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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

Your method works well as a tutor with a single student. Try doing that as a teacher with a classroom of 30+ students.

My favorite class I ever took was middle school algebra. We had a teacher, problem sets, and were put into groups of 3 or 4 to work through the problem sets together.

The teacher would give a bit of a spiel to intro the problems, but the problems themselves were very self-directed, things like "measure these triangles, square these numbers, do you notice anything?" then introing the pythagorean theorem.

The teacher would float around and basically help groups that were more stuck on things than others. But students would help each other a lot, meaning the teacher is not spending their time on people who can ultimately help themselves.

This is not a format that works for all students and all class types, but when it works it works so well, and it's extremely scalable.

it’s called a flipped classroom and students universally hate it.

Maybe I was in the massive minority then. Though part of it was that the format let me just work on stuff "by myself" rather than sit through a bunch of explanations I didn't need.

flipped classrooms seem to imply work ahead of time though? But here we'd show up hands in our pockets and start working on the material on site

Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in the session). This is active learning with small group work and peer learning - which students tend to actually quite like. (Flipped classroom works better the more engaged the students are in the topic - for electives, fine, for mandatory courses, less good.)

Depends on a group and the available tutoring time. It can go well, but not in every environment. If most of your group is not interested in the first place, you're not getting anything out of it either.

That's definitely not flipped classroom. In flipped classroom students read or watch videos before class, then work on problems interactively in class. The concepts are introduced in the readings and videos, not in the problems.

I have for the past four years averaging 180-200 students on my rosters.

Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat.

Apply this to middle/high school students and you're going to get a lot of students being annoyed since they're being challenged, are feeling stupid, and don't know how to deal with that feeling of being stupid; especially given that many of them don't see the point in attending school since they feel like it isn't helping them.

There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.

Wrong. Their profile clearly states high school teacher. Why assume?

Because I don't check every user's profile before responding.

I made an assumption based on class size. The person I was replying too stated 180-200 students. So the assumption was that they were meaning a lecture hall of 180-200 students, which is typical for a college course. That is not typical for a high school course, in which case, I'm going to go out on a limb again and say that it's 180-200 students over 5-6 ~30 student periods.

> Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat.

In the US, it is maybe not completely wrong that a majority of college students want to be in school, but it is definitely wrong that a majority of the students in a given typical teacher's typical course want to be in that class (possibly unless it is a major-only course).

This is true, however, when you have students that want to be in school, I think they're more likely to put the effort necessary in since they can clearly see what the end goal is.

> There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.

Any school teacher can tell you: a single kid that refuses to engage easily holds back an entire class. The only way to get really well educated kids is to separate kids that engage. But do that, and the parents won't stop screaming at you ...

I think it depends on what you mean by “engage.” Hell, I was morbidly shy in high school, so I would virtually never talk, but I was engaged with the material. It’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. With class sizes being what they are, the best I can usually do is kind of figure out 2-3 groups of students based on types and intensities of engagement and manage from there.

Class sizes in private schools are a little less than half of what they are in public schools on average. That includes "private" schools (like a catholic school).

As a parent now, I must say I don't understand what you want parents to do. I want the best for my 3 daughters ... and public school isn't the best (and private school, while far from free, is certainly not as expensive as I keep reading. Tuition per year is in the thousands (close to 10000$), but not 50000. And if I chose the catholic school, which btw is a school with actually a better reputation than their current private school, it would be less than 2000$ (plus a third kid doesn't pay at all). One kid has a sponsorship in the private school, and doesn't pay.

When we went to check out the public school, the teacher didn't know where France was, and the 6th year math teacher didn't know what differentiation was. There were no advanced classes or study sessions outside of regular hours (they might refer you to a program that was organized by the state university ... a 45 minute drive away). There were some sport clubs, but nothing compared to either the private school or the catholic school we checked out (there the private school was far superior, you can even go horseback riding, but the catholic school still had 10 sports available, and another 10 activities)

It's close to 2000$ per month to have 3 kids in private school ... and me and my wife pay that because, well, in my opinion there's no alternative.

Yes, if you want to give your kids, a solid, college-bound education, you are more likely to find it in private schools than your local neighborhood public school. However, there are some really great public schools, it just depends on where you are and what the composition of the community is. My parents live in a town where you can’t turn your head sideways without bumping into an engineer of some kind. Very diverse place. Median household income in the district is like $80,000+. Best public schools in the state.

