Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests | Hacker News Reader

Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests

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526 pointskrschultz196 comments

Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there's a lot of book-learning in the world. You're never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal - your lifespan isn't long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mistakes yourself. Only by standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before - that is, by reading their books - can you hope to push boundaries.

The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes. Has nothing to do with "teaching science", as the writer asserts. Just because he doesn't understand the purpose of the test doesn't mean there isn't one. Reading and comprehending text is one of life's fundamental skills. It is, in fact, useful to know if schools are teaching that well or not.

Before I get downvoted into oblivion I should say I also think schools should do hands-on work (which, of course, they do).

I agree: of course there is a lot of value to book learning as well. However, I do think that practical or hands-on learning can be a way to show the relevance of the material taught in books. I remember having trouble with probability and statistics in high school, because it was very abstract. It wasn't until university when things clicked. Mainly, because I all of a sudden saw why it was useful.

In the same way I believe you can make some of the book learning more interesting by relating it back to the hands on learning. Explaining the physics of shooting a rocket up into the air is a lot more interesting if you ran into some of these problems yourself. Of course, this isn't always practical to do for all subjects.

The writer's complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes.

From my understanding of cognitive science, the question asked is deeply flawed if you want to test comprehension without testing knowledge of microscopes.

One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model in your head of what is being described. You then answer questions about the model in your head. Experience with microscopes or similar devices is incredibly valuable to building such a model in your head and answering questions about it. This was one of the “big problems” in first generation AI: to answer questions, a computer must be able to construct models, and to construct models, a computer needs a huge amount of real-world experience.

What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices. Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

Now, there may be a good reason why an entire test full of a variety of such questions is effective for accomplishing whatever the school board wants accomplished—getting funding, I imagine—but I stop well short of saying the author’s complaint is “daft.” I think there are good reasons to be curious about the biases inherent in this question, and about where schools end up if they build their entire approach to teaching around scoring well on questions like this.

It is a reading comprehension question. Read the text provided: "To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen"

The microscope lens should initially be placed close to the glass slide: C. To avoid breaking the glass slide when adjusting the focus.

"The microscope lens should initially be placed close to the glass slide: C. To avoid breaking the glass slide when adjusting the focus."

Incidentally that statement only sense if you know which direction to turn the focus knob, and you recognize the fact that the hypothetical microscope is capable of crushing the specimen. I had one when I was a kid that was incapable of doing so.

I answered the question correctly, but it only due to my cynicism, not my reading comprehension.

Blah blah blah blah. "To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the microscope close to the specimen and then gradually back off to focus." Blah blah blah blah.

Utterly incomprehensible!

And you know what? I'll tell you why people get this wrong. It's because their brains turn off. They say "omg microscopes scary! big block of text!" and guess at answers instead of actually bothering to try and read the text. That's one reason why they get poor scores at reading comprehension: a lack of reading with intent to comprehend. Heck, if they're pressed for time and the guessing-wrong penalty is low enough, it's an entirely rational response.

The fact that the journalist is that dense is mostly a symptom of "oh hey I've found an argument against standardized testing to fit my preexisting conceptions of the matter! Screw reading it, it looks complicated, I'll just use it to justify things." Same basic problem.

>It's because their brains turn off. They say "omg microscopes scary! big block of text!"

s/microscope/computer and you have the cause of an average Helpdesk's stress...

ed. Downvotes? Really? Nobody has ever struggled with a problem which could be solved if the help-ee has bothered to read the text on their screen?

Yes. My mom said "Now what do I do?" when there was a box on her screen that said "Click Next to Continue" and that's all that could be done. I've been trying to teach her to read the boxes that come up before she calls me for help.

On the other hand, when she doesn't call me for help, she ends up printing off a picture from a webpage and scanning it back in to get it into a power point presentation. That's better than giving up on the problem, I guess.

This is why I think the time limit on such tests should be eliminated. For many well-paying occupations, correctness is far more important than speed.

I saw that too. It doesn’t change the fact that understanding of the domain strongly biases the result of answering the question. What you’re saying is that it is possible to answer the question while staring bewildered at a device you have never seen or interacted with. What I’m saying is that it is much easier to answer the question if you have hands-on experience.

And I think what the author is saying is that we should spend more time giving kids microscopes and testing what they see with them.

TANGENT ABOUT BIKE SHED COLOURS:

Questions like this remind me of questions about OOP. First the preamble: “Organize objects into classes to create a hierarchy of abstract types....” Then a question: “Classes are used to (a) provide a constructor for objects, (b) to promote reuse of behaviour, (c) to model a type hierarchy, (d) to facilitate modular software development.”

You ask someone to build a model in their head, and then the most successful strategy for answering the question is to turn the model off and use brute force to scan the exact words of the question, because the more knowledge you have of the domain, the less likely you are to answer the question correctly from your experience.

What you’re saying is that it is possible to answer the question while staring bewildered at a device you have never seen or interacted with.

Based on my life experience so far; this is one of the most important skills to learn.

What I’m saying is that it is much easier to answer the question if you have hands-on experience.

Of course; but that isn't the point of the test.

And I think what the author is saying is that we should spend more time giving kids microscopes and testing what they see with them.

Yes, but again this test is not about that. And if the author is arguing that practical experience should entirely supplant this sort of critical thinking then I entirely disagree.

Critical thinking is taught from a young age, in very subtle ways. The ability to approach a topic you know nothing about, dissemble it, and answer a question (either posed to you, or by you) is fundamental to all of our lives.

off topic: i hope you meant 'disassemble' :).

'dissemble' means "to put on a false appearance : conceal facts, intentions, or feelings under some pretense" according to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dissemble.

I agree with everything you are preaching about critical thinking. Personally, I don’t think this particular type of question is good at testing critical thinking, and worse I think that the incentives in the school system are all about gaming the test rather than teaching critical thinking.

My feeling looking at this is that if I wanted kids to get the highest possible score, I’d teach them how to take tests rather than buy them a bunch of tools and have them figure out how to use the tools from the instruction manuals (reading, critical thinking, problem solving). Whereas if I wanted them to learn critical thinking, we’d be solving problems with tools.

But I accept that this is a very large topic, it’s not like this is a one-question test, and students are exposed to a variety of stimuli. Also, there is always the democracy argument: This might be the worst test ever devised, except for all of the others we’ve tried. Perhaps this is the “least worst” way to test and teach given other factors in play.

> What you’re saying is that it is possible to answer the question while staring bewildered at a device you have never seen or interacted with.

The question is completely invalidated by knowledge of the domain. If anything, they should have constructed an artificial device that would guarantee the student didn't have domain knowledge that would allow them to bypass the necessary critical thinking:

To avoid smaggling the fizdoodle, make sure you begin with the smunderson in the upright position.

Q: Why should the smunderson start in the upright position?

A: To avoid smaggling the fizdoodle.

edit: s/being/begin/

So wait, you're saying the reason for the lens to begin close to the glass is the same reason the lens should begin close to the specimen? How did you come to that conclusion?

Context clues from the "How to" section steps 2-6.

Or you already knew how a microscope works, and performed that step implicitly like the rest of us did.

> One approach to answering questions like this is to build a little model

This test question isn't testing that.

> What I’m saying is that answering this question well requires experience with microscopes or similar devices.

It sure doesn't. It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text. That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of microscopes.

> Being able to answer the question without prior knowledge of what a microscope is, or how light behaves, or lenses period, or refracting telescopes, and so forth, is ridiculously hard.

It sure isn't. Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.

My HN friend, my argument was that the writer isn’t daft, and neither is his complaint, and I stand by that. My argument is that the writer raises interesting and useful questions, and I stand by that too.

As to the fact that the question doesn’t test internal modelling, of course it does. If you made it a question about something nobody has ever seen before, then it wouldn’t test knowledge of microscopes. But it does ask about microscopes.

Perhaps, in aggregate, the test covers enough subject areas that the students tested will be exposed to a roughly equal mix of things they have experience with and things they don’t. But as I noted elsewhere, the fact that it’s possible to answer this question from the text alone in no way changes the fact that it’s easier to answer the question with prior experience. And from that, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether this is a good question.

Yes, if it were truly just about reading comprehension, then the test-writers would be horrifically incompetent, and therefore unfit to test anyone. Anyone who competently designs tests (experimenters, pollsters, etc) knows to address such biasing factors.

But I think the testers aren't total morons, and know that such a question is biased towards children with proper (privileged) backgrounds where microscopes and the respective training are commonplace. They'll be faster at answering the question and not feel ignorant — crucial advantages on tests.

(The testers may not even like this facet of their jobs, like ad industry developers who use ad-blockers, but it sure beats unemployment.)

And the whole question smacks of "scientism", where tools are confused with science. You never see a question like, "Scientists have believed something for 200 years. Is it necessarily true?"

> It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text. That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of microscopes.

And therein lies a great fallacy which is still widely believed in our post-Enlightenment world. But the map is not the terrain. A mental model cannot be completely represented with words or pictures, or anything. Words and pictures, even good ones chosen for pedagogical value, are only pale projections of a complex thing onto a flat surface.

>Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.

Without qualification, this statement is strictly false. There may be certain kinds of text that can be comprehended with no prior knowledge of the subject if you assume a certain baseline of internalized knowledge. There are many old parlor games (which have sadly gone out of style) which rely on hacking this qualification. For example, one of them requires that one person follow the instructions of another. One person tries to describe how to draw a particular geometric figure. The person doing the drawing must follow the instruction, but they also are free (in fact encouraged) to ignore the intention of the instruction. It's a game that puts the difference between words and reality up-front and center.

You put this wonderfully. People are very little more than our experience with the world itself. Without external stimuli, we would be trapped within our own minds and only be capable of evaluating a limited set of possibilities. Merely the act of touching an object generates complex cognitive experiences. This is not possible by abstraction alone.

