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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

When will we switch to the Khan Academy model of lecture-online and homework-with-tutor/teacher? Then school would have a purpose outside of daycare.

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Flipped learning models suck unless they're done perfectly. And 90% of the time they won't be done perfectly.

In my experience (as a student), what actually ends up happening is that students don't do the lectures, which leads to low engagement with the classwork. This also tends to punish people who fall behind, since class time is useless without doing the prerequisite material.

On the flip side, your ability to do homework with the teacher is limited by class size, which have to be large unless you can find a large supply of teachers and buildings to put them in. So what ends up happening is that you teach yourself, which is great if you're smart or talented enough to do that. But if you're not, it's very easy to fall behind and stay behind with this model.

This is the problem. I was a secondary maths/science teacher. 9 tried to implement a flipped classroom before the pandemic and, well, the kids did absolutely nothing. Most would come to school the next day having never read/watched (I linked videos and actual reading, trying to cover all varieties of ways kids prefer to learn) and be openly proud they didn't. It listed about two weeks before I just said screw it and went back to the normal model because I had to.

Lots of students simply aren't mature enough or lack the disciple/interest to do a flipped classroom - and this will apply to any online education as well. Tech isn't going to magically change education, sadly, at least not the way we conceive of it now.

Recruit parents? Use a tool that track viewership by student, send reports to parents, grade them on it? Block students from classroom if they haven't seen the lecture, and let parent's know?

There are traditional ways of motivating student, a combination of carrot and stick.

But yeah its not been solved yet.

In some (vague, old) theories, students in a traditional school are learning F2F social skills, developing friendships & relationships with a large-ish group of their ~peers, and other soft stuff.

There'sa difference in the socialization part: the 'sitting in class bored to tears by a long slow lecture that everybody has to watch in silence' removed. And the actual interaction increased.

imo this limited definition of peer groups is in fact one of the biggest issues with our education model. short of being drafted there is virtually no other social or work setting where your entire social stratum will be comprised solely of people born within the same 12 months and the same zipcode. if anything this gives a highly distorted view of society and encourages a whole range of maladaptive behaviors & thinking patterns. it should be unsurprising that the most intense forms of bullying occur in these settings.

The "born within the same 12 months" part was, historically, far less a part of America's school system. My grandmother taught grades 1-8 in a one-room small-town schoolhouse. My mother taught both in that little town schoolhouse...and also in a large, modern high school in an industrialized city. There was one h*ll of a difference between the two.

Mom did not mince words about which one she thought was far better for the students - in spite of having a vastly lower per-student budget.

I always thought that Scouts was the one bright spot in youth upbringing, where kids from 10-18 had to socialize, listen to one another and plan mutual outings.

Free day care is just really hard to pass up

Idk why this is being downvoted. One only needs to look back at the rippling effects that school closures had in 2020-2021…

Indeed. Bring back the good old days when men were men and worked in the fields all day, and women were women and watched the kids and fed the family.

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