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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

The thing that breaks my heart is that we have a much better understanding of adult learning. It didn't need to be that painful. That's not the lecturers fault. It takes a while to learn how to teach. It is the fault of our education system which thinks "let's throw seniors into a teaching situation without any grounding or support". We can also, simultaneously, fault the education system for a high school system that does not prepare people for college at all.

Sure glad we spend a lot of money on football coaches, though.

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Our high school system doesn’t prepare students for college at all because the way high school works here (in America) clearly isn’t meant to prepare students for college. You have to go to high school. There are compulsory attendance laws everywhere. You don’t have to go to college. It’s a choice to be there. College professors expect students to have their own motivation, their own ability to study things, and so in. High school teachers have to deal with the fact that very often a very large percentage of our students would simply rather not come to school than be there. And if you just let them fail, you get everybody from the principal to parents to society at large, pointing their fingers at you as the problem. So we can’t approach instruction with any expectation that students will care, try, stay awake, or do anything other than show up in class. (And I live in a district with really profound truancy problems because our district attorney doesn’t give a shit and never holds truancy court, so I can’t even expect students to show up on a regular basis.) But everyone then pointed us like we are failing somehow to prepare students for college.

I put it in reverse: colleges are failing to understand what high schools deal with and what we have to do in response. We are the ones who have laws constraining what we can and can’t do (especially in public school), how we have to approach certain things, and even what content we have to teach. (I am required by law, for example, to teach the content standards promulgated by the state. If I wander outside my standards, that’s good cause for being fired. Now, fortunately, I teach a subject where our standards are extremely broad and loose, so I can fit almost anything under them. But history is a core subject that isn’t a focus of testing regimes, so they generally ignore us.)

By the way, I’m not saying it’s a good thing that high schools don’t prepare students for college. But literally the response from our administration when a faculty member points out that our policies aren’t helping prepare students for college is that “not all our students will go to college.” Maybe half-ish of our students do.

Note that I point to the education system. I know a lot of teachers bend over backwards to make sure their students learn something. (Often even at personal cost, because heaven forbid we give them or students decent supplies)

We as a society just don't seem to give a damn about that outcome. (Cf teacher salaries, the truancy issue you mention, standardized testing, content standards as strict prescription instead of a minimum,....)

And you're right, maybe colleges need to adapt to that reality as well. Or maybe there's a step missing between high school and college. But, again, we don't seem to particularly care about fixing that as a society.

I like the idea that there’s a step missing in between. Like, after high school, you spend a year minimum doing college prep at some sort of extended school. Or you could test out of it and enter college immediately (if, say, you went to a college-prep-type high school). I don’t know who would fund it and that’s half the battle, but it would be miles better than what we do right now.

Part of the issue with public schools right now is that we aren’t really just education anymore. We’re like a social service agency. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t be but people need to understand that what we do is so much more than just content. Every day last week, I was in the offices of the guidance counselors, or our behavioral interventionist, because kids had come to talk to me privately about different struggles they’re having (all mental health-related in one way or another). Whether it was anxiety, depression, panic attacks, or not being able to get through the day without smoking weed because of how bad they feel. Who else is going to help these kids deal with that? They don’t have community resources to help them, and they often don’t tell anyone at home about it. And that’s just extra stuff on top of what every normal teenager goes through during their development. I’ve had to have so many conversations with boys AND girls this year about using protection if they’re having sex that it’s terrifying, because of the shit I hear. But people on the outside just see me as, like, giving history assignments.

In my case, at the very least, I had a fair amount of support.

First of all, I explicitly signed up to teach. At my university, fewer than ten undergraduates per semester teach a class, and typically it's for students who want to hang out and teach something they like. In order to teach, they have to take an introductory class on pedagogy first, which mostly covers assignment and syllabus design.

The student-taught-course program at my university exists far more for the (undergraduate) instructors' benefit than to teach students; its job is to give students a chance to experiment with teaching early on.

No offense, but "assignment and syllabus design" scratches the surface at best. And while I understand the desire to let students experiment with teaching, it's worth keeping in mind it's an experiment on other human beings. (So, technically, subject to IRB review.)

Again, this isn't your fault. This is a massive failure of the education system in general. We pretend that as long as somebody knows the subject, they're decent teachers. (We pretend that because it's cheaper, and we pretend it because otherwise established faculty would have to admit that a large number of their members are extremely bad teachers)

In general, it is always interesting and disheartening to see how many educators feel like they need to re-invent the wheel. There has indeed been a ton of research into educational methods, didactic approaches, etc.

There is no shortage of material available. Then again, as you say, without the proper support to get you grounded and pointed to the right entry level resources it is difficult to all figure out.

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