same thing in different states. Some of the for-profit charter schools are much worse than public schools. Other areas have sane regulatory regimes that result in an OK product.

Even there, though, students in charter schools do not do better than students who applied for the school but didn't win "lotteries" to get in. That is, the performance benefit seems to mostly be tied to selection effects relating to parental involvement.

> I've never talked with a public school teacher who had anything positive to say about charter schools.

Welp, I'm not a public school teacher, but there is a decent charter school in town.

The big problem with "free market schools," BTW, is that the state is the educator of last resort. There's a real adverse selection problem if education suppliers can take $X to educate the most desirable students, leaving $X per student for the most difficult to educate students. A huge proportion of public educational expense is special education.

If you don't want to give up on special education, this is difficult to do.

I favor policies like vouchers for ~33% of public educational cost to be used at private institutions. This is enough to make private education more affordable to many more families (especially with institution financial aid), but could possibly increase resources-per-student for the remaining students in public schools.

Out of curiosity, what was the transition from field work to teaching like? I always hated school (the school bits, I liked the socializing) and thought I might like to be a teacher one day for that reason. I have no idea what transitioning would even look like though, it's entirely foreign to me.

It was an accidental process. I was volunteering running after-school robotics teams and my role steadily increased over a number of years.

If you want to do this at a public school, you're going to need to go get a specialized master's degree and teaching credential. Of course, there's some value in what's taught in these programs (pedagogy, classroom management, practical experience, etc). I've studied rather intensely on my own.

Interestingly, none of the college professors I had had any education whatsoever in teaching. Neither did my dad, who was a professor for 20 years. They just knew the material.

Feynman, perhaps the greatest physics teacher ever, had 0 teaching credentials. I attended one of his lectures long ago, a privilege I didn't realize until much later.

This works pretty well in an environment of highly motivated university students. But there are reasons why we expect teachers to be educated on how to teach in general.

I highly respect you, and we seem to talk here a lot. But you have this habit of holding up various edge cases that don't quite directly relate to what we're talking about as "gotchas".

I have 0 teaching credentials, too, and think I'm pretty great. The current systems we have for younger students require teaching credentials, and there's some good reasons to require some education-in-education before letting someone teach kids.

There’s no evidence teaching degrees make people better teachers.

::: It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.

Research highlights ▶ Majoring in education is not associated with teacher effectiveness. ▶ University attended for college is not associated with teacher effectiveness. ▶ Acquiring a master's degree is not associated with teacher effectiveness. ▶ Teachers become more effective with a few years of teaching experience. ▶ Teachers may become less effective later in their careers.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

I've already read this research. The problem is that there's massive selection biases at work.

It doesn't mean taking more people without teaching credentials results in an equal or greater quality of education.

e.g. I am a high school dropout who's doing pretty-damn-well at teaching. I do not think this means we need more high school dropouts teaching, though.

I've learned a whole lot reading the pedagogy literature and reading about the kinds of strategies that credentialed teachers are required to learn during their practicum and student teaching. It's difficult to imagine that these courses of study are not useful.

(The research does probably mean that programs intended to incentivize existing teachers to get graduate degrees are probably flawed, except for some special cases in e.g. secondary math education)

In my voyage through the public school system, I never noticed any particular methodology used to teach.

I agree that specialized techniques help with specific learning disabilities, I've seen it in action. But for ordinary kids (the vast majority), the teacher just walks through the textbook for the class. The smarter kids just read the textbook and learn it themselves, as the teacher is moving too ssllooooooowwllyy.

Frankly, the teachers didn't know what to do with me. Some wanted to be rid of me. Some liked me. I don't recall learning much from any of them.

My history teacher would show Mr Magoo movies. I'm not kidding. My auto shop teacher would show drag racing newsreels. I did like my wood shop teacher. He taught me how to use machine tools and not cut my fingers off (he'd lost his in a table saw). That's paid off dividends for me my whole life since. But I don't think that required special teaching training. I learned how to use metal working machine tools in college from the head machinist, who simply enjoyed showing me how to run them.

> But for ordinary kids (the vast majority), the teacher just walks through the textbook for the class

IMO: This is a terrible way to teach. Even for very highly curriculum-driven classes like the microeconomics class I'm teaching.

