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I teach university biochemistry. After eight or ten years, I began to feel that I was no longer a novice.

“Move fast and break things” is a monument to an aberrant culture of arrogance and dismissive impatience. Based on hypercompetitive greed. (That for a generation was funded by cheap money chasing itself around I search of a drain.)

It’s no coincidence that importing this culture to education produces experiences that are superficial and brittle. It’s difficult to think of a counterexample.

Glass houses, my friend. Academia demands people spend their entire lives slowly crawling up a ladder while simultaneously threatening to kick them off that ladder for a large portion of that climb. Spend your life working towards tenure only to get denied and wash out after 15-20 years seems insane.

a decade of your life to get past "novice" level for teaching something like CS to high school students is not something we should be pushing to replicate in other fields.

Education is begging to be disrupted. Maybe this guy doesn't have all the answers, but pretending like what we have is good is a joke. He's on a better track than sitting in a classroom trying to get past "novice" during the most productive time of his life.

>> “Move fast and break things” is a monument to an aberrant culture of arrogance and dismissive impatience.

> Education is begging to be disrupted.

I rest my case.

Substantively, believe me, I agree with you. Culturally, though, you're proving my point.

I think you know better than to claim that anyone who disagrees with you "culturally" proves your point.

My whole point is that the culture of academia is not something worth replicating, and indeed needs to be fundamentally... disrupted.

You're talking about different things.

You are talking about the restrictive, punitive world of academia where you constantly have to please the powers that be in order to step up. OP was talking about their own feelings about their own abilities in their job.

The parallel to software engineering feels correct to me, particularly if we're talking about working at a giant company like Google. No matter how good of a developer you are you still need to battle yearly reviews, stack ranking, peer review etc. etc in order to advance. But you can strip all that away and still recognize that after two years in the industry you're not that advanced as a developer.

The crucial difference is that in the software engineering world you can take your misplaced confidence, strike out and try something. Worst case it'll fail and you move on. As a teacher with misplaced confidence you can strike our, try something and mess up the educations of children and parents who put their trust in you.

Statistically, what are the odds that you're someone who actually understands enough about teaching and learning to be able to identify why education is 'broken' and successfully 'disrupt' it, as opposed to someone who just thinks they understand it but actually is suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome?

If a guy in a dirty denim jacket comes to you outside the bus station and tells you he's Jesus, he absolutely might be Jesus. However assuming that he's not is a perfectly good heuristic.

"Statistically" implies some kind of measurable "teacher skill unit" that one is

a) fully aware of or

b) could be measured, and

c) is precise enough to differentiate between "able to help improve education" and "not able to improve education", and

d) this skill unit is in any way accurate.

Of course none of these are true, and in fact teaching is an amorphous and situation-specific concept that defies all attempts to replicate or quantify success. All attempts thus far to do so have failed in glorious and spectacular ways at every level (e.g. No Child Left Behind Act of 2002).

In reality, the skillset a person who can successfully improve the state of CS education has may or may not be related to their time spent actually teaching or their skill at teaching.

Hell, even one's time spent teaching is mostly uncorrelated with one's skill at teaching. We all know teachers in our childhoods who had many years of experience and yet remained terrible at their jobs.

A good teacher may in fact be the very worst kind of person to fix teaching.

"chasing itself around in search of a drain" - beautiful metaphor!

A large part of that is that tools + procedures expand to fill the available space - if there are people willing to spend 20 years doing the same work, the work expands to fill 20 years of your life.

It's more about the social landscape than the practical requirements.

I took CS in the equivalent of a US highschool. The classes were taught by teachers ranging from 2 years experience to 15 YOE.

We enjoyed (and aced) the classes from the teacher with fewer YOE. Maybe the more experienced teacher was more jaded, maybe the younger teacher was more relatable. Who knows.

I have relatives who are educators their entire lives. One thing I've taken away from listening to them complaining about their work, is that there is an abundance of teachers with long YOE, who are totally checked out from their job, and use their long tenure to bully the younger teachers. There's an idiom they use a lot during these complaints: "Using their tenure to sell their experience."

Finally, it's "you're". Not "your". It was difficult to parse your text when you're not doing it right.