I understand what you're getting at, but that's not the case in this question, since one of the four answers are stated almost word for word in the text. (caution point 4)

The rest of the alternatives are "plausible guesses" which you might think are reasonable if you don't remember the point above. So what they're REALLY testing is if you read the text carefully enough to remember that line or not.

Actually having knowledge of microscopes are probably a bad thing on this particular question since you're likely to skip over the boring warning part, like I did when I quickly read the question just now.

> Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.

That's the writer's complaint. In order for this question to be testing reading comprehension rather than laboratory experience, it must be assumed that the test taker has not used a microscope. Otherwise, they could answer the question without even looking at the text.

Did you read what raganwald wrote? He's saying that reading comprehension is not typically about memorization, it's often about model building. As a human reads they don't just fill up big bin with data, they build up models. When reading a narrative we will build up ideas of characters. We'll fill in more and more of their details. And when probed about the story we will fall back to our knowledge of those characters, and it may take us a while, if we even can, to figure out exactly which events in the narrative contributed to each aspect of a character.

In this case the object of the narrative is a microscope. And as people read through the text they aren't memorizing sentences or facts they are filling out the model, or character, of the microscope. But people who already have an accurate model of a microscope from personal experience will have an easier job doing so. It's similar to the way standardized tests can be racially biased. If I put forth a "story problem" about the rules of football, being familiar with those rules already gives one an advantage.

> It sure isn't. Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.

This reminds me of people who think the manpages are a sufficient resource to completely understand the unix cli environment.

When I was taking these sort of tests, I learned to delay processing of non-question text until I've read the question. Reading comprehension, in most of the standardized tests I've taken, was nothing more than ability to quickly pattern match keywords from a question to unstructured data preceding it. This kept me from building models of questions in my head and thusly prevented any preconceived notions or facts divert me from the answer the test considered correct.

I think that test item is a good example of the role that testing is playing in the US education system today. The real problem is that, for many students, this test item is the closest they will ever come to using a microscope.

We should be focusing on getting more students in front of a microscope, in classes where they learn effectively from texts as you describe. Instead, we are so caught up in testing that many people lose sight of this goal.

I think it's necessary to draw a distinction between book-learning, standardized tests as a means to test book learning and the absolute focus on standardized tests that followed the NCLB Act.

Book learning is indeed essential. But standardized tests are far from a necessary component of that. They just happen to be the cheapest/least-offensive devil-we-know for judging whether a student comprehends a passage.

And the alternatives to standardized tests are far from a panacea. For all their desirable traits, they suffer heavily from problems of subjectivity and bias.

But the emphasis on standardized tests, particularly as a follow-on from NCLB is something the country really needs to re-examine and discuss. And this discussion should (ideally) be utterly divorced from whether we need book-learning and even from whether we need standardized tests in some capacity.

Complaints about NCLB and what it's done to our schools and students need not be an assault on testing and book learning. And defenses of testing and book learning need not be defenses of NCLB and its effects.

The emphasis on tests, yes, that is a problem. I agree with you. But of course people see something used poorly and want to get rid of it completely. This happens in many areas, but perhaps nowhere worse than in public education. The trends over the years are a wild backlash from one side to the other over and over, with the system invariably throwing the baby out with the bathwater on each cycle.

Over and over in education debates I see false dichotomies posed without the slightest hesitation, and people passionately argue whether we should do A xor B. But in almost all such debates the correct answer seems to me not to take one side, but to find the proper balance between the two.

"Before I get downvoted into oblivion"

Why is it always necessarily to add this? It's like "I apologize in advance but I'm going to insult you".

As an aside I was wondering this morning if people who down vote read an entire comment or downvote on the first negative thing they don't like, disagree with etc. If that is the case you would think that putting your last sentence (sans the bigdio) would suffice as a prophylactic statement?

people say this because outside the mainstream thoughts do get downvoted alot on this board.

which is maybe better than letting trolls take over, I'm kind of agnostic about it

but alternative viewpoints are often dismissed here

(only example I can readily think of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460572 , but I feel like I see it all the time)

Hundreds of people may read and agree or disagree. And usually the number of down votes is very small by comparison.

I'm sure that's the case

putting a sentence about how your comment may be downvoted, is just a request not to have that small number reflexsively downvote, because sometimes that happens

I guess I phrased the question incorrectly as I know the reason is is to avoid downvotes and the person is aware of what they are saying will get downvoted.

My feeling is that by saying "sorry if this is insulting" or "I apologize in advance" or "before you downvote me" you are rolling over on your belly and appearing vulnerable by acknowledging your vulnerability and trying to show some humility. And in a sense you are setting up the contrast principle because the belly in comparison to the crime just doesn't seem so bad.

its a rhetorical technique

whether its effective seems situational

"sorry if this is insulting" won't be effective if what you follow it with is truly insulting

we all know thin skinned people though, sometimes the best way to get them to hear a benign (or neutral, or even constructive critism) comment that they might dismiss is to procede it with "sorry if this is insulting"

so there are certain scenarios where I'd say those phrases are ok (this board with their sometimes quick downvoting, seems like an ok use to me)

I agree with you that the extra noise of the "downvote prophylactic" is annoying, however, I went ahead and downvoted your comment because the meta-complaining adds even more noise. I realize that my comment is meta-meta so feel free to downvote it also.

Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I see that as a form of passive aggressive manipulation. The way I read that kind of comment is "I know the mob will downvote me instead of discussing the topic; you don't want to be part of the mob, do you now?"

Yes, but that is often justified and understandable. HackerNews has one of the better communities out there but I know that getting downvoted without an explanation annoys me. This happens even on HackerNews occassionally.

Occasionally?

without an explanation your whining annoyed me and your comment added nothing to the discussion.

The two APICS tests I took sofar are really standardized. The only thing they didn't test was actual knowledge and comprehension of the subject and the thing they didn't deliver was realistic results. What they tested was you ability to read the question in the right way. I take these tests since I assume that they are pretty american-style (atleast I was told so). Doesn't mean we don't have them in good old europe, too.

And in my experience, that's all these test do besides being somtetimes completely random. I agree that it is easier to give marks based on these tests,but they don't really tell you want you want to know.

You are entirely right.

With that said, schools right now often emphasize testing and test prep at the expense of any hands on work. Naturally, we should have the right balance, which seems to be what you are proposing, but if we must overreact, I would much rather overemphasize building, exploring, creating and underemphasize testing than the other way around.

Most people aren't going to build rockets to the moon in their backyard and those who want to can.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

With regards to reading a passage and comprehend it. That is obvious but completely missing the point.

We don't have a shortage of people with critical skills we have a shortage of people who's knowledge isn't only abstracted from the phenomena they are reading about but a combination.

Testing and experimenting should always run before abstraction and critical thinking exactly because abstraction is based on premises made by experimenting and testing.

Academic discipline is way overrated and the best scientists aren't those who only deal in abstraction (with a few exceptions) but rather those who more more like engineers.

We didn't bring people to the moon by reading about it. Someone had to make those experiments. But it is more and more a lost art and that is sad.

This also breeds a society that is increasingly willing to accept things at face value. Nobody asks if the correct answer on a multiple choice test is really correct. No one is allowed to justify their reasoning--they're wrong. After getting beaten down so many times, people just accept that things are the way they are. This is also the same reason that people can just memorize things for tests and parrot them back without a real understanding of anything.

Book learning is only valuable insofar as there is experience in the real world that it can be applied to. The sole reason I learned algebra and eventually calculus was because I taught myself very basic Java in 6th grade. I had a useful framework to apply the math to.

We need to remember that "if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." (Feynman) Not because the test says it's incorrect. It just may be that those two statements coincide, but it is because of the former.

This is not about book reading. He is not saying kids should not read books.

I think you come from a false premise. The idea that "book learning" can be successfully measured through standardized testing does not have as much backing as you think it does.

One of the big problems of standardized testing and school in general the way we've been doing it is that you can inculcate a great deal of pseudo-knowledge, and you can probe for its existence through these targeted tests, but in many cases you fail at instilling true understanding and knowledge.

Math and science becomes rote memorization of formulas and terms and plug-and-chug. But this isn't learning.

A classic example of the problems involved here is to go ask a bunch of recent college graduates about where the mass of a tree comes from. Even if you only ask people who have studied photosynthesis, you'll still get an abysmally low percentage of correct answers, if any. The same goes for any question on any topic that's covered in college which requires actual understanding and thorough application of the alleged "knowledge" that the students have acquired.

If anyone wants to know the answer to that question, Richard Feynman explains it wonderfully: (He starts talking about trees at 2:00, but his explanation of fire is equally elegant!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE

My first instinct was to say that a tree's mass comes from dead stars. Imagining how it got from those stars to the air that eventually becomes the tree would keep you busy for a while :D

I've seen trees where the largest single component of the mass comes from butterflies. They alit on the branches. Water for most trees' mass mostly comes up out of the ground, though.

On the larger point, testing learning is hard in principle in that you are usually testing theory. Practice is the basis of theory and much harder to test.

But even then, writing a good test to test theory is very hard. Most objective test questions on university tests are terrible and only slightly, if at all, more likely to reward the testee for knowing the theory.

> The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it.

I disagree. The purpose is not to test if you can read a passage. The purpose is to test if you can show someone else you can read a passage. That's not only an incredibly important distinction, because the ability to communicate is an evaluatable skill, but also the skill itself is essential to have.

On the other hand, I do have to admit that a lot of tests are designed to evaluate things that can't really be evaluated... but that's largely because decent testing is hard to scale.

The author, I think, takes a pretty big leap in concluding that the test is being used as a teaching tool, rather than a testing tool. Stating that the students are now stuck learning about microscopes through the test, rather than actually using microscopes seems like quite a stretch to me. Of course kids still use microscopes in school and do lots of hands-on learning. Both types of learning are essential and both are practiced. Does our education system focus too much on testing and not enough on hands-on learning? Maybe, but I think that still varies a lot from school to school, so it's hard and perhaps a bit unfair to make overall assumptions.

