Why Every Educator Should Read Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Why Every Educator Should Read Hacker News

educationismylife.com

31 pointsajjuliani26 comments

> As educators we are constantly trying to spark our student’s “intellectual curiosity”.

Rarely. Let's be honest here, most teachers are not even teaching, not to mention sparking anything. They're just (slightly) glorified babysitters maintaining a space where people store their kids during the day (vide http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html) with some supposed benefit to the kids and society at large but the results are so hard to quantify that no really knows.

You're an outlier in your field. Which is also probably why there is no popular site like HN for educators -- there are too few of you who really care, not in theory, not in declaration but in the constant effort to improve their process and results. I'm not blaming them, there are no incentives, no feedback loop, and almost no leaders to imitate.

I must have been very fortunate to have, on the whole, great teachers that cared deeply about their work. But then again, my parents made it a point to make sure we lived in less-than-stellar apartments in excellent school districts that paid their teachers well and treated them with respect.

There's a systemic problem with the way we (in the US) let remote policy makers dictate how teachers should teach (especially with the prevalence of standards-based testing), instead of giving them room to be autonomous and creative in their work. Micromanagement and lack of professional autonomy turns workers into disengaged drones regardless of the field (c.f. the dead look in the eyes of that friend of yours that's at a dead-end job at a coding farm). Most teachers don't start as "glorified babysitters" and get in it to try and make a difference but become disillusioned after fighting against the tide for a few years.

I think I may have agreed with you completely five years ago, but today's world of education is changing...fast.

We may be still seen as outliers in our field, but the landscape is changing an many educators are getting on board. I'm also looking at the glass somewhere half full, which may not be the case...

There are enough tools now for these teachers to find one another rather than been islands in a school.

Growing up, I can count the number of educators that cared enough to "hack their craft" on one hand. None of them knew about each other. What has changed is that these people now have a way to know one another. This also helps some teachers with hacking potential that would have otherwise slipped through the cracks to realize potential as a hacking teacher.

TBH, without a site like hacker news and places like github, how many here would still be working a lame enterprise programming job coding in VB.NET or Java in the basement of some big company where programming isn't the core business, but simply view as another job that needs to be done.

"There are enough tools now for these teachers to find one another rather than been islands in a school."

This is not true. I've been teaching for 15 years, and I've looked every year or two for good online ed communities. There are some good ideas out there, but every one I have seen has a significant shortcoming: over-commercialized, technologically inferior, poorly moderated, diluted by the whining and complaining that plagues staff rooms...

The value of a true HN clone is real. I'd love to see someone make an exact clone of HN, called Educator News, if pg would be fine with it. I can't run it, but I'd sure help moderate it.

I have a background in IT and am not a teacher, but I am deeply interested in learning more about educational technology. I think it's important to understand the history of "education reform" and what has succeeded and what has failed in the past.

It seems to me that there is no "magic bullet" for applying technology to education. There's no app, no device, no specific technology that will really revolutionize our educational system.

There are at least two essential things that I've noticed in my brief time thinking about this subject.

1. The focus should be on "better education" not "more technology".

2. Engaging early adopters is critical to get anything done in a relatively short amount of time.

80% of teachers are too busy teaching with their existing, "tried and true" methods and aren't interested in whatever new technology is being presented this school year.

I really like the ideas that seem to be coming from Khan Academy where they are testing the best ways of learning, not just running with assumptions.

What is changing? Public education is still based on a very outdated model (at least in the US).

What outdated model would that be? And what different models are more successful countries utilizing?

The model came from Prussia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

It is amazing that our delivery of education hasn't changed much. I'm sure it would be up for debate as to what country has a better model. I certainly do not have a comprehensive grasp of non US school systems. I believe that ours will take many, many years to unwind...

So do you have any example of an education system that performs better than the US that doesn't also have:

    * compulsory attendance
    * specific training for teachers
    * national testing for all students
    * curriculum set for each grade
    * kindergarten.

I modified barely more than a stub of a wiki entries summary from:

"The Prussian system instituted compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students (used to classify children for potential job training), national curriculum set for each grade and mandatory kindergarten."

The US doesn't do job classification based on testing, have a national curriculum, or enforce mandatory kindergarten (but some states might). Pointing at the Prussian "System" is a really weak commentary.

Education critiques on HN are laughably bad. Most people here post as if they are experts even though their only experience is spending their childhood on the receiving end of the system.

I would be curious for you to share some information or opinion on this topic. I am always up for learning new things. How can this critique be improved? Give us some examples! Raise the level of discussion!

