Accountability and Incentives Are Necessary but Absent in Education

I think back about when I had the best learning experiences, they were semi-structured classes, where each child went at their own pace, or classes where there were multiple grades in a single ~25 child class.

And skills from those classes were what I brought forward into adulthood. Not the Honors classes. Not the AP classes.

Calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle? I'll go ask ChatGPT or search on DDG cause I sure as shit don't remember.

Identifying a bird-of-prey or what kind of evergreen tree that is? I can still do that. And those were skills taught in elementary.

This goes back to not everyone learns the same way. Rote, rapping rulers across knuckles, teach-to-the-test has always caused an adverse reaction to learning, for me. And I'm not a unique snowflake amongst 7 billion humans.

Maybe the issue isn't so much the test scores, but rather what and how we're teaching. Am I good at math having gone through Honors classes? Not in the slightest way anymore. Did I ever enjoy the books I read in Honors English? Not surprisingly no, I found Jane Austen a complete bore. At the time I would have rather been reading 1984, Catch 22, Silent Warriors by Richard P Henrick, or some Ray Bradbury sci-fi, but those weren't "classics" (why the fuck 1984 and Catch 22 wouldn't be considered classics is beyond me!).

If a kid is resistant to what or how a subject is being taught, there will be near-zero retention of that subject. Despite not remembering how to perform complex calculations in math, I did enjoy it throughout school as when I was beginning to learn more complex math I was allowed to self-pace.

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The linked article reads, to me, like one of those "health hacks" or "longevity hacks" articles; indeed, it comes from a book titled, in part, Science to Supercharging Student Learning.

I get the author's point, based on how we teach currently due to No Child Left Behind. But that policy is a failed one. If I had been going to school after NCLB went into effect, I would have resisted that style of learning. It's boring; it's teaching-to-the-test; it's North Korean-robot-ism. There's no room for creativity or self-pacing.

But there's also no yardstick for creativity or self-paced learning. That doesn't sit well with authoritarians.

Anyhow, personal anecdote vs. scientific understanding and all that.