However, it does illustrate how the test is a poor evaluation of reading comprehension.

The problem I see is that it's not necessarily a reading comprehension question. It's a question about microscopes. If you don't happen to know anything about microscopes, then the answer is clearly there in the text and, at that point, it's about reading comprehension, but if you do, reading the text is completely unnecessary. So then it remains a question about general knowledge of microscopes, not reading comprehension.

Here's another example... My husband got into IT when he was young and never finished his degree. He's now decided that he wants to go back to school for a related, but different-enough field that he needs that piece of paper and additional training. Because it's been over 20yrs since he's been in school, and he's never attended school in the US, at the age of 40, he found himself taking the ACT a couple of weeks ago.

The "reading comprehension" portion of the test was full of paragraphs about various topics that anyone with an average amount of general knowledge would know and so, being pressed for time, he simply didn't read half the material. He got a perfect score on this section of the test.

That clearly demonstrates a level of intelligence on a variety of topics, and probably indicates some good deductive reasoning as well, but it doesn't show how well his reading comprehension is at all.

Now, he's 40, not 12, but the ACT doesn't look that much different than any other standardized test and it is (along with the SAT) a sort of be all and end all of evaluating a high school student's academic performance.

So are you calling standardized tests "book learning" or "hands-on"??? I say these things devalue "book learning" as much as they devalue building things.

I would agree kids should be reading books, writing essays, writing math proofs and building robot but not doing (and endlessly preparing for) standardized tests. Comprehension isn't going to ever be fully exercised by multiple choice questions.

Seriously, the problems with standardized tests just don't allow them to be glossed over as "book learning" or any other way. The worst problem of standardized tests is they reduce teachers to proctors and game-strategists rather than demanding they have constructive engagement with their students.

> The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes. Has nothing to do with "teaching science", as the writer asserts.

There are lot of comments here referring to the fact that this exercis used in original post was a reading comprehention test, not 'understanding of the microscope' test. It may be so, but it's still a bad test, and the mistake is on the test authors' side. Why?

Because one of the principles of testing is that you should control for any variable that you do not wish to test. Here, they didn't control for the "I know better than test author how this work, because I have (read a whole book about it || been using it since 8 years old || built one)" factor. And that, for many students, converts the test into a choice - should I write what they expect me to, or should I write how the world really is?

If we teach kids to always choose the first option, do we want to live in this world when they grow up and start running it?

So why not, instead, test reading comprehention on fictional topics (like operating a 'fluxklux' device), thus making sure that no-one can have pre-existing knowledge of it to interfere with reading comprehention?

I agree with sentiment of the author, and believe schools have sidelined physical learning to a frightening level. But this test is a comprehension test. If you look at the passage, then the question, you can clearly see what is being examined:

Passage

=======

3. Keep the stage clean and always use a glass slide for specimens.

4. To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen and gradually back off to focus.

Question with correct answer

============================

The microscope lens should initially be placed close to the glass slide: C. To avoid breaking the glass slide when adjusting the focus.

Aside from being able to correctly identify which part of the passage relates to the question (showing broad understanding of the passage of the whole) the specifics are:

a) Do you understand that "crushing" is synonymous with "breaking"?

b) Do you understand that you put the specimen on the glass slide?

c) Do you understand that "begin with ..." and "initially ..." are essentially the same construction?

d) Do you understand that "focusing" is the action of "back off to focus"

To me, the surprising thing was how well this question was written.

As an aside, I imagine these questions are purposefully written about a subject that the person being examined is expected to have little knowledge about, so that only the comprehension is being tested.

'We walked into an empty room that once was the metal shop. It was perfect. I could imagine it having tools and materials and workbenches. I could imagine groups of curious kids being active, social, and mobile. '

When I was in 6th grade, they let us use a spot welder and press brake. I still have the box I made out of folded sheet metal from that time. We also had to make a little container out of folded sheet metal that surrounded an egg. The metal shop teacher piled weights on everyone's in the class until the eggs broke.

In 8th grade (2001), they let us use MIG welders and the project was to make a crane with the maximum cantilever given a set of counterweights and a limited amount of 1/8"x1" steel. I remember the entire class standing around watching as we piled weights up until they failed spectactulary.

It's not a coincidence that those are some of my (few) vivid memories of middle school. I remember being bored in a lot of classes that simply weren't challenging enough, but never in metal shop or science class.

They don't even have metal or wood shop in the middle school anymore. They barely have it in the high school. It's probably some combination of safety and budget, but can anyone imagine the school allowing basically 13 year olds to handle MIG welders anymore? It gets hot! Or sheet metal in 11 year olds hands? It's sharp!

By high school all of the best and brightest are maxing out AP classes for college applications. There is no time left for 'fun' classes like metal shop if you aren't going to trade school. (That becomes quite apparent when you get to college and there are mechanical engineer majors who can't work a hand drill.)

If we lose all of this stuff, we are going to lose the next generation of engineers. FIRST robotics is a great program, but we need more things like it.

FIRST Robotics was an amazing experience. Our sponsoring university basically let us have free reign of their machine shop and made us do all the work ourselves, They just offered assistance if asked. Some of my favorite memories of school. Likewise, when we built 6 foot tall working trebuches in Calc... that was also a blast.

I hope my future kids have these kinds of opportunities in school.

I, too, was fortunate to have woodworking, mig welding, electronics soldering, combustion engine repair and a little aircraft building as a part of my middle-high school education. I enjoyed it a lot and I learned a lot of stuff that I would have not learned by reading books and taking exams.

But I guess American kids won't need any of that since everything is manufactured in China these days. You just need a lot of lawyers to keep the Chinese from stealing your intellectual property.

Manufactered in China, but designed and prototyped in the US. Which would you rather have your kids doing?

Exactly. And to design and prototype something, you need engineers who understand the tools and materials. You can't design a stamped metal part for a Chinese factory if you never learned about stamping metal.

How long do you think the situation is sustainable?

I'd prefer my kids be proficient with power tools, computers and pen & paper, all of them are necessary.

I completely agree. I would say that the situation is sustainable if we are careful not to lose the whatever advantage we have and if we invest in finding new ones but also very tenuous given the global nature of our world today and the nature of the competition that is arising.

In case I misunderstood, I agree that losing the classes you mention could very well mean losing our edge in design and invention but losing spec work to factories in China is not a very good argument to keep those classes.

Total and utter bollocks.

Millions of Chinese students have or will have done engineering and science at the degree level, that combined with the Chinese business acumen will almost certainly ensure them both designing and building the things we require in the future.

The USA will however have plenty of patent lawyers to ensure they are all sued if they try to get too clever.

The United States manufactures more than ever before. (Well, the recession probably drooped output a little bit.) China manufactures more stuff than ever, too, so they are a larger share of the world market.

Reminds me of getting at least a small workshop in my house ASAP! Not the welding machines, I risk brning my house down myself, but at least a wood shop. Still remember the fun I had with my grandfather in his work shop (wood and later metal). Every kid should get that oppurtunity!

I live in a small cramped apartment, but I'd really like to do some wood works. So I bought some balsa wood and a few small tools to do some miniature models. It's not like doing real carpentry but will do until I get myself a shack to fit a band saw in.

Exactly. And since not everyone has the luxury of his private workshop, I really support that schools should provide that.

I'm only affraid that in a world where 8 year olds are still forbidden to use real sicorrs you're gonna have a rough ride in order to do so...

We got a box of those kindergarten scissors in grad school!

Although there was a theoretical astrophysics group who probably shouldn't have been allowed crayons without careful supervision

I also live in a small place, but I want my child to have the experience of building and using tools. Fortunately, just a couple blocks from my home is perhaps the most wonderful place I have ever been in my life. http://artisansasylum.com/?page_id=1336

I have read about other similar places in New York, and I'm certain there must be stuff like this in the Bay Area. So if you're lucky enough to have something like this nearby, take advantage. I'm not sure what the kid policy is, but I'm really hoping they have or will create children's classes.

http://www.techshop.ws/ - usually there are minimum age requirements for a lot of the machining classes but as far as I have seen very kid friendly.

http://randallmuseum.org/ - classes for kids through adults and they also have a woodshop.

Not sure where you live, but there might be a Makerspace nearby you can utilize.

Does anyone know of such places in the UK?

Part of this is just a reflection of the changing economy. Shop classes were funded when there was a demand in our economy for people who made things. Now that we've outsourced the making of things to China, there's no perceived need for learning how things are made anymore; they just get made, somewhere out of sight, and when they break we throw them away and buy new ones.

This is a strangely infantile way for a society to live. Part of the mystique grown-ups had to me when I was a kid was that grown-ups were the ones who knew how things worked -- I knew how to break my toys, but only grown-ups knew how to fix them. Growing up was the process of being initiated into these mysteries. That's less true today; now feels more like an age of adults striving to get back to the (blissful?) ignorance of childhood.

Of course, this feeling could just be an artifact of my being an adult now :-D

So how much demand is there in todays workplace for historians, geographers and spellers - but they still manage to find time on the curriculum

There is plenty of demand for Geography graduates. From an IT perspective - understanding Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software is essential in many industries - land management, natural resource exploitation, environmental modeling, transportation planning etc.

A Geography degree usually involves a mixture of “hard” and “soft” science. While studying I did everything from climbing mountains to set off weather balloons to standing on a street corner interviewing people about their transportation behavior. I also spent far too long hacking away in Python and attended many classes that were essentially computer science/physics classes. Finding a job after graduation was not an issue at all and nearly everyone I graduated with walked into a well paying job that was often in an exotic location. Please don’t lump us in with historians! ;)

But did drawing ox-bow lakes really help you?

It's the attitude that we should stop shop class because nobody is going to work in metal bashing anymore - and of course there is no way that exposure to engineering in school is going to lead to somebody being an aerospace engineer.

While any 'proper' subject is sacrosanct

The US still makes plenty of things. They're just not made by humans.