I can see you're point about newer teachers being more engaging with more energy and enthusiasm but there is a balance to be struck in education between engagement and experience/ability to teach. They are not the same thing.

I would also argue that while some of the most 'fun' teachers I had were newer, they were not the best teachers and many of the best teachers I had were older with far more experience but, like you said, had not lost their enthusiasm. When you apply that to the discussion in question I would argue that the author might indeed know how to engage with students, and has come to the frankly not so orginal conclusion that kids like to have fun, but does not have the experience/ability to do more than those that have come before.

Another user replied to my comment about Khan academys founder having no prior experience beyond tutoring relatives, well, there existed a market gap that no longer exists. What killer features are being proposed here? What are the technical solutions to the obvious technical issues that they point out? How do they plan to monetise this solution aimed at high school kids or indeed underfunded schools? How will they help teachers engage their students in the classroom itself via this platform - a poor teacher blames his tools - students need engaging in the classroom not online where you are competing with dopamine inducing auto scrollers.

I appreciate you educating my punctuation, perhaps you have the experience to start an education platform of you're own!

Strongly disagree with this take and especially the tone.

"Is two years enough experience to create a curriculum?" is a good discussion prompt but it's hardly a silver bullet for dismissing the project. A counter argument is that being new to the field gives the OP a fresh perspective.

OP never claimed to be an expert and there is nothing disrespectful in this post. It's too bad it's the top comment. Best of luck to OP on pursuing a new way of engaging students.

Why would you even need to create a curriculum in a HS setting? The tests are standardized and there are hundreds or thousands of people teaching the same subject in the same schedule state wide...

The author had two years of experience, during which he saw things that surprised him. He didn't say he was a know-it-all or that others taught badly. He wasn't very satisfied with his own results. He decided to try something different. I have not seen arrogance.

Playing devils advocate a bit:

Maybe he's starting that project because the state of the art is just so abhorrently bad that two years is plenty of time to see some really low hanging fruit.

I mean, this seems very plausible to me. There's plenty of areas where this type of things happen. All the time.

But it’s _not_ abhorrently bad. There are so, so many high quality platforms out there which exist solely to teach coding. It’s not 1990 where people learn C++ from a textbook anymore, the bar for good programming education is actually incredibly high now.

I’m of the opinion that coding just something not everyone is going to like, just as I’ve never enjoyed painting or basketball. I don’t think there’s a lack of good tools, we just started with an incorrect premise that it’s possible to design a tool that makes someone like something that they assuredly don’t.

Can you name some? I know of Scratch.. and that's mostly it.

It really isn't plausible at all. The students are teenagers so the biggest hurdle is always going to be social, not tools.

It just can't be solved by tech, unless it's a complete paradigm shift such as sentient AI teachers with emotions having productive 1on1s with students in a full-dive style VR style environment.

My wife and I taught for 7 years before we couldn't make it work anymore financially. And that was in higher education which is infinitely less challenging than k-12.

We both agreed that we learned most of what we learned about the job in the first 2-3 years.

Also we saw a lot of teachers hit burnout at around 2-3 years and become infinitely less engaged / less passionate / more toxic.

Two years is a perfect amount of time to put into teaching.

I am sorry to hear that, it is a great shame of society that education is continually neglected, underfunded and politicised.

I believe it is largely accepted by economists from accross the spectrum that a key driver and indeed one of the only gurantees of long term economic growth is investing in education and yet we routinely do not do so to the point where it is simply not financially viable for teachers to remain in the profession.

As to your argument that 2-3 years is where you learn most, I would argue that is probably the same for ever profession out there, but the experience of time is what adds that extra 10%. Just like we complete 90% of a programming task in the scheduled time, its really that last 10% where most of the difficulty lies.

> continually neglected, underfunded

In the US, we pour staggering amounts of money into education. It's certainly not underfunded in raw dollar terms.

Now, the lion's share of that money going to administrators of one kind or another, is a big problem.

> While normally I would applaud work in this area, the sheer arrogance to claim in your article you have the experience to build curriculum's or indeed that you can build a better education platform for teaching kids to code with this experience is insulting to the teaching profession as well as those building existing platforms in collaboration with teachers and schools alike.

