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Comment by ttiurani | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a gem I picked up in my pedagogical studies: the aim of effective learning is for the student to ask from the teacher to explain something they don't understand. That both guarantees relevance and is highly likely to leave a lasting impression.

However, in most classrooms it's the teacher doing the asking. "Why are you asking me if you already know the answer?" is a completely valid response. A teacher should try to avoid that and instead ask e.g. "what are you having trouble with?"

With regard to ChatGPT passing tests, IMO the root problem is the overemphasis on tests with these kinds of redundant questions (and constant grading) that have always had limited correlation with learning.

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The problem with this is that students don’t know what they don’t know, so how are they supposed to ask the relevant questions?

My favorite teacher, for math would give us a paper with soem optional homework math problems, we would xerox the paper and we will try at hoem to solve them, then next day we would ask each other how X or Y was solved, compare results, we would teach each other. And only the hard problems that we could not solve we would ask the teacher to show us the solution.

What is weird is that 4 years later my brother was in a class at the same teacher and the atmosphere was completely different, nobody was working on optional stuff, nobody was asking questions, nobody was offering to go to the blackboard and participate. It was same teacher, same school , same level of smart students. Not sure if maybe there is one ot two students that with their enthusiasm or the opposite can cause this drastic change.

Teacher burnout is a likely possibility. Or administrator interference. Students causing the change is unlikely, as even if it happened in one class, there would be nothing stopping the teacher from introducing the optional work in the next class.

What if the burn out is maybe caused by the students, some of the new students caused a different interaction to happen, causing the teacher to lose enthusiasm.

is is a data point so it could be possible there is soem variable I do not know about.

It's possible. But when talking about adults and children the adults are typically directing things to their convenience.

The difference could have been the introduction (rollout) of standardized testing. A lot of teachers needed to change their curriculum as a result because they were being forced to teach to that test.

Smart kids are ready to pass those standardized tests (which aren't new) before the first day of class.

Not in this case, there was no such change here in Romania for the 2 generations in the example.

The teacher of course brings the material to the student, typically by presenting it by making statements. If the emvironment is right and the teacher has good pedagogical skills, that should spur questions from the students.

> typically by presenting it by making statements.

Yes, but these statements are often posed as questions though.

> A teacher should try to avoid that and instead ask e.g. "what are you having trouble with?"

The student who is sufficiently lost answers “I’m having trouble with everything!” It takes some guided questions first to figure out exactly where the problem is.

Don't forget the elephant in the classroom: other students.

Regardless of how badly lost some student may be, a question like "do you understand what I just said?" directed at the class in general, will almost always solicit zero responses other than everyone nodding and making approving noises. This is driven by social sense of the students, involving many contributing reasons, such as "I don't want my classmates to think I'm stupid", "I don't want my classmates to think I'm brown-nosing", and "my classmates will kill me if I make this lesson last any longer than necessary".

In my experience, this kind of thinking holds well into university years - it takes some years of adulthood for people to unlearn this pattern, and take responsibility for their own education.

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