There are still applications where welding and making things on the spot from metal are important. Mining operations come to mind.

And, there are thousands of welders employed in many other industries - let us not forget that you can't sit around and stop production while you wait six months for the Chinese to make a replacement for a one-of-a-kind machine. On the street where I have my company (a niche-market hardware company), there are, I would take a guess at, at least 75 people employed primarily to do welding. The street is approximately 1 mile long. We also weld quite often - I wouldn't hire an employee whose answer to every question is "we can't do that process until I find someone to sell me the item I need to perform it." Why buy a $75 tool when I can make a functional one for $0.35 in materials and ten minutes of time?

My best-paid employees are those who can weld, drill, operate machines, and do all of the other things necessary to keep us in the business of making products - and also think creatively and logically.

Contrary to popular belief, China is not the manufacturing panacea - for most of us making small-market products (think a few hundred units a month), China is exorbitantly expensive. Most of my competitors either do their work in-house or out-source to other U.S. companies.

But if you don't know how to weld, solder, hammer, or hot-glue something together yourself, how do you expect to teach a machine to?

When my dad was an engineer, engineers knew how to work the machines. Because a technical drawing isn't just an illustration, it's a set of instructions to someone on how to make that part. For example, the engineer was likely to know, through experience, what tolerances the machines in his shop are capable of, and adjust the tolerances specified on the drawing accordingly (or if the tolerances are bigger than what is required, say "we can't make that part with this equipment").

A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.

>>A few years ago, my dad mentored some college kids who were incredibly smart and eager to learn. But he complained that they had almost never touched a machine in their lives. They didn't know how to design the parts properly. He had to teach them.

This happens because no matter what you learn and how much you know in general, that doesn't say anything about ability to deliver in practical areas of work in a small narrow fields.

You can learn everything general about programming. But pick up a new language and you will be hitting the manual very often even to do some very trivial tasks. Or you will like to read existing real world code in that language, to learn the idiomatic way of doing things.

When you spend time solving real world problems in any field using any tool. What you are basically doing is turning yourself into a 'human database' of problems and solutions to a wide variety of problems. And you get that only by practice and experience.

I couldn't agree with this more. What's more, I think you can take what you said about the manufacture of things and say it again about the manufacture of software. I don't mean outsourcing -- obviously, most software is still written in the US -- but rather that it is something modern users consume with infinite hygiene.

Gone are the days that you had to run things from the DOS prompt with the concomitant risk you might discover QBASIC. Or, on a Mac, the risk that you could run into Hyperstack.

My grandfather was a welder and had a workshop in the back of his house. He took pride in being able to build anything and not buy it from the store, if anything he owned ever broke he would hack it himself.

When I was a youngin, about 12, I used to watch him work for a few hours during the day then sneak back to the workshop in the middle of the night while everyone was sleeping. I would fire up the torch and start experimenting with all the scrap metals. Playing with a plasma torch at midnight with no supervision was probably very dangerous but it taught met the importance of being a builder in world of consumers.

I remember taking a standardized test in public elementary school in the US (I think this was the Iowa series). At the end of one section I finished early, I counted the number of questions and was planning on finding out some basic stats on the questions.

We hear "pencils down", and so the break period comes around. I comply, and the teacher collects our tests. I then picked up my pencil again and started doing a bunch of math, trying to find out how many questions there were per section, or how many multiple choice there were in total, basic things like that.

I got in more trouble than I could have ever imagined. The teacher nearly screamed at me for doing math, and threatened to take me to the principle to have me removed from the exam permanently. She feared I was cheating, and forbade me from doing any more math that day outside the strict testing times.

Reminds me of my primary school's request to my parents that they stop me from having access to books at home as it was making me difficult to teach.

Upvoted a thousand percent. This sums up everything that is wrong with education.

(EDIT: spellchecking my dumb arse)

My dad had to explain to them how this wasn't really achievable, even should they want to, as he worked in libraries.

Oh, the beautiful but saddening irony.

We had a book reading contest my fourth grade year, to read as many books as possible during the year.

At one point, after I'd read some multiple of whatever the class average was, my teacher told me to stop reading so many books. Still, all these years later, I have very negative feelings about that.

There's a lot of subpar teachers out there. In every district.

If those teachers had any sense of professional responsibility they'd resign en-masse, or at least drum out whoever's idea this was. Unbeliveable.

Wouldn't normally post a youtube link but the famous Bill Hick's "what are you reading FOR" story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvs2g5Nj0NI

Reminds me of my first grade teacher telling me to stop signing my papers in (neat) cursive as I wasn't supposed to know how to do that until the end of the year.

Were I to receive such a ludicrous document, after I got over the shock my first course of action would be to double time on the number of books I bring home for him/her to read.

This is pretty much why you have to have standardized tests. Subpar teachers like this one. You couldn't possibly trust someone like that to make any sort of valid evaluation of her students.

I think you actually have a good point there.

I'm not so sure... The standardised tests don't actually weed out crap teachers as they can just teach to the test, and they do a lot to hurt the effectiveness of good teachers.

Also a lot of the motivation of the teacher who was annoyed with my parents was that I was causing problems in tests due to being interested in stuff well outside the domain of what would be taught in class.

Set tests largely test how good you are at those set tests, but most problems you will encounter in the real world are unbounded by a curriculum and the ability to recall stuff you have very recently read, while useful, is not a particularly good measure of wider ability.

"Just teaching to test" isn't always bad. For things like literacy, it's pretty good.

Yes and no. Obviously his teacher was in the wrong for yelling and screaming at him over such a trivial matter. However, in California at least, testing standards (as dictated by the state) are incredibly strict. More than one good teacher has been fired for not following the written procedures EXACTLY. Any reported deviation (state inspectors interview students and staff at random) is grounds for punishment and possible dismissal. It's a complete disaster, but this is what the teachers have to deal with. It can be incredibly stressful.

I don't like false dichotomies like this. Why can't kids learn to do both well? Standardized tests are akin to FizzBuzz for college entrance. If you can't get 500/800 in the Math SATs, you will not be able to keep up in STEM majors with others who scored 700+.

Given the real constraint of limited resources, you have to implement barriers to entry. Standardized tests are not perfect but they serve well. Of course, making rockets and robots is awesome so everyone should be encouraged to explore that.

Agreed! The situation is similar to professional organizations like ACM and IEEE who act as gatekeeper and moneymaker for academic journals, which make people angry (justifiably so). It's a bad solution, but you need some form of reputation management. You can't have kids who want to enroll to MIT line up in a stadium and have them build metal boxes, or write code. However, you can use these as additional input to the standardized test scores.

Articles like this continuously bicker about standardized tests but don't realize how much better the situation is compared with other countries, like China, India, Japan, etc. There nothing else matters other than your score, here at least they look at your application essay, your extracurricular activities and such.

Agreed. And in Malaysia, the mostly the only way to obtain that score is brute memorization of facts.

But of course the problem is when you place so much emphasis on an artificial exam, you create a large incentive for administrators to interfere with classroom instruction in order to try and cater to the test. This is especially bad when you have poor tests.

I'll preface this by saying that I hate standardized tests, but this is a good reading comprehension question (and the author clearly has poor reading comprehension.)

The description clearly says:

> 4. To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen and back off focusing.

This article seems to be celebrating that people can't follow instructions properly. If I were to get some students to play with robotics kits (which may or may not include microscopes) step 1 would be making sure that they understand the instructions for the kits. And a series of questions like this seems like a pretty valid way to test that. Tests are good. I'd even say tests can be crucial before you let kids play with expensive electronics and explosives.

> step 1 would be making sure that they understand the instructions for the kits

That's not the point of hacking.

If I were to get some students to play with robotic kits, I'd give them the parts, instructions and let them do whatever they want. If you remove the "discovery" part, you get something not much different than standarized test itself. If you have kids follow instructions precisely, well, they may as well just watch how it's done on youtube. They won't learn much more from it anyway.

There are a number of schools which are now refusing to participate in their states' "mandated" testing. There are a number of conditions that have to be in place for a school to take this step:

- The school has to be really good at educating students. It has to be clear to visitors that high-level learning is happening every day. The school must be able to prove that all of its students make a successful transition to their post-high-school lives. A successful transition means the student has set goals for what they want to do after high school, and their high school education allows them to move on to these goals.

- Administrators, and teachers, must not fear losing their jobs. This is much like the programming world, where the best programmers don't have to submit to stupid managerial decisions because they can always find meaningful work elsewhere.

PG encouraged people to replace universities in his PyCon keynote. When asked about replacing high schools, he laughed and said something along the lines of, "Don't touch high schools. That is way too difficult." I think we fix high schools the same way we fix everything else on PG's list - don't attack the big problem itself, just attack a piece of the problem. Build on your successes, until your model of how to run high school is so compelling that everyone else has to use it.

That requires competition. Whenever you mention competition and private schools people scream, "But the poor children! They have no chance that way!"

Here's my simple response to a particularly complicated (and touchy) issue: children that do extremely well on standardized tests, especially from an early age, do not need them. If you're consistently in the 90+ percentile in reading comprehension, critical thinking and mathematics from an early age, you are probably not only great at standardized tests, but an intelligent child to boot. These are the kids that should be playing with real-world physics applications (rockets) or rudimentary robotics (Lego Mindstorm).

If, however, you're a child that does consistently badly in these tests, it probably makes sense to get the book learning straight before venturing forth into the practical applications of math and science. After all, the point isn't supposed to be to play with rockets, it's to understand the physics behind them (right?).

Unfortunately, this is an unfair line to draw. Should smart kids get to play with cool science projects while the kids who are struggling--or who were sick on the day of the standardized test--are stuck inside studying "the basics" needed to understand these projects? Personally, I don't think that's fair line to draw.

The result? Everyone needs to be book smart, and hopefully, everyone should also build cool stuff with science.

Everyone is not of equal aptitude. It's not possible for everyone to be book smart.