My block periods are 1 hour 16 minutes. This is a long, long time to be giving dry lecture or popcorn-reading a textbook.

Bell-ringer activities and exit tickets. Gimkit to break up long lectures and get an instant reading of mastery. Appropriate strategies towards looping and unit construction. Pacing, formative vs. summative assessments.

Just how to effectively create discussions is tricky. Everyone looked a bit zoned out when we're talking about consumer surplus. "EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU HAS EXPERIENCED CONSUMER SURPLUS." Huh? "EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU HAS EXPERIENCED CONSUMER SURPLUS. Tell me when!" a few seconds of silence... eventually "Uhm.. there was a thing of candy and it had 4 pieces, and said 25 cents on it. I thought it was 25 cents apiece and I brought a dollar to the counter, but I got 75 cents back..." "Boom! That's 75 cents of consumer surplus!" Cue everyone sharing their concept of it and internalizing it when I had been losing the whole class.

I didn't have training. But I did have a year where I didn't have many classes to teach and I had a very masterful teacher on the other side of the wall and I could listen to him and learn some of what he did. And I've read a whole lot about pedagogy and research from the National Training Laboratories about what are best practices.

> My history teacher would show Mr Magoo movies.

lol. I'm about to show a 2 minute clip from a cartoon where a shopkeeper says that it's Christmas Eve and that they're going to "jack the prices to the moon" because the customer has no other choice to illustrate elasticity of supply and demand.

> He taught me how to use machine tools and not cut my fingers off

I teach robotics, and that means teaching the use of machine tools to middle school and high school students that have no common sense. It is stressful. I agree no one trains you for that :D

On the other hand, teaching is an innate human capability, and a big part of what makes us humans. An education degree is an extremely recent phenomenon.

Clearly, some teachers are better at it than others. But if anyone did a study and found that Masters in Ed teachers did a better job than Bachelors in Ed teachers, I'd be genuinely surprised.

> On the other hand, teaching is an innate human capability, and a big part of what makes us humans.

I've spent my whole career "teaching" in that sense. Explaining things, mentoring junior engineers, etc.

There's definitely skill transfer from that, but it's a bit different of a thing to try and take 25 12-year olds of vastly different backgrounds and ability for a year and get most of them to master a given curriculum.

Yes, it's different, and it's a LOT slower, as the teacher goes over it again and again and again and again and zzzzzzzz......

I missed the first 3 months of 4th grade. The teacher told my mom that they had advanced very quickly, and I could never catch up. I would have to be put back in 3rd grade. My mom said nope, Walter is going in 4th grade.

It was as if I wasn't gone a day. 4th grade had not advanced one iota. Not much to show for 30 hours of instruction per week for three months.

College was a bit different. They blew through 2 years of high school physics in a couple of lectures. This was a tremendous shock to me, and frankly terrifying. I learned I could not afford to miss one lecture, or even be late, let alone 3 months of them.

> Yes, it's different, and it's a LOT slower, as the teacher goes over it again and again and again and again and zzzzzzzz......

Three things:

* The normal pace anywhere -- even most colleges that are not CalTech or MIT -- is for chumps. It's slow so that everyone can keep up.

* On the other hand, I don't think your experience is representative of current middle class (and above) schools. Students complete a whole lot of what was previously considered college curriculum before graduating. Many of the students at my school graduate with >1 year of college credit, and this is despite the non-remedial curriculum floor in colleges moving up from decades ago.

* I don't think you can generalize your experience. You are very intelligent. Your experience (and mine) are not representative of overall student performance or problems.

> On the other hand, teaching is an innate human capability, and a big part of what makes us humans.

That depends on what you mean by teaching. Explicit formal instruction with at least some attention to abstract principles is basically unknown in non-literate societies. People are generally terrible at it without experience. Observational learning is something people are amazingly good at, and language helps a lot but teaching isn’t even a universal in human societies. Watching and learning with occasional, minimal correction is.

Anyone who wants to learn more should read The Anthropology of Childhood by David F. Lance.

Homeschoolers seem to do rather well with no such training.

Many parents teach their preschoolers the basics of reading before they enter school. Those parents have no special skills. My parents taught me arithmetic as a preschooler. My 8th grade teachers were still trying to teach the kids the multiplication tables.

