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Comment by lysecret | Hacker News Reader

I used to work as a teacher in a kind of bootcamp. Over the years my my view on teaching has changed massively. I think there are only two generic things and the rest is situation dependent.

- There is just no way around the struggle. The students have to struggle. Your job is not to take the struggle away but to show them why it is worth struggling and instil the belief that they can do it.

- The most important teaching skill is to level with them. Talk about how difficult it was for you to understand it, what helped you. Never put yourself above them. I honestly believe this is where most people fundamentally fail. Respect them. Don’t treat them like babies. Forced attendance is imo the worst symptom of this.

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> Forced attendance is imo the worst symptom of this

I taught in an inner city title one school. While it would have made teaching those who showed up easier, I'd bet that over half the students would not show up without forced attendance. We had under 2% of students who would go on to graduate a four year college and something like an 80% transitory rate (meaning 20% would complete all four years at the school - this might have been up to 95% transitory, it has been a while since I was there). Gangs, violence, and poverty and no examples of school helping anyone in their lives.

What do you do with kids in that kind of situation?

Oh, first of all, I truly respect this kind of teaching work. My only experience is in graduate or post-graduate level teaching. So really don't what is ideal in your situation.

fwiw I've never heard of forced attendance post secondary; attendance is a legal requirement in k-12.

Some classes have an attendance requirement, but usually that's set by the department or the individual instructor.

In Spain it became common after the last university reform, about 15 years ago. IMO it's counterproductive. If a student doesn't want to go to class and you force them, they probably won't be paying attention but just wasting time with social networks or whatever other distraction, and they can even distract those that want to attend. And I don't even feel morally justified to tell them to stop wasting time (as long as they're silent, at least) if they're forced to be there.

You can force a student to be in class, you can't force them to care about class.

Forced attendance would work if students cared for their education but their parents didn't. That's just not the case, even if students don't care because their parents don't, it just doesn't fix the problem.

From experience, in the last 5-10 years most lecturers won't care if you go to classes or no. The will only require you to do continuous evaluation tasks.

Edit: Change "won't" to "don't", and "The will" to "They"

I’ve taken and assisted for classes that had “mandatory” attendance. In the sense that missing classes would come out of your grade.

Sometimes it was implemented as a direct role-call. Some classes have a “participation” component which is really just a fuzzy attendance grade. Some classes have random graded in-class quizzes, which also function as a stochastic attendance check.

Generally I hate all of these things IMO low attendance is the instructor’s last, most dramatic barometer to indicate poor instruction, and subverting this measurement is a terrible idea. But it is definitely different for k-12!

Get them into trades that can make them money right now rather than calling textbooks & college the OnlyWay™?

Err, wrong. We must feed the industrial debt complex.

Even with trades you need to know how to read, write and do basic math (and honestly algebra). Kids who don't show up likely haven't hopped that hurdle and are unfit even for trades. There is a disconnect where kids dont understand that classes are often not about the class but some underlying skill you're practicing via something they consider worthless.

It's a waste for schools to put an unprepared kid in a trade class only for them to realize oh. They actually have zero skills for that. And then backtrack. You'll also never convince most kids that they'll need algebra for a trade because most people can't connect that you need algebra to budget and other basics of life.

Vocational track was a thing when I was a kid. And it didn't matter much because kids who could do it were capable of doing college track if they wanted and kids who could nevet do collegr track and needed mandatory attendance couldn't even read. Maybe the gap is narrower these days, but i don't think a vocational track is encourages the bottom. I do think it's a good thing to expose kids as an option, just to explain that nowadays even trades require schooling after high school if you want to get certified, etc. It's just shorter with more lab type classes a la engineering.

Amen to this. Frankly i would go a step further and say that any student that doesn’t show a real interest and propensity for STEM should be equally encouraged and introduced to trade school and apprenticeship options as well as college with equal emphasis.

You will serve those students better and society as a whole.

Trades still include hard work and rule following for a long time. And many trades have a culture of crusty old assholes being in charge and then turning the young entrants into the crusty old assholes. I think there will still be a large segment of the population that will see gang and criminal activities (fraternity, high-reward, party lifestyle) as a more compelling career choice

It sounds like a problem that punishing students for not showing up doesn't solve. Incentives (like pay for attendance) that help to alleviate some of the issues causing attendance problems (by your own words, poverty among them) seem like a good start. At the bottom of it is a very rough and ill-enforced social contract, though. People in these positions don't believe that society cares much to reward their positive qualities (and it often doesn't).

That sounds like a difficult environment, and as they say "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".

However, here's a few things I'd be trying:

1) Stories. One of the best uni professors I had was always breaking up his lessons with Stories. The time some people exploded a whale with dynamite, the Lawnchair Larry flight, the time he was held at knife Point while travelling. It just made the lectures more fun and made you feel good for having showed up.

2) Inspiring examples. I'd be inclined to work to find people who had been in their situation and gotten out. Bring them to class, get them to tell their stories.

3) Relevance. Making teaching examples that are edgy and somewhat relevant to their interests. If you're teaching English, use street slang in your examples. If you're teaching math, make examples about making money etc, getting creative and meeting your world with theirs.

Agree with all this. The key is to make it relatable to the students in some way.

My son was struggling with Romeo and Juliet because of the archaic language, and the teacher never explained what many of the words and phrases meant. I would sit down with him and explain a scene in modern terms eg “OK, so basically the boys are going to a party, and one of Romeo’s friends is telling him not to be a stick in the mud and sulk off in the corner, but to actually have fun and talk to people”.