Your attitude about "unfairness" is part of the problem. Schools must stop treating kids as equals when they are clearly not.

This issue is where it gets the most complicated for me. I absolutely agree with you that everyone is not of equal aptitude. There are smart kids and less-than-smart kids; athletic kids and those with two left feet. I get that, and agree with it; anyone who doesn't is fooling themselves.

Where I believe we differ in opinion is that kids should be treated differently--especially at a young age--because of this inequality. Different skills develop over time, and although certainly we should have Advanced Placement programs for those in high school, when talking about grade-schoolers, I think that we should let skill first manifest.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers had a pretty big impact in my formulation of this opinion: small advantages, over time, turn into huge ones. What seems like a minor issue at first can, through the course of a decade, become many times compounded. This is why the Dutch school system does not separate children into "advanced" and "slow" classes until they are at least ten years old (forgive me if I'm misquoting the text).

Getting a low score on a test, or needing to study for twelve hours instead of six to get an A+, should not limit a child from being able to reach for academic excellence. In the same token, however--and this is where I think many schools fail--the smartest children should not be held back by the less clever ones.

So, in my opinion, if it helps foster learning to build robots and rockets, then all children should. If it's a cool part of an Advanced Placement class that also requires significant knowledge of an advanced subject, sure, keep it for the "smart kids." Let's just not condemn a child to failure because of a bad test, or a bad school year when they're young.

Don't be silly--we won't be eliminating standardized tests any time soon. You can't easily produce huge reports full of meaningless charts or fluff up politicians' resumes with rockets and robots. Standardized tests produce orderly, easily measured numbers that make for lots of easy bean counting.

This. Public projects that don't produce sizable sums of bogus data aren't worth it for candidates to support.

Don't forget - realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores.

Why they can't just show a map of median household income (which is a pretty good proxy for standardized test scores) is beyond me.

1) They don't show median household income because that would discriminate against the poor, or some line of thought like that. 2) The reason that standardized test scores are shown isn't because people are really interested in the tests, but rather that they act as a proxy for the quality of the area; you don't get much in the way of gang violence in areas where kids do well on tests, generally.

There really should be a better way of measuring the quality of an area, but I can't say I see an obvious one.

Actually you are thinking about that a little bit backwards. That is to say, high test scores are a pretty good proxy for not only income, but other less tangible things.

Consider, you can get high income in some suburbs of rust belt cities... doesn't mean you want those kids at Governor Dummer's.

In essence, some people want to buy real estate around 'the right kind of people'. There is more to it than just income, and test scores are a good proxy for figuring that out. Of course, that's normally only for a fairly select group of 1%'ers. But that's also where your big commissions come from in real estate.

realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores.

Note that this phoniness about living in one place being a guarantee of a child's school success is so ingrained among real estate agents that they still talk like that even in Minnesota, where there is statewide public school open enrollment, such that the school district where I live has students come in from FORTY-ONE other school districts' territories, including neighborhoods with radically different socioeconomic characteristics. Parents are always looking for some easy proxy for school quality. Power to shop here in Minnesota is helping somewhat in focusing parents' attention on what really matters. (For example, there are more and more school districts now that are adopting the Singapore Primary Mathematics series

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39....

as elementary mathematics textbooks.)

What's really difficult today is finding out which schools offer genuine added value above what any child could get from an involved set of parents who value education. (This is why I homeschool, even in my apparently very desirable school district, which we live in for employment-based reasons irrespective of the school system.) The interesting article that you kindly submitted here makes the case that young people should do more in youth than what can boil down to answering pencil-and-paper questions on standardized tests, and I agree, and that is another reason we homeschool--to have time for more hands-on, constructive activities. But I will point out that is not an either-or forced choice, as several other comments have also pointed out to you. Indeed, sometimes open-ended projects favor children from wealthy families much more than student evaluation based on learning 3 R subjects that can be tested by standardized tests. The people in my generation in Taiwan were very proud of their standardized test system. When I first went over to Taiwan in 1982, several people pointed out to me that the president's son failed the college entrance exams--in other words, the examination system was above political corruption, fairly administered to all. It certainly served as a path to higher education for many young people who grew up in third-world poverty and had little by way of spare resources for doing projects with anything but school resources. (There IS project-based learning in all the schools of east Asia, contrary to the impression of many Americans, but rather than an either-or forced choice, those schools have a both-and of projects for all, and rigorous standardized tests for all.)

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make the tests relevant and well written, and accurately scored, and make the 3 R's learning in school efficient enough to allow time for challenging projects. And if the school is resistant to improvement, promote power to shop on the part of parents to nudge schools to do better, and meanwhile get your own children a good education however you can, even if it means that they learn outside school.

1. Because school districts are not typically comprised of equal-value neighborhoods.

So a 'good' district will inevitably have 'poorer' neighborhoods whose houses are relatively more difficult to sell. It thus behooves realtors to pitch more-heavily on the upside of these houses to parents and would-be parents.

2. Because emotional decisions short-circuit logic.

The default emotional response to a lesser house is that it reflects lesser success on the part of the homeowner.

Saying "better school district" evokes the children and places a positive emotional spin on this: this house doesn't reflect poorly on you, it's a badge of honor that you sacrificed so your children could have the best you could provide.

Saying "on-average richer neighbors", while objectively a suitable proxy for "better school district" evokes a very different emotional response: not only might this house potentially reflect poorly on you, but it's surrounded by people who did better!

For anyone who can get past the emotional baggage, the second part is largely irrelevant. But they're the minority and weren't listening to anything the realtor had to say anyway.

Who exactly is going to teach children to build rockets and robots? As a country we have pretty much run all the vocational teachers out of the schools. The vocational teachers were good because most did contracting during the summer. Add to this the decline in schools teaching programming[1]. We need to figure a way to get qualified technical / vocational people back into the schools and realize that they need to paid more because of demand in their field.

Standardized tests suck, but they suck less than every other way we have to measure schools in a country-wide manner.

[1] I am wondering where the next generation of programmers is going to come from.

[1] Brazil, Russia, India, China...

And yet the educational system of those countries is even more focused on rote learning / standardized testing than it is in the USA...

Not really true. Russia, for instance, didn't get standardised testing until 2003 and still the universities do not really respect it.

[1] Training?

by who? when?

By employers.

From TFA:

It failed to convey that the whole purpose of having a microscope is to see things that you can’t see with the naked eye.

Umm, the 2nd sentence in the all-caps introduction:

BY PRODUCING A MAGNIFIED IMAGE, THE MICROSCOPE REVEALS DETAILS THAT ARE UNDETECTABLE TO THE NAKED EYE

I understand that the author is trying to make a point, but proving his incompetence in a simple reading comprehension example does not help his case.

I have 5 implementable ideas how to bring out schools into the 21st century:

1) Let children solve real world problems. They learn skills that they can use in most every job.

2) Let the children decide which problem they want to tackle. Excellent skills to have: Coming up with ideas, convincing your fellow students to focus the rest of the year on that one problem and focusing on the solution for the rest of the school year. [I can't wait to find out what they will do.]

3) Share the problem, proposed solution as well as the whole process on the web with the world Wikipedia style. We live in a networked world, let’s use that opportunity to the fullest. Track progress weekly for a great review at the end of the year and for others to learn from everyones else’s progress.

4) Big hand-over of the solution via a presentation in front of students, teachers, parents, … Great skill to have to be able to present your ideas and solution in front of a larger audience.

5) Project Fridays: Every Google employees is allowed to focus 20% of their time on a project of their choosing. Let’s do the same with our children in school. 20% is the equivalent to one school day a week. Let’s do it on Friday.

My hope is that the first thing the children will do is create the environment for them to tinker to try out solutions in their schools.

Just presented these 5 ideas at TEDx Creative Coast too: http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/06/video-replay-tedxcc-5-id...

Please join the movement to make our schools come alive: http://www.aliveschools.org/2012/05/hello-world/

Thanks, Mark.

Most of those ideas are nice, but not very practical. Some thoughts:

1) Real, actual, real world problems can't be solved in a class room. They are solved in 'the real world', i.e. business and government. Business and government won't let kids have a go at such things because it's too expensive, risky and messy. Companies continually complain about young employees' lack of (VET/STEM)skills, yet when it comes down to it they're really not prepared to run the risk that comes with having young kids (not) solving their actual problems. Now, schools could 'simulate' real problems, and do try to do that, but it's enormously expensive and difficult and not very practical. Also, in our services-based economy most problems are solved through repetitive procedures. This is why there's such a focus on 'transversal' skills these days. Learning how to do look up information, read texts etc are important skills to have. They're the foundation underpinning those transversal skills. The idea is to not let kids learn about just one problem, but about a basic skill set that can be applied to any problem. Combine this focus with the hesitancy of companies, and you can see why these dreaded standardized tests come enter the equation...

2) Many schools already do this or try to do this. The problem is that there are some essential skills kids need to learn, which cannot be removed from the curriculum. Teaching those skills takes up a lot of time. This is why there is little room for such 'free play' in a class room. Creativity is wonderful and essential, but very hard to consistently implement in schools. Especially with the complaints that todays students lack the basics: math&english.

3) Schools already track progress. It's the one thing schools are actually pretty good at, and it has led to a complete focus on metrics that has had the unfortunate side effect of making the test results more important than actual learning outcomes and skills. This is also why I'm pretty cynical about web-based learning: a metrics based system breeds metrics based testing, schooling and studying. IT is a nice luxury, but not (yet?) the solution to our problems. 4) I like this idea. Especially involving the parents. 5) This is really the same idea as option 2. The same issues apply there. I agree that kids should do projects and have so leeway in their choices, but you underestimate the real world problems teachers encounter in a class room. Most students are in fact NOT responsible, smart or capable enough to choose a (relevant, teachable, educational) project and tackle it. Add social problems, broken families, shitty reading comprehension and problem kids to the equation and you can see why this doesn't work for most students. It's a great idea for excellent students though - add it to the curriculum for the better students who do well on tests anyway and it would be fantastic. In fact, don't do it on Fridays. Let them do projects based on what the rest of the class is doing. When everybody else is learning about the planets and the moon, give those 'smart' kids an advanced project about planetary movements and let them present the results to the class.