(Personally, I suspected those kids knew the tables, they had just figured out that they could keep the teachers stuck in a loop by pretending to fail all the tests. This way they would not have to learn any more advanced material like fractions AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!! This looping business was made abundantly clear to me later, when other students bragged to me how they snookered the teacher into failing to advance.)

Hm, yeah so a problem would be that I have no degree, nor any desire to attain one.

Yes, I too have come to this realization too. I too hated memorising something as I didn't consider it an "intellectual" task. But you are right that it is a necessary part of education to train kids. Indeed, now when I look at some professions as an adult - like the Indian administrative services (civil service bureaucrats), doctors, lawyers etc - I understand why the ability and skill to learn some fact quickly and retain it in memory is highly valued in such professions.

you dont even need to go to administrators. i worked as a cashier in high school amd some items just never scanned. the ability to memorize the upc codes for those items improved my metrics a ton.

when i studied engineering i also memorized commom values to speed up problem solving. I think everyone does it to some degree. Some deliberate practice while you're developing basic skills isn't a bad thing imho.

> I think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main goals.

I was taught obedience and how to follow instructions in school (and didn't learn it very well). Being discliplined, systemic, learning new things, and challenging myself are what I was always getting in shit for.

I read these rationalizations a lot.

"What college degrees teach you mostly is how to think." "We miss the actual point which was learning to memorize." "Playing chess teaches you how to plan and think."

Well no. These were never mentioned as the goal. If the goal is to learn how to study, how to memorize, how to learn, then present it a so, focus on it.

The goal of memorizing the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English, definitely wasn't to learn how to memorize. Maybe that was a secondary or tertiary goal. It definitely would never be mentioned as a goal in itself.

It seems like now that we had to invest our time in close to useless things, we try to find reasons why it wasn't so useless. School is extremely inefficient. I studied way, but WAY more things I'll never use, or want to use in my life again than the opposite. Education nowadays is like using a shotgun to kill an insect. One thing that's good in software engineering, as opposed to other engineering fields is that it's maybe more focused and applied. But in Mechanical, I studied so much stuff, and now I use less than 5% of it. And the argument that I hear from my colleagues "Oh but you learned how to do complicated math, how to study hard, and understand difficult concepts" just doesn't stick. It's been shown that this kind of training helps you at that task, and little else.

From a 2016 review by Simons et al:

“We find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.”

See https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/09/13/brain-training-d...

> These were never mentioned as the goal.

I teach, among other things, robotics classes. I'm rather explicit that students will learn things about kinematics and mechanical construction, programming, etc. But that these are also the easy parts. The class is really about organization, project management, dispute resolution, and time management. It's about being systematic and making small changes and figuring out where to pitch in to improve the team's progress.

And yah, there's a lot of time spent studying and memorizing rules in a rulebook. Because it helps our performance in our season... and because learning and juggling lots of requirements is stuff students will likely have to do later.

Most of these students will never use inverse kinematics again. It's the "hook" that interests them right now and gets them to practice the other things. They definitely will not use the FIRST rulebook again. But I feel like the students are learning a lot of the things that helped me solve real world engineering problems and complete large projects successfully.

> From a 2016 review by Simons et al:

Why do you link a review about the effects of brain-training on adults? It's very well documented that practice in memorization improves performance at memorization tasks (both similar and unrelated) in children and young adults. This is some of the earliest rigorous ed-psych material we have that is also some of the most durable and well-reproduced.. e.g. this paper from 1932. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1416195

It's a bit silly of an argument here. Do you understand just how much humans develop ability to e.g. memorize musical passages and texts by memorization practice?

I don't think it should be a primary thing we "train" in youth, but it's probably not great to neglect it completely, either.

Here, memorizing poetry is all about building an efficient encoding for its structure. Learning the poetry's structure is a primary aim. Getting good at memorizing small passages of text to be able to recite them is a secondary goal (and a useful one).

I would argue that doing that kind of dive into foundational texts in the English literary cannon is more useful than you might expect. Things like the Canterbury Tales were often recited live by someone standing on a table, as you may remember from that lesson. The exercise of memorizing and orally reciting the couplets gives you a totally different intuitive understanding of the material. This also gives you a window through which you can better understand later works, like Shakespeare. Modern literature is also full of allusions and references to these foundational texts, so a passing familiarity gives you access to a deeper reading of newer works.

