Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

I'm from England, I left school in 2008 with 3 GCSEs (which is considered failing high school here) and the absolute biggest problem with education here in England is it's not education it's just doing work / remembering information -- not sure if this affects other countries, I would assume so but I've not experienced any other education system.

I had an absolutely fantastic IT teacher, he really cared about technology and teaching and he was the best teacher I've ever had but he was very restricted by the curriculum. This was a teacher who enjoyed programming and could teach it, he could teach complex (relative to the classes intelligence level) computing things and teach it in a way we could understand, but the material he was forced to teach was awful, absolutely awful. For my entire last year of school my required work was (If I remember correctly (this is how awful it was, I do not remember it well today)) write an explanation / brief about a microsoft access database system, the extent of our freedom was to choose the subject (dvd store, grocery store etc) and this was an entire years worth of work.

What we need is two things, teachers who really care about teaching and providing a real education and a good curriculum that promotes learning not consumption (and subsequent regurgitation) of information. I left high school and in the last 4 years of it I really did not learn anything that is useful to me today, everything I need to know today is stuff I was taught early on, the last 4 years was being given information to consume, information that as soon as I left the classroom was absolutely worthless.

The IT teacher I had left the school after a year to teach in Switzerland, I think that's pretty telling. The system we have pushes good teachers away and the shitty ones who are just content reciting material stick around, I would also assume relevant to this point is a teacher I had of Spanish is still with the school, but he is such a bad teacher they re-assigned him after many years to "cooking". Someone the school deemed qualified and able enough to teach Spanish for many years is now using his full power to teach cooking?

Most of what you say is spot on, but I take issue with your suggestion that "a good curriculum" will solve the problem. What is needed is /no/ set curriculum; it is in the nature of prescriptive documents to become fussier and more prescriptive over time (instruction creep), and it is only a matter of time before even the best-written curriculum devolves into a nightmare document that specifies exactly what lesson must be taught on exactly what day of the year, and hell mend any teacher who dares ignore it. (This is one of the things about the system which pushes the good teachers away.)

A good approach is that used by the Schedules of lecture courses at Cambridge: they are 'minimal for lecturing and maximal for examining'; they are also very short (about two decent-sized paragraphs for a 24-hour course). Obviously university lecturers can work out more for themselves than school teachers can - but that may well be because school teachers are not /trained/ to work anything out for themselves.

It may also be a good idea to get rid of standardised examinations; the exam-board system is a mess, with boards competing (essentially) on who can make their exams the easiest and thus attract more business from schools who want to move up the league tables. Employers know how to compare, say, a 2-2 at Cambridge to a First at Essex; why should the same not apply to school-leavers' results?

the exam-board system is a mess, with boards competing (essentially) on who can make their exams the easiest and thus attract more business from schools

This has got so blatant that one board was caught telling teachers what questions will be on the exam this year: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/8940...

My IT teacher was similarly skilled and equally wanted to teach usefully and interestingly, and he generally managed to get round the curriculum.

Part of this was that he managed to bend the curriculum to be more challenging and interesting (my GCSE project consisted of researching and then writing up methods of bypassing the school's internet filter system - those who preferred to could indeed do stuff like MS Access projects), and part was finding ways to achieve good grades quickly leaving plenty of free time for other areas.

Possibly the reason he was able to do this was that I went to a private school, I don't know if state schools would allow teachers this much flexibility? That said, my school was/is ranked very highly in GCSE/A-Level rankings tables, and took that very seriously, so as far as grades were concerned he was still on a very tight leash.

He was a very unusual (in a good way) teacher though, like none over I ever had or have ever heard of. In his office (connected to the IT rooms) he had a fully stocked minifridge, originally for himself but he also sold to his students at cost. He formerlly was a programmer for the Canadian air force, as well as a DJ, and would generally play techno music through classes (often loud enough for teachers above to take issue), and was regularly getting in trouble with the headmaster for wearing an ear-ring. Unconventional, but the best teacher any of us ever had.

My school was the complete opposite to yours then, it's in a poor area and the year before I sat my GCSEs the 5 A - C pass rate for the school was under 20%, the only 2 lower schools in the county were special education schools, although I noticed that last year they were celebrating that they'd achieved something like an 80% pass rate, but I suspect they're just focusing on getting people to pass now (the year I did GCSEs they offered a single test (well, one maths one English) that was the equivalent to 1 GCSE, I assume to boost averages)

Our Design/Technology teachers took a similar approach - we had a checklist of "How to get 100% in your coursework by ticking the boxes" parts to rush through, and then a real focus on building something cool and learning DT properly. Again, a private school.

Let me compare with the 1980s in England, because that's what I know ...

I sat 'O' levels (now replaced by GCSEs in 1981 and 'A' levels in 1983. There was no IT teaching in my school at that time. A computer lab was installed in 1980, and they began running the 'O' level computer science exams in 1983 (too late for me) although I got to use the lab's Apple IIs and Systime 525 minicomputer during my 'A' level in general studies. Teaching focused on programming; there were no office apps on those computers. The 'O' level in CS was recognizably about computer science, albeit at an embryonic level, in those days.

In 1987 I began studying for an 'A' level in computer science at evening classes (I'd been at university from 1983-86). The focus was fairly hardcore programming, with some assembly language plus BBC Basic, plus boolean logic, binary and hexadecimal arithmetic, basic data structures (linked lists, trees, hash tables). Applications barely got a look in.

I bailed on the CS 'A' level as too pedestrian and instead went into a graduate-entry conversion degree in 1989. The then CS 'A' level was, I will concede, useful preparation for a CS degree back then.

The point is, the 1980s syllabi had zero content on application usage -- it was all about data processing and programming and the structure of computing machinery. The trend towards teaching IT seems to have cut in some time after 1988, and gone way too far ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com