Don't get this stuff backwards.

Schools don't need to build metalshops and have children go through rote construction of standard pieces. That's the exact same thing as standardized testing, we just like it more because we're hackers.

What we need are more fab labs: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/faq/

and hackerspaces.

What we really need is for my city to give a $1 Million endowment to my local hackerspace so that we can properly redo our electrical infrastructure, buy more tools, and run more classes.

And then we need every other city in the country to find similar programs, and nurture them in the same way.

Every single time a kid walks past our lab and starts oogling our display windows, somebody comes out front and gets them inside for a tour.

If it's me touring, and their parents allow it, every single one of them gets to press the go buttons on our HUGE laser cutter, and gets to take home an example of a time that they built something in a hackerspace using a big scary industrial tool: they make a stencil of their name.

That's HUGE.

AND IT WORKS. Remember that kid that was on the front page of a bunch of things shooting marshmallows with the president? He hangs out in our lab. Another of the kids at our lab gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix (which is just like TEDx) about 3d printers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyZxzkd-Jsk).

These kids are freaking awesome! I wish there were 10 of our labs in Phoenix.

I'm sorry, but the school system is broken. There are a few teachers doing beautiful things, but they're few and far between. In my 12 years in the system, I met one of them.

How many high schools would let me stick around in the shop until 4:00am building? None? How many would give a 12 year old kids' dad a keycard that gets him in 24/7 to use industrial machines, DSOs, SCARY POWER SUPPLIES etc.

Would my high school teacher have been fired if people knew she let me and my friends stay in the computer lab fucking with linux until all hours?

Probably.

Except that fuckery, the thing my teacher probably could have been fired for, was one of the most important experiences of my high school education.

That's...bad.

We don't need to fix the school system. We need a new system entirely.

OH! I wrote an article about exactly this a couple of years ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/104

Where is your front located that you have so many kids walking by? My hackerspace is located in the back of a high-end furniture store so we don't get that many kids that walk by unfortunately.

We're on a main street in an old clothing store.

Here is one of our members giving a video tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=I...

My experience with my kids education (Oregon, 4th and 6th) is that there is some standardized testing but there's a ton of hands-on project work. In fact, I think there's maybe too little rigor and too many poster boards and research projects. They definitely learn how to develop ideas, research and present them, that's great.

An area that's underdeveloped is teaching to sift through available information and figure out what's signal and what's noise. I don't know if standard tests could help with that but encouraging close reading and deep thinking about very specific questions is definitely a worthy goal.

The inventor of the bubble test wanted to get them removed from schools as a measure of testing knowledge.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/he-invented-bubble-...

I'm amazed at the short-sightedness apparent in this article and in some of the comments here. Yes, the American public education system is broken and is to a large extent too focused on poorly-constructed standardized testing, but imagining that 1) the system used to be better for students, 2) the resources exist for universal project-based learning/assessment, and 3) project-based learning/assessment would fix many/most of the problems ignores the reality of the education system as a whole.

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

From the article, the question provided is about technical reading comprehension; it has nothing to do with learning how to use a microscope. The text states, "To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the lens close to the specimen...". The question is NOT testing your knowledge of how to use a microscope, it's testing whether you can read an instruction manual, which is actually an important skill that can be difficult to assess through project-based learning. Standardized tests try to package the assessment of a wide range of fundamental skills into a relatively contained, standardized format so that skills are evaluated relative to some clear standard as opposed to each individual teacher's ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each of their students. Secondly, the article states that "Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom." Tell me about a time when the biggest problem in schools was not boredom (or worse). This statement attempts to recall a mythical golden age of education excellence that can be recaptured if only schools could "remember". This is not a memory problem. Public education has become a much more complex beast over the past few decades, and the system is struggling to adapt, not remember how to teach.

There are over a million high school teachers in the US. How many of them could competently replace their core curriculum with project-based learning? What about the ones with 40 students in a classroom? What if half of those students don't have basic English language skills? What if 2-3 of those students have behavior problems and regularly destroy the projects of others?

This is just a tiny sample of the challenges that educators and education researchers are trying to address, and the "make robots" solution only addresses a few problems with the current system while introducing many others. Importantly, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such initiatives across the country to introduce more hands-on learning. Education research is not only identifying the most effective interactive, project-based teaching methods, but actually working with schools to implement them effectively. This is a long-term, resource-intensive, ongoing development in education, and it will take awhile to get it right. Trust me, the benefits of project-based learning identified by this article are old news in a lot of progressive education research, but the actual implementation is a far more complex problem, and one that requires understanding the useful role of standardized testing as well as its disadvantages.

In fairness, this is an article from Slate, aka "News For Nervous Upper-Class White People". So it shouldn't shock you that they might not stop to consider how offensive "have the kids build robots!" might be to an educator in a school system that can't even afford to maintain reasonable class sizes, much less a robotics lab.

Robotics labs aren't expensive: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

I'm not sure you realize just how strapped for cash most school districts are. The average K-12 teacher in the US spends around $350 out of their own pocket each year just to buy supplies like books, pencils and glue that schools and parents can't or won't pay for. Only 8% of teachers can get through a year without spending any of their own money on supplies. (http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/07/08/teachers-spend-1.3..., http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/08/most_teachers_spend_...)

If school districts can't afford to buy pencils, it's unlikely they can afford to buy robots, no matter how cheap the robots are.

> I'm not sure you realize just how strapped for cash most school districts are.

They're actually not that cash-strapped. They just don't choose to spend money on education.

It's unclear how giving them more money will change that.

Seriously - take the spending per-pupil year and multiply it by the number of kids in a class room. Subtract the teacher's salary and benefits. Subtract the cost of the room and educational facilities (like the library). Heck - subtract the cost of the playground.

Now, ask yourself where the rest of the money went.

> it's testing whether you can read an instruction manual, which is actually an important skill that can be difficult to assess through project-based learning.

This is the key thing that the article willfully ignores. And the whole point is to not confuse this with whatever you think you know about microscopes from your experience.

Indeed, it's a very valuable skill to be able to read and interpret any kind of text without letting your preconceptions get in the way. You don't want low-level nuclear plant technicians ignoring or misunderstanding written safety procedures based on what they think is their own personal understanding of the plant from experience...

"Standardized tests try to package the assessment of a wide range of fundamental skills into a relatively contained, standardized format so that skills are evaluated relative to some clear standard"

Ultimately, what is the point, though? Almost every day there are articles about hiring on Hacker News. Not once have I read the advice to look at the results of the applicant in the standardized school tests. If the test results are not relevant in the real world, why cripple education by aligning it with the necessity to do such standardized tests.

I think at least for HN affine companies, "I have build a robot" would be a much better selling point than "I have high marks on the standard test". Intuitively somebody having too high marks might even raise my suspicions (little creativity and drive, just does what he is told without questioning it etc.). Which is of course unfair, some people are simply good. But it is an emotion that arises.

Standardized tests serve a number of roles in public education, very few of which relate to either enhancing or testing a student's ability to get a job.

The main applications relate to checking in on students' progress through the education system relative to their peers. It is also a way to compare the performance of particular groups of students (or schools) relative to others, which is very controversial, but obviously easier than trying to judge the quality of the robots they produce.

By far the greatest advantage of standardized tests over other assessment methods is that they scale beautifully. When you want to ask the question "how are we as a country/state/district doing compared to others", standardized tests provide a reasonably easy-to-interpret, reliable reference point. It's not just about what a test score says about an individual student (which ultimately is very little), but what the test scores indicate in aggregate.

None of these seem to benefit the actual students/pupils much, though? What would happen if kids could pick the schools they want to go to themselves?

Having spent a decade of my life in for-profit education, specifically standardized test preparation (Sylvan, Kaplan, College Network, Grockit, Veritas Prep), I can say that there is more data that could be collected from tests. For example, instead of looking who got the "right" answer, you could look at which wrong answers people selected and why. For example, students who chose "A" probably have experience with microscopes, perhaps don't read instructions carefully.

More interestingly, you could learn a lot about a student's thought process by analyzing the time spent on a particular question, or whether they chose another answer choice before settling on one, or whether It's possible that the computer adaptive exams (GRE, GMAT, NCLEX, etc.) take this into account because the computer can collect this data, but paper and pencil tests simply cannot.

A student who chose answer choice "A" after 5 seconds is probably careless or overconfident, whereas a student who chose "A" after a minute of waffling between "A" and "C" possibly lacks confidence.

I think standardized tests could become a lot more useful if we could collect more data from them.

How would this data be used?

Ideally, as student feedback.

Yes, they should be. It also would be nice if they had personalized attention of highly qualified education professionals, as well. But they don't. The unions, bureaucracy, politics, and funding is what it is.

I think you are unwittingly peddling an insidious idea that may be just as bad, if not worse, than standardized testing.

A "highly qualified education professional" is a disinterested drone whose only accomplishments were meeting the arcane state requirements for a teaching certificate. If you're really lucky, they might have been adept at stringing together a bunch of useless "research" conclusions into incoherent prose in order to impress an academic who hasn't taught in any meaningful sense for decades.

The qualities that make for a good teacher--intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity--are diametrically opposed to the qualities of a "highly qualified education professional."

I agree with you on the academia aspect, and it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right? Or else, why would we want those from academia teaching our children in middle school and high school.

"intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity"

Are those really the qualities of a good teacher? In my mind, I don't really care of the teacher is curious or intelligent. I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible. It would be nice if the children were engaged, and if the teacher had a clever way to even make it "fun" at times, great. But it's not a prerequisite.