Prior to Chaucer educated people in Europe considered English unsuitable for poetry. His work is part of the story of how English came to be an important global language.

That's all to say that going deep on literary classics is valuable in a way that cursive is not.

It's not really the case that memorising those lines have taken up useful brain space.

On the contrary from all we know it probably made you better at memorising.

Similarly being able to write cursive gives you better fine motor control in your writing hand.

I learnt cursive at school, as well as use of a slide rule and log tables. They were obsolete by many decades when I was learning to use them. But are my arithmetic skills worse than the average zoomer who has a smartphone practically cemented into their hand?

No, I'm fact I'm probably more efficient at using the calculator app on their phone.

In theory computer algebra systems have obsoleted junior maths courses let alone times tables (multiplication tables). But good luck using one if you didn't do the wax-on wax-off leg work of memorising seemingly useless data.

In my current job I oversee trainees who have to sit 3 exams (at great cost totalling about 10k). The recommended reading for those those exams is about £25 question bank. Everyone who does it comes away feeling it was useless. The vast majority will pass and tell their more junior friends not to bother with it. And invariably the group that doesn't use it has more fails. There is bias here, those that are willing to work are more motivated and more likely to pass. But this always reminds me that 1) you don't even know what you're gaining when you do any kind of training 2) we rarely remember how we know something or why we came up with a particular idea. Usually the reason is some boring combination of seemingly unrelated grunt work.

You can make the case than learning almost anything “useless” will help you with something else than everyone considers useful nowadays.

Cursive helps with fine motor control. Chess helps you with memorization. Using an abacus might help with both.

That’s not the point. The point is kids have a limited time. I don’t want my kids to learn cursive or the abacus because that will take time off from stuff that’s almost surely more relevant. Perhaps I’m wrong and learning with an abacus is the best use of their time.

I hated cursive with a passion and some of my teachers forced me to use it at different points of my primary education. It was falling out of fashion then and only the hardcore old-timers thought it should be forced upon children. I wrote a perfectly legible print, but for them I just HAD to do it their way

In my view fine motor control is actually very important, as it seems to have a big effect on neuroplasticity and the prevention of Parkinson's.

I also want my kids to learn how to appreciate things that have no tangible purpose other than be beautiful.

I think it's a shame though that you were forced to use cursive when you hated it. Although where I grew up writing cursive used to be the norm. But it's not anymore apparently, as my son is learning non-cursive first.

>as my son is learning non-cursive first.

Is non-cursive different than print? Didn't everyone learn to print before learning cursive?

No, I just didn't know what it's called.

And no, I never learned print at school, only cursive. I started writing in print as a teenager because I thought it looked cooler, but it took me some time to get used to it.

I think people massively overestimate what kids are willing to do or capable of.

Kids are stupid. Like really dumb, not even just not well informed (they are entirely uninformed) but also wildly illogical and without strategy. They do by brute force. Unable to appraise tasks and split them into smaller pieces.

I don't think many get to use an abacus these days but if you do you'll see an abacus makes visual the way numbers can be split into digits for addition and subtraction.

Believe it or not at one point in your life that wasn't so deeply rooted into your soul that it seems alien and a colossal insight.

To kids the sums of numbers might as well have been plucked from thin air.

Every time there is an attempt to teach kids "useful" maths there's a backlash that it's too hard. That parents can't manage it. New Maths, Common Core.

Add to that 50% have IQ below the mean ( of course).

The (of course) is true of the median, not the mean.

Of course. Glad to be corrected.

Clearly I need to hit the abacas harder to bone up on my averages!

I wholeheartedly disagree with the "kids are stupid" comment. They just have no experience. I've coached 4-5yo kid soccer. With guidance and instruction and lots of practice, they went from wanting to kick the ball as hard as they could to dribbling the ball in total control in one season. Some of them had better skills/ball control than some of their older siblings that were not taught the same way. All they needed was to be shown how, encouragement to keep at it, and someone willing with the time to do it with them.

It wasn't until this team (I had coached older kids prior) that I immediately understood why people became coaches/teachers. The look on their faces when they realized they could do something. It was the pride of a parent multiplied by each player.

I'm going to address each one of your points since you didn't really bother to provide any corroborating evidence beyond one personal anecdote.

"It's not really the case that memorising those lines have taken up useful brain space. On the contrary from all we know it probably made you better at memorising."