Alas, no response :-(

Ah yes, those pesky weekends getting in the way of someone spoon feeding you an education.

Instead of lazily spouting nonsense about outdated teaching methods failing in the US how about you expend your own energy figured out why nations outranking the US do better? What they do different? What could apply here? Maybe even put your own effort into formulating a post from knowledge, rather than lazy ignorance.

I am in education and agree with much of what you have written.

"Which is also probably why there is no popular site like HN for educators"

I disagree. First, there are all sorts of conferences, books, workshops, and other resources to help teachers improve. The amount of resources that exist to help make teachers better probably dwarfs the amount of resources that exist to help make hackers better. Second, if you read the HN comments it's pretty clear that the average person can't really say anything intelligent about education. Maybe this is less so among teachers, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case.

I loathe passing around links about education to anyone in the profession. The comments almost immediately go negative. The first comment on this post was calling teachers babysitters. Everyone immediately turns against each other (parents, teachers, armchair educators, politicians).

Most good school teachers don't have time to read sites like hacker news for even an hour a day. They're in the weeds --running after school programs, early morning programs, writing IEPs, planning upcoming lessons, and whole slew of other stuff most people don't even think about.

People in the tech field all have the luxury to stop working to check out a few articles on the internet. We even pretend like this is making us better at our job. Teachers do not have this kind of time. They are on the moment they walk in to the moment they walk out (and them some more before they go to sleep).

Good teachers are like full stack engineers. They have to worry about everything and carry all the wait. They're thrown into a 50+ year system that almost never changes. Their version of a startup is creating a new school, and that's still a derisive, hot topic (chart schools). Instead most of them work for the education equivalent of IBM.

But still, Academic Recess sounds like a good idea. I just signed up. Hit me up at gaelenh at gmail dot com if you want any help.

Don't let the haters get us down! I'll reiterate that I do believe perception is changing amongst many teachers in the field. However, the perception outside of the field is what you said...

In NYC I would say that it's still a mixed. The comment section on gothamschools.org (great local edu news site) is full of Angry Teachers waiting in the wing to jump on editorials and commenters with vitriolic language.

I am a high school teacher who reads HN as well. I completely agree; there are many ideas in the hacker world that are quite relevant to education. I would love to see an "Educator News" clone of HN. A simple site where the focus is on high-quality ed articles, where all the BS banter and whining that occurs on almost all ed sites is downvoted and killed. A site where educators who act as professionals every day gather, and start to take education back from politicians and legislators. I will check out Academic Recess. If it's a clone of HN, and it is well-moderated, I will love it. If it's just inspired by HN, I'll wait and see.

PS I don't see any contact info in your profile. I'd like to send you a message; is there a good email to use?

ajjuliani at gmail

We are planning a similar site and we are looking for moderators... Thanks for the interest and I completely agree.

I just signed up. I'd be happy to be a moderator with the goal of creating a professionally-minded community that demonstrates ownership of education.

What are you using to power your site?

Interestingly I think the OP indirectly touch upon the reason why everyone should learn to program and not just people who want to do so as a profession.

Programming is the lever which allows members of a community to surmount all the obstacles that form a barrier to sharing, collaboration and developing best practices out in the open with others.

Without programming, sharing and collaboration is reduced to the amount afforded by fundamentally human "bandwidth". Programming gives you the tools to create and marginally, but constantly improve systems to increase not only the bandwidth between two members of the community, but the number of people within the community with whom a single member can collaborate and share with.

I would say that tools like Github are the most important tools in the community because use of it ultimately inspires a lot of the discussion in the community. It takes the basic building block of what the community is most passionate about, code, and accelerates and multiplies the interactions between two to many people involving that code.

In the educational community, something similar that involves lesson plans, exercises and other teaching material would be awesome.

For example, were I a science teacher, how could would it be if it were easy to share exercises, fork and modify them, hack together individual exercises of greater complexity that not only teach underlying principles but how multiple underlying principles work together.

What tools would allow people who have a passion for teaching to come together and collaborate over material? Programming allows the building of those tools. The more members there are of a community that can program, the more likely that there will be diversity of solutions and rapid iterations of those solutions.

Very interesting post. I've been getting more into educational technology (I have school aged children and recently became co-chair of the tech committee at their school).

I've been thinking of a "Hacker News for Education" for some time, so I signed up for academicrecess -- let me in! :)

http://academicrecess.com/?lrRef=4EVtr

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