Knowledge is not some quantity that teachers mechanically shovel onto students in an efficient manner. Teachers must be curious and intelligent, so that they serve as a role model for their students (who also must be curious and intelligent to learn.) An uninquisitive teacher encourages uninquisitive students.

>>> it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right?

Actually, no. The qualifications for becoming a professor are generally: doctoral degree in subject + publications to name. At least where I live, the requirements for becoming a teacher are generally: approved course of study (in education, not necessarily subject areas) + baccalaureate degree + teaching certificate.

>>> I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible.

Then what you want is Google, or Wikipedia, or a good textbook. When, however, it comes time to teach your child how to find the information, how to assess it critically, how to reason about it, and how to use it effectively, then you need a teacher.

Also, teachers play the important role of exposing students to ideas and information that they would not otherwise be searching for, and thus to cultivate previously unknown interests and foster an appreciation for learning.

> I don't really care of the teacher is curious or intelligent. I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible.

Adding to other excellent answers, there's also this thing that children are not robots. You can't just open a channel and upload the knowledge to their brains. You need to work them on emotional level, make them curious / interested in what they are learning, even if because it boosts efficiency tremendously.

> It would be nice if the children were engaged, and if the teacher had a clever way to even make it "fun" at times, great. But it's not a prerequisite.

Yes, it is. Even teachers who are experts in their domains may (and in academia, often are) poor teachers. Because it doesn't matter what you say (they can read up the details in textbook/on Wikipedia; that's what they're there for anyway). It matters how you say it.

>The qualities that make for a good teacher--intelligence, patience, curiosity, and creativity--are diametrically opposed to the qualities of a "highly qualified education professional.

You're reading too much into it. I meant a good, competent educator.

I understand what you meant, that's why I qualified my statement by saying your choice of words was unwitting. My point is that, precisely because it was not deliberate, your choice of words reflects a subconscious perspective that teaching is no different than other jobs, where formal qualifications and a professional attitude are reasonable substitutes for an in-depth assessment.

Of course, we could get into a discussion about whether that's a valid assumption for any profession, but that's neither here nor there.

By 4 poking speakers with pencils, by 7 burning raw sulphur to investigate the blue flame & burning holes in test tubes, by 8 taking photos of bugs & crystals down microscopes, by 9 re-wiring light switches into 240 volts, by 10 hacking electric motors with propellers, by 12 building & flying balloons & model aircraft & programming.

Sorry, but I thought that was a great question. If you have ever used a microscope before it's obvious and if you have not you can still figure it out in under 30 seconds of logical thought.

It's also explicitly stated in the fourth caution item.

The author seems to be presenting the question as a boring context that students have to deal with, but there are plenty of tasks where some degree of self control is required to read and understand a few hundred words that aren't real exciting.

To me, the big problem with testing is that it is not particularly adaptive. Students that demonstrate a reasonable level of reading comprehension when they are 10 probably don't need to be evaluated for it 5 more times before they leave school (of course tests do get successively more difficult/higher level, but doing that in lockstep by age is a waste).

I agree, but assume standardized testing takes a full 2 days / year and you either do it every 4 years (3th, 9th, 11th) or every year. Well every year costs an extra 2 days on 3 / 4 years and assuming 180 school days a year that's (2*3/4)/180 = 0.83%.

So, yea it's probably not that useful, but if you want to get upset over something focus on the terrible quality of textbooks or something that can have a slightly larger impact. Even the school lunch program has a larger impact on student performance.

PS: Or just mandate that standardized testing does not count as part of the minimum required instruction time per year.

Good news is I'm not terrifically upset about it.

I did carefully leave "standardized" out of my comment. I have a problem with the whole process of present->practice->see what stuck. It has been the most practical method for teaching large groups of people for a long time, but I think there is a lot of potential in using adaptive testing to mechanize the evaluation and tracking of what students understand, which hopefully leads to students getting more and better personal attention.

That photo says it all. Someone that's actually made something has confidence that cannot be instilled by positive, "you're a winner" affirmations. The individual is left with joy, not relief at having suffered through it.

The most important thing to be learned is that you can. And the most important thing that you can do is do.

I find it hard to believe that the author had trouble with the question. The answer is provided perfectly in the supplied text. If I say that dogs bark when they are cold and then ask a five year old why dogs bark I think I'd be pretty disappointed if they couldn't regurgitate what I just said. Is it so different when written rather than spoken? Can we really be sure that this is a reading comprehension problem as opposed to a basic reading and language problem? I'd like to see if the students who got it wrong could even read the full text. If they can't read it then it is nothing to do with comprehension. They just can't read.

It's the way we're killing thinking in children.

If I say that dogs bark when they're cold and then ask a five year old why dogs bark, I'd expect something like, "when they're cold! and when they're angry! and when Amy [sister of this 5yo] steps on his tail, hahaha". Or whatever. Reality is not bound by what someone written or said few moments ago. If you want to test reading comprehension, you have to control for prior experience in the subject which might be (and probably often is) greater than test author's.

Just because you can compete in some rocket building competition or can program your Arduino to light an a 3x3x3 LED cube does not mean you have achieved a knowledge level to be successful in STEM. It's the details; I would think that our community would recognize that the most.

Programming a pong game would probably seem like genius level intelligence to many outsiders. Sure, most here don't think that, right? That doesn't mean you understand serious computer concepts and the sort of things that are Knuth's "Art," right?

It's fun to say "Who cares about solving these dumb, boring algebra problems, I can build a rocket by researching most of the things on the Internet." Sure someone who builds these kinds of things is probably more intelligent or perhaps had the chance to be more technical than your average everyday American but when you get into the details, I think we're talking about people that will successful in STEM and I just don't take seriously this romanticism of "project based learning."

I mean, just because you can follow directions and build a rocket, doesn't mean you're going to be fit to work as a Quant or something like that. This just seems obvious to me.

Of course, it goes without saying that you probably should have these kinds of projects. Definitely. These are great experiences. I doubt computer science would have even existed if people just had the attitude that "book learning" was for the birds or whatever and just "built stuff."

> Programming a pong game would probably seem like genius level intelligence to many outsiders. Sure, most here don't think that, right? That doesn't mean you understand serious computer concepts and the sort of things that are Knuth's "Art," right?

But not programming a pong game and just learning from the book also doesn't mean you understand serious computer concepts. I've seen examples of it at my university. "Understand" does not mean "repeat it on the next test", nor does it mean "repeat the definition you memorized from the book". It means being able to manipulate the concept in your mind, to infer consequences, to think of alternatives, and most importantly, to put it into use.

So my belief still is that bulding stuff correlates with understanding more, than book-learning alone. (I'm not saying builders don't learn - they do, but not what they're told when they're told, but what they need when they need it).

As a guy who's just been building a robot for a class instead of doing an exam - YES PLEASE!

But I'm probably not a "kid" anymore and college exams have never been all that standardized ...

I'm opposed to standardized tests more than most people, however I have to take issue with this article. The author of this article stated early on that this was a 'reading comprehension question', and then goes onto to critique the question as if it was about learning about microscopes. He also says that he 'couldn't figure it out' by guessing. He should've tried reading.

As an aside, I did know the correct answer because I had been trained numerous times on microscope use. I didn't even look at the question until after reading the rest of the article. The test makers wouldn't have been testing my reading comprehension. I suspect this would be true of most people who got the correct answer. Interestingly, anyone who has been trained in taking such tests knows to read the answers first, as well as to guess the correct one. Then scan the actual question to find the relevant bit, as well as the 'trick', if it exists.

Like many people, I believe this author confuses learning with being a student. A student's job is to be a student, and that includes trying to score higher than average on tests by any legal means. Learning is something else altogether, and I have my doubts about being able to get far with that in an institutionalized setting.

I'm not too opposed to standardized tests, but I completely agree that they don't teach. That's what the rest of school is for. Saying "tests don't teach" is almost a tautology.

(Okay, when there is a reading comprehension section you will often learn something. That's just a bonus, though.)

I should point out that several top tech innovators were trained, not in traditional boring schools, but in Montessori. These schools emphasize the Learn By Doing model without grades or tests.

Look at the minds produced: Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, etc.

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...

I think a lot of these comments are focusing on the wrong part of the text. I think what the author is really trying to convey is that taking standardized tests is not going to make a child want to grow up to build rockets or robots.

I'm a mechanical engineer and attended a technical university, and from my experience, most of the other students in technical fields are ones that grew up with an innate interest in building things and creating things. Not all children do things like that in their spare time. And not all parents give their children the opportunity to do things like that in their spare time.

Spending time in school taking standardized tests instead of performing scientific experiments and building things makes children bored with science and math. It is, very sadly, a wasted opportunity. Most children have no idea how exciting science and technology can be. All they know is sitting in class, reading books, working boring problems.

When a child gets to high school and starts applying (or not applying) for colleges, they are going to choose a subject that they remember being interesting. Most children that I have met do not find taking tests and reading about science to be interesting.

If children were more involved in the learning process through hands-on experiences, imagine the kind of excitement that would be generated among the young people. Imagine the kinds of things we would be capable of as a species if there were more people excited and invested in science and technology.

I realize that most of the readers of Hacker News were probably the children that grew up wanting to build and create. But there are so many children out there who need to be inspired in order to succeed, and those are the ones that are being failed by our flawed education system.

Why does Slate magazine hate me so much that they made every possible attempt to move my eye away from the article I was trying to read?

I liked the article but I couldn't take issue with the test question.

Is it a sign of a certain way of thinking that I read the test question, read the provided instructions, answered correctly, and then wondered how on earth anyone could miss a question where the answer is printed above?

I'm not being snarky or mean spirited, I honestly do not understand how anyone - whether they'd used a microscope or not - could look at a piece of provided text, look at a question regarding the text, and then answer incorrectly when a multiple choice selection is provided that is essentially snipped verbatim from the source text that addresses the question exactly. They literally give the answer. I used to wonder this when I took standardized tests as a kid, too.

