Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t have much insight into the teaching environment so take this with a grain of salt, but in general, when bringing new people into an environment, one of the most useful periods of time to get feedback is during and just after the onboarding process. This is when all of the things long-timers have become blind to are most visible.

Someone who has been in a role for years has often absorbed the issues and found ways to navigate around the biggest pain points (the upside of this is a deeper understanding of the environment). But someone who just joined can often see some issues more clearly than anyone else, and someone who is just finding their stride is in a sweet spot for delivering useful feedback.

I’m not claiming to know the ins/outs of classrooms, nor do I know enough about this person to pass judgement, but disdain seems rather misplaced and counterproductive.

Neither should all decisions about improving the system fall on newcomers, but they will have extremely important and valuable feedback. This seems like unnecessary gatekeeping if not tempered by reasonable policies that seek feedback from numerous sources, especially at a time when classrooms are in crisis and improvement is critical.

Blanket disdain is always a red flag.

I have a lot of friends (including my spouse) who are teachers, and I can pretty confidently say that an office environment/culture/work sphere as we as engineers are used to is vastly different than working in a classroom. We don’t often value experience because, you’re right, often times fresh eyes do bring useful insights. But in the case of teaching (and probably many other things), consensus seems to be that experience does vastly affect one’s effectiveness.

I applaud the OP for their attempt to bring something new, but I feel like if maybe they’d waited a couple more years they may have an easier time thinking through the problem set and creating a product to fit the need. Perhaps I’m wrong! But that’s just my feeling from the many conversations I’ve had with teacher friends.

> We don’t often value experience because, you’re right, often times fresh eyes do bring useful insights.

This isn’t quite what I’m getting at. Even in an office environment, I bias towards valuing experience over naive and idealistic attempts to fix everything that’s wrong.

My point is closer to: those fresher experiences are ephemeral and also an important signal alongside deeper experience and institutional knowledge.

Office environments are also full of inexperienced people trying to fix systems they don’t understand.

My point is not that inexperienced people should be taking over, but that people in positions to institute change should be listening to newcomers along with seasoned veterans. I don’t see this as an either/or stance.

For me the disdain comes from the fact that in my time in the classroom, I was constantly given advice on how to do my job from people who either had never done my job themselves, or like the OP had done it briefly before bailing out of the classroom to become consultants or administrators. There is a whole industry of education consultants who couldn't hack it as educators. All of the other educators commenting on this post are echoing that 2 years is not enough to understand the job while the OP is happily tearing down Chesterton's Fence.

> the disdain comes from the fact that in my time in the classroom, I was constantly given advice on how to do my job from people who either had never done my job themselves

I’ve been in tech for ~20 years, and if there’s one thing that never changes, it’s that newcomers are eager to tell me how to do my job.

Fresh grads come in convinced it’s their time to shake things up.

Management brings in consultants to tell me how to do my job.

The new SVP comes in and tells me how to do my job despite not understanding the environment, etc.

Over the years I’ve found it far more useful to frame this kind of feedback as just another signal among a myriad of signals, which collectively can be quite valuable.

It seems common to any human organization, especially those that rely on specialized skills, and I’d argue that the outcome is similar: just as experience and deep understanding can be important for stability, questioning the status quo can be just as critical for navigating societal change and long term success.

I’m here to argue against the binary position, not to claim that newcomers should be running the show.

At least for the urban school district I went to - of which many school districts are similar (although less represented among the HN crowd), I think your comment is totally off base. There is no chance of learning what to do in these schools during the 'onboarding' process.

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