At the beginning the play was completely alien to him. By the end, working together, he came to understand that the play engaged in timeless themes that are as true today as they were 400 years ago (love, prestige, ego, jealousy, anger, despair, remorse, etc).

> What do you do with kids in that kind of situation?

Probably something different and specialized compared to kids in the other 80% of schools. Like residential boot camp.

I think most of the people here (myself included) only have experience teaching at a university level (since it is a website for tech professionals, most of us only have teaching experience in grad school or as professors). So the scenario is just totally different. Mandatory attendance doesn’t make sense for adults that are supposed to be trusted to make their own decision and who are paying lots of money to be there (If people don’t show up to my discussion section, it is a sign I’m failing paying customers, and I need to sort that out, so forcing them to attend will destroy my measurement).

If you are teaching k-12 and especially if some of the kids have a rough situation outside of the school, at least mandatory attendance puts them in an environment insulated from those outside pressures.

I imagine that you did your very best, you tried to meet your students where they're at, and tried best as you could to make your class room a safe place.

Although there is no way around the struggle, there is a way around how the struggle is perceived and experienced. A good teacher shows the struggle is worth it, but I believe a great teacher makes the struggle something you enjoy doing, and not something you have to put up with so you can enjoy the compensation at some point in the future.

> I believe a great teacher makes the struggle something you enjoy doing

What's a good example of this? :)

I think there are two main factors in doing this: The first is creating the passion for the subject matter by making it both fascinating and accessible and by that generating even more curiosity and motivation that I believe are innate in everyone. The second is never letting anyone feel that they are treading water (although this can be seen as a by-product of making things accessible).

Even when babies learn how to walk (assuming a healthy and secure environment) they do not need (or would understand) any assurance that the struggle will be worth it. They go for the struggle because the instinct/motivation to explore is already there - it gives a sense of autonomy, of being in control, of making progress, of being involved, of being alive.

But no need to make assumptions about what motivates babies - you can look at how people feel when playing games, solving puzzles etc. They don't see it as a struggle, it is something that is a joy to participate in, even though it might be very challenging. A great teacher is someone that makes learning a by-product of having fun. I believe this is possible for any subject, no matter how "difficult" or "boring".

> A great teacher is someone that makes learning a by-product of having fun.

No disagreement with any of what you're saying.

But do you have any real life (adult) examples rather than just the equivalent of platitudes? :)

I see nothing wrong with platitudes if they are true :)

I'm not sure what examples you're looking for or would find convincing. I can speak about my own experiences of learning new things, where the speed of what I learned were always proportional the how interesting and accessible the material was made to be. In the cases where it was made enjoyable, I usually had more than enough motivation and curiosity to dig deeper using new materials that were less fun to learn (but could have been made fun too).

I can also speak of my experiences teaching young people with no knowledge about programming who had preconceptions about how boring and difficult it is, which illustrated the degree of how you teach something has an effect on the perception of struggling.

I assume you have your own examples as well, but if you can offer a counterexample I'll reconsider my opinion :)

There is another important thing I'd like to point out though. What makes something fun or accessible for one person is not always what will do it for another. Having to teach groups, and especially large groups of people will make it very challenging if not impossible to be the ideal teacher. I'm not judging anyone for not being to be an ideal teacher under these constraints. Just pointing out that this should be the objective - not saying it is always possible.

Flipped classroom style maybe. Lectures are prerecorded then you as a group struggle with the problem sets in class. A few schools have entire courses for learning the struggle like MITs freshman problem solving course for figuring out Puerto Rico's power grid problems you are given some small area to research yourself and bring that to your student meetings and struggle to a solution.

https://terrascope.mit.edu/nextyear/

Thanks, that looks like a good approach. :)

Agree, seems like a good example. I also understand what you meant by an example :) Sorry for the misunderstanding...

No worries at all. :)

Seconded. On this, I think the book "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley summed up the lessons when it comes to learning the best. The effort/struggle to learn a topic is a signal to the brain that this particular information is salient and worth remembering; like some sort of feedback/anchor. People more should reframe and be thinking on how should they approach a subject to make getting to "the click" and understanding faster (not necessarily easier).

> The students have to struggle

Perhaps it's just the wording, but I really disagree here.

Yes, there's a natural stress process we go through while learning where our boundaries are expanded, but to struggle... it's often a sign of bad teaching.

I say this as a best selling Udemy instructor and having been a university CS tutor. Your job IS to take away the struggle. You do this by being the student, leading them to confusing situations and then overcoming that situation with them in a series of steps that are built up over time, and then having them apply that knowledge to build skill.

The thing is, that teaching a subject well takes a lot of time and effort. There are very few really great teachers out there.

Maybe a better word is "toil", or just "hard work".

No matter how good the teacher is, there's almost no student in the world that can learn effectively without actually putting in the effort of working through problems on their own. The best teachers and curricula are the ones that dose out the hard work to maximize learning.

Few good teachers...few good engineers? 10x cough cough...

Your first point is the truth, although I've found that there are very few takers for this truth :)

In HN itself, I've argued with people numerous times on how challenge is a necessity for advancing in learning, but I've met with stiff resistance to this point often.

So just want to say, glad to see a practicing teacher state the obvious (to practicing teachers) in HN.

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