Are they preying indecisiveness, or trying to make them feel it's a trick question? Maybe that's where I should be taking issue? That if they were familiar with a microscope they'd feel more confident in choosing the clear answer?

Comments here so far seem to agree that the article goes too far, that we need both abstract and experiential learning in schools, and the article misunderstood the purpose of the microscope test question (reading comprehension).

Yes, we do need both abstract and experiential learning. But we need different ratios of them at different ages. Teenagers are much better at abstract learning than young children, and young children are much better at learning skills than teenagers or adults. That is why young children can be piano prodigies, become multilingual, etc. There is nothing wrong with book learning, but it is currently close to 100% of the school day in our elementary schools. At least 50% of class time should be devoted to practicing skills at this age -- painting, singing, playing drums, athletics, building robots. With four years to learn something like physics in university, 100% book learning makes more sense.

Kids should be building rockets and robots, not making iPhone apps.

Not sure that the article conveys the message well, but I agree vehemently with the sentiment of the article's sub-heading (the title of the HN post). Standardized tests do a great job of ensuring we end up with standardized kids that will safely perpetuate the status quo.

As a side note - I can tell Slate A/B tests their headlines because I originally read this on a mobile device with one header, then opened it on my desktop and it had a different header. The subheader was constant so I chose that as the title for this submission.

After attending the Seattle Mini Maker Faire this past weekend, all I can say is that I agree 100% with OP. You internalize the lessons much more thoroughly when you actively (rather than passively) participate in the learning process.

The kids were the happiest people at the Faire, because they hadn't convinced themselves yet that they couldn't build these things. They were excited. It was great to see.

Pessimism is for suckers :)

Title is misleading. Articles seems to be picking on one particular standardized test. Does anyone want to invest in a startup that doesn't believe in collecting metrics let alone A/B testing? Why would anyone besides the teachers union advocate for no standardizing tests then? Sure testing sucks in a lot of places but that's not an argument against the idea of benchmarking.

It's not. You make what you measure. But it works both ways, because it's a feedback loop (otherwise measurements would be useless).

And standarized test are poorly calibrated to real understanding and makes the whole school system produce more and more dumb kids with each year.

How Schools Kill Creativity (2006) http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

Summary: Around the world, our present education system was set up to meet the needs of the industrial revolution, it does not meet our current needs, and certainly won't meet our future needs.

I agree to a point but I believe everything should be project base so people are given problems to solve in all subjects.

The reason for this is people get a better understanding of how to manage something properly and something that people can get stuck into rather than knowledge just being thrown at students without learning skills required to actually put the knowledge into action.

I have a relevant story about the topic of this post. It's actually my life story.

When I was about 12 or 13 I dropped out of school.. I was too bored, too frustrated, and too unhappy to actually stomach it any longer: the unsightly pleasure adults took in dominating children, the teachers who knew less than I did but refused to admit it, the way smart kids often ended up at the bottom of the pecking order... The only thing I enjoyed was writing simple QBasic games for my friends and me to play.

After a protracted fight with my parents (I actually went on strike on the roof of our house) I got what I wanted and they let me drop out of school. This was probably the best single decision of my life, and the credit really goes to them for being brave enough to allow it.

I started out teaching myself C++ templates, and the basics of electronics. I got obsessed with high voltage, and started dumpster diving to find good parts. Once, after I took a (harmless) 40kV shock, my mom started to worry she'd come back from her teaching job to find me dead on the floor. I convinced her I knew the actual parameters of heart stoppage well enough to avoid this!

I built plasma globes and an improvised vacuum pump. I started rewiring our telephone lines. I made an amplifier. I built a coil gun and tuned it using my computer's sound card as a digital storage oscilloscope. I taught myself Python, and dived into the theory of digital signal processing.

I even had the good fortune of acquiring some Perl contract work through a family friend. Using the money to buy my own computer at 14 was probably the most satisfying experience of my life. Old school-friends would come to visit and oggle my enormous 21" CRT. That made me realize that I didn't have to follow the ordinary rules to survive in this world.

All the while I took distance education courses, a measure my parents insisted on (luckily). When I got high grades on A-level physics, I got the opportunity to attend university. Still a year young, I ended up studying pure math at the best math university on my continent (lots of Soviet bloc math emigres who moved to Africa for the sun).

The weirdest contradiction for me was hanging out with many of the other "nerdy kids" in math and physics who had gone the traditional route, and finding out that they really weren't all that interested in what they were doing. They seemed to be more consumed with perpetuating their high marks. Most frustrating of all was that achieving those high marks often boiled down to the most 'mercenary' kind of pillaging of old exam papers -- actual understanding didn't have much bearing on it.

Pure math was different -- you really had to think, be creative, and understand things to achieve good grades, at least in the more advanced courses. And sure enough, that was the one discipline I got very good grades in. But funnily enough, only when it got hard. For the first 2 years I didn't realize I had any interest in math at all.

By and large, my experience of formal education is best summed up by one little anecdote: I once handed in a 3rd-year physics practical in which I had taken an extraordinary large amount of care: I did the experiment several times because to better resolution on the spectrometer, I researched error propagation and did a more principled error analysis, I wrote it up carefully in LaTeX, and so on.

I got a mediocre grade for the practical. In fact, my explanation of how I had used a genetic algorithm to fit Gaussians to the spectrographic peaks had the word 'genetic' crossed out and replaced with 'generic' -- the ignorant tutor thought I had just misspelled it!

In contrast, a classmate put some last-minute work together that had (illegitimately) small error bars, and got 90%. At that point I lost interest in getting good grades in that subject, and stopped trying.

There is a happy ending: industry proved to be very meritocratic indeed. And my current job means I can actually bring all this random knowledge I have to bear, and bootstrap my way into new fields (like, recently, graphical models).

What are my conclusion here? I think the main conclusions are:

* Teaching yourself on your own has the benefit that you get used to doing what you do because you love it, not because people reward you for it. And this is what really matters in the end.

* Metrics to reward behavior will almost always tend to corrupt the behavior they are meant to be promoting (this has been enshrined as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbells_law). Grades are the best example of this.

There are kids who want to build rockets, write plays and create art. Then there are kids who want to get jobs in IBM and HP.

I think we ought to give both these kids an equal opportunity to get what they want. It's wrong to assume that we all want to create; some of us are happy handling the running and the finances of someone else's creation.

I agree with the article and would go further. In the modern era of information availability and the incredibly high quality of online courses and resources, school is obsolete for all but the really dumb kids that just aren't motivated because their parents are stupid or on drugs.

In the modern era of more and more families having only one child, I don't think replacing school by online learning at home is a good idea. Children need to be exposed to other children, kids with diverse backgrounds if possible.

Also, there is a time to be free and focus exclusively on what you like, but I'd rather have kids exposed to a variety of disciplines first.

Perhaps more importantly, I would not trust most parents to provide a good learning environment to their children, especially in poor families.

And online learning might be the most efficient for some students but I expect that other students benefit a lot from the personal contact with a teacher. Ideally we should be able to give each student what works best for her.

Schools have many goals and education is but one of them and even education doesn't just mean reading textbooks, viewing videos and being able to reproduce that.

People are talking about how this test is biased against poor kids and how kids with no context won't understand. Does anyone here know of a middle school without microscopes? I went to a poor grade school and we had microscopes (granted they were old)

What is with the deluge of articles telling people what they should do? If people want to build rockets, robots, or learn to code they can. They should be doing what excites them and interests them whether thats science, writing, music, or coding.

Answer is simple, a bigger population will require pruning and leaving few people behind, natural selection through standardized test. In a smaller popular, individuals will get to decide their interests and future.

Well.. if 60% of pupils got the answer wrong, given the full explanation before the multiple choice answers, maybe it has more to do with reading ability than STEM disposition or method of questionning :/

Except that in real-life I wouldn't put the lens too close to the glass, because a) the microscope seems (by the description) to be able to crush the glass, and b) I wouldn't bet on myself remembering which way to turn the knob to raise the lens instead of lowering it.

IMO this is a thinking vs. saying what they want you to say problem. It pops up often when a kid has more experience with subject matter than the test author.

I can only speak from personnal experience: the first time I used a microscope I did break a glass by trying to zoom in first. I had no manual but I wouldn't have read it anyway (nowadays I do read instructions before using anything). When I read this particular article I "played" the game and answered correctly (hooray for me). I agree this kind of test has nothing to do with STEM because it is interchangeable and could be devised for any courses ; my point is that it's "just" a comprehensive reading test and if you fail it it means you fail at comprehensive reading which is one of the most basic skills one pupil should acquire. I agree it has nothing to do with validating specific STEM knowledge but nevertheless the explanations are correct and useful in the STEM field and understanding them is important. Now, if american science courses are only about those kind of tests it's a little bit concerning: Scoring A's in every courses just because you understand the questions versus scoring A because you understand the courses.

Not: I am not american so I don't know how education is organised in the US.

A standardized test is bureaucratic mechanism of control. It is a way to grade and rank a whole populace with a simple abstraction. They have nothing to do with learning.

A lot of the discussion here focuses on critical thinking development which is an interesting topic. Does compulsory testing or even compulsory education in general do children any service in that regard? Are critical thinking skills better developed when a kid's education is self-directed? I think these are all fair questions.

Personally, I'm a fan of self-directed learning but that doesn't mean I'm right. Still, it strikes me that teaching people to think critically is like teaching them to be happy or to love. It seems kind of difficult to quantify.

Someone didn't like my comment. Fair enough. I'll put it another way.

Are children, left to their own devices, naturally deficient when it comes to critical thinking?

"American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests."

I agree on anything, but the first word. ;)

Standardized tests aren't there to measure students, they are there to measure teachers.

I think Udacity does a good job on this learning by making.

Education is remarkably outdated.

Article fails to take into account the full intellectual diversity of the students in the average classroom.

Some students need to build rockets and robots. Others need standardized tests to make sure they can read.

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