I think you mistake conviction and ambition for arrogance. I mean, how much of a fintech wiz were Patrick and John when they started /dev/payments? How many call taxi companies did Travis and Garrett run before starting an on-demand Limo service? Experience counts for naught. Insights matter more when it comes to inducing mass change in human behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnav9vgHDHs&t=350s / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/qnav9vgHDHs

Sure but the insights the author has had are that kids like fun and that cs education platforms have bugs. I don't see any original insights here tbh they are just insights that should be obvious to anyone who has ever stepped foot in a class room or used an interactive course.

There is also the fact that your examples and indeed the likes of khan academy filled a market gap or had a niche offering. The education platform market is saturated and if your entire product is to create and deliver educational courses for high school kids I'd wager teaching experience, and more of it, is key.

How many years of teaching experience do you think is necessary before you start an educational platform?

I have 0 experience in teaching, never created a product focussed on education, and schools are paying me to use my product in their class.

I know nothing of your product, so this isn't a shot against you personally, but there are plenty of products schools are paying for that provide little value and a handful of them that are providing negative value.

You've reached the first step in the process, getting into schools. The next step is show value in outcomes rather than just another grift.

The original point I was trying to make is that you don't need to be an experienced teacher to create a useful educational product.

Like I said, my product is not really made for schools, and it's also not my main focus. But plenty of teachers and students seem to get value out of it. I just have to trust their word on that of course.

Calling someone arrogant because they want to create an educational product with only 2 years of experience is really weird for me.

You don't need any experience. You don't even need a quality competitive product. You just need a landing page and marketing to administrators. Even better if you have connections to school boards.

Maybe they're orthogonal. The trick is making the two work together.

100% agree with this.

There's so much more to teaching than the actual teaching part. Interacting with kids, controlling a classroom, etc. Those are things you start to pick up as a student teacher, but you really nail it several years in.

I feel like many base their opinions on teaching through their experience as a student or through what they hear from others.

It also highly depends on the school, students, and what type of teaching you are doing (specialist, classroom, support, etc).

A classroom teacher who has well behaved students for two years will have different opinions about teaching than a classroom teacher who has rough classes for two years. Admins do their best to spread kids out, separate kids that cause trouble together or fight, etc.

Sometimes though it's just down to the luck of the draw - you enter your third year and by the end of the day you are crying on the car ride home.

There are people who never worked as teachers who have created education startups. Salman Khan was informally tutoring relatives before starting Khan Academy.

I disagree with this interpretation.

If Bill Gates took this advice he wouldn't have dropped out of university to run Microsoft. That's fueled by ambition and initiative, not arrogance.

Arrogance is telling OP or young Bill Gates that they aren't qualified enough to do it.

This is a very dismissive reply. Some of the replies to this comment are better.

I completely agree. In any field of sufficient complexity, 2 years isn't enough time to learn enough to have an informed opinion on reforming it.

Like many others here, I work in IT and that's the kind of thinking that led to every new project being "Ruby On Rails" about 12-15 years ago and every time a new underlying library gets updated, a bunch of code breaks. Meanwhile, C/C++, COBOL and FORTRAN programs from 30-50 years ago are still running the infrastructure of the world.

Newer doesn't always mean better.

Too much of that here on NN. "The state of x is terrible... so here's my new startup." "Increasing the performance of y tenfold.... with our new product."

Presumably you are OK with this person getting in front of a class of kids and being responsible for teaching them CS on their first year of employment. Even though they are a new teacher and still have much to learn, they will learn on the job and get better.

I don't see how starting a startup is any different. Yes, today, this person probably doesn't know everything they need to know for their startup to succeed. But they will learn that over time.

On the other hand, OP probably knows the difference between "your" and "you're", so there's that...

The old adage holds true: it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

in my culture this is said often; however, I'd be very careful with using this in modern day. The right tool for the job can make tremendous difference on your result. Also, some tools can abstract away some of the unnecessary detail/undifferentiated heavy lifting and help you reach your outcome faster.

Up to a certain point... the bad dancer may be wearing terrible shoes that impedes from learning and becoming great, instead focusing attention on improving unnecessary skill.