I have heard of no study that indicates that rote memorization is some kind of magically distinct musculature in your brain that lets you memorize more rote information - the few studies that I have seen about improving your ability to memorize talk about that it's more important how you memorize information and the means and effort in which you used to encode it, for example creating highly vivid mnemonics.

I will concede that if you take the time when memorizing information to consciously connect it to other information particularly seemingly disparate unrelated information, that this can help significantly with retention. But most people don't make an effort to do this, they just repeat the information and ad nauseum until it "sticks".

"Similarly being able to write cursive gives you better fine motor control in your writing hand."

One could just as easily apply the same logic to the fact that more kids play video games, and said video games require fine dexterity and control.

"I learnt cursive at school, as well as use of a slide rule and log tables. They were obsolete by many decades when I was learning to use them. But are my arithmetic skills worse than the average zoomer who has a smartphone practically cemented into their hand? No, I'm fact I'm probably more efficient at using the calculator app on their phone."

I don't even know how to respond to this seemingly wild conjecture. Every generation makes these exact same set of arguments (like learning To read and write Latin and Greek, the list goes on and on) and apparently you've fallen into the same trap.

The bottom line is that we have a finite number of hours in which to cram an exponentially increasing amount of information to distill the entirety of the experiences and knowledge of mankind.

A nit: Canterbury Tales is Middle English and with the rhythm of the words and the many similarities to modern English, it's not that difficult and it's a good way to appreciate the language. I'd say the same thing about memorizing a Shakespearean soliloquy.

Old English/Anglo-Saxon is the language of Beowulf and a modern English speaker would be effectively memorizing a northern European language like German. (It's pre-Norman invasion and therefore pre-Romance language influence.)

See, other information that can't be recalled! Now that you said, I do kind maybe (memory is fuzzy) something about Middle English. It wasn't until being forced to read Canterbury Tales that I personally realized how Germanic English is. This is probably around the time I learned that Romantic languages had nothing to do with feelings and kisses.

Human memory doesn't work like that. Nothing gets pushed out when you learn something new.

It probably works the other way around even. The more you know (and understand), the easier it gets to remember (and understand) new things.

>Human memory doesn't work like that.

Probably right, but that's why we just need to be equiped with an M.2 port so we can upgrade our memory. Or maybe a bit of "better living through chemistry" will come up with a better swapping routine for memory

The explode function is probably jumbled because the order is different in different languages you've encountered.

Thanks for the gentle let off on the memory problem. Now, how to find similar explanations for all of the other things that can't be remembered ;)

Devil's advocate: it's teaching you how to memorize something you don't want yet need to.

I don't want to need it ever

I feel the case could be made that knowing the explode syntax is obsolete because you should have code hints. That being said, in language the general theme follows English language sentence syntax with the verb abstracted to the function name.

As in verb(subject, predicate, preposition)

Think of it as a sentence, you would say "Separator exploded the string"

The verb is exploded, so that's the function, Seperator would be first, then the string, and any modifiers which would be equivalent to prepositions, as in "Separator exploded the string at the first occurrence".

Anyhow that's what used to be taught as best practice if you were developing a new language.

Our memory banks are effectively infinite, we can remember a lot of details from very early parts of our lives, all by ourselves or with the help of hypnosis and other techniques. Oftentimes (much more often than we like to think) we do not remember the exact details (see research about witnesses). Lessons on memorization allows children to train their memory.

Me too! It's only been 14 years years for me but I can still make it through most of it, especially given a little help. It is one of the few things I can remember, even compared to poems I might want to memorize to make myself appear "cultured"

I wonder why that is? Fear of failure produces a stronger memory response than simple desire?

>Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that?

Building a culture.

Not all points are related to the raw utility of doing some task.

In my secondary school we had teachers who dictated their lectures out of their notebooks and we had to write it all down & learn it line by line basically. And then during oral exam recite it back at them. I remember some kids would ask to go from the beginning when they lost track.

> I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string.

On the flip side, having a conversation with someone who *only* memorized those kinds of things would be rather dull.

I used to be against memorization too but to be honest it’s immensely useful and an important skill that takes hard work to accomplish. There’s a special flow to speaking with someone that doesn’t need to stop to look things up on his phone multiple times in a complex conversation.

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