I don’t blame parents for making individual decisions for their own children. I blame us as a wider society for our willingness to throw kids away who have themselves done nothing but have them misfortune of being born into shitty situations.

I feel that society is blatantly choosing against education. I don't see that ending well, not just because the kids will suffer. They'll also become aggressive MAGA nutcases, or something equally horrible. But it is a case of "put up the money or shut up", which means for education to do better something else needs to lose budget, so this is a nonstarter.

A disruptive kid can hold back an entire class ... but disengaged student wont. Nor introverted shy student.

Disengaged can hold a class back, it spreads. But nowhere near as much as a disruptive kid. Or in the case of my worst class, 5 disruptive kids.

> Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes?

No. Title I urban school in the state’s third largest city.

> There will be some that engage….

First, if I were being nitpicky, i’d say that this assumes that it’s the student’s responsibility to take the initiative to engage with content. Rather, that’s just what the job of a high school teacher is… to lead them to a point, often sneakily, where they are engaging.

All that said, people are rather overlooking the “bad news” paragraph I included. Getting kids to at least respond to you as an individual teacher on an individual level is easy. But it’s often actively sabotaged by the systems and processes that govern day-to-day crap that happens in a public school. Sad.

My apologies. But I don't know how you can genuinely listen to hundreds of students every day, much less engage them each individually. Glad you're out there doing your best anyway.

Numbers vary, but we’re on a modified block schedule, so it’s 180ish every two days. ;)

Anyway, thanks for the kind words. I’ve been pretty down about it recently because it seems like we’re just papering over deep structural and systemic problems, which just hurts our kids more than acknowledging the realities would.

What is your view to get out of the deep structural and systemic problems?

Fully acknowledge and confront the fact that public education serves as essentially a catch-all social service agency for a significant chunk of our populace and stop pretending it’s just about knowledge-transfer. For kids who come from stable family backgrounds (of whatever composition—-stability and reliability are the keys), and a stable (not necessarily affluent or adjacent—-again, stability and reliability) socioeconomic environment, that model works. Kids routinely make it to high school without being able to read or do math at more than a third grade level, because at some point, we can say well, we can’t solve society’s problems, but we also can’t “penalize” these students by holding them back several years (gotta get ground up by the economic machine as soon as they’re 18), so… well, it’s above our pay-grade. I have seen some interesting work and individual charter schools that are like “full service schools.” The problem is, for every decent idea in a charter school, there are 25 charter schools that are pieces of shit.

I need to go take a shower and get ready for work, so I’m going to stop ranting, but the basic solution is to recognize that one size does not fit all. The career tech-normie hs-gifted division we operate with is too broad-brushed. The school I’ve been at has a shit ton of profound mental health problems among students. Poverty is real but it’s not as grinding as our rival school down the street (the “super ghetto” school I was told), nor is life-threatening violence necessarily a daily companion for our kids as for theirs. Yet we are both Title I urban schools.

It’s complicated, man.

Thanks for showing your insight and the problems you face.

I hear these experiences from many places. I know someone who started a buddy system from the sports coaches in his place. They made an on campus chill out room where kids can relax with coaches nearby in the next room. They are confidants and they keep them away from their homes which are sometimes terrible places.

They also get these kids a sports team so they have mates who are in the same situation.

Finally they got some local shops to sponsor it because the idea is that they and the police have less problems with the kids being of the street.

It’s not a 100% cure, but it does seem to take away the biggest strains on the system.

Thanks for posting. It sounds like you're doing a great job in difficult circumstances. And I really agree with you. A lot of this stuff is getting blamed on phones when the problems are elsewhere and the disengagement is just a symptom, but it's easier for educators to blame some distant third parties (tech companies) than it is to blame the education system.

Key things from the article blamed on phones/the internet/entertainment:

- Schoolteacher says "they don't care about grades, they don't care about college"

- College teacher says, "I am teaching Intro to Theatre and prisoners care more"

- Cheating in college.

All this has a simpler and much more direct explanation: college doesn't motivate students anymore, and especially not humanities courses. If college doesn't matter then high school grades matter much less, what professors teach in class matters much less, and all this is totally as expected because universities have been trashing their reputations very publicly for a very long time now. Roll back to the pre-smartphone era and it was taken for granted that any degree at all would grant you upward mobility into the world of easy-breezy office jobs. Why not study Plato for a few years, given that expectation? Roll forward to today's world and even teenagers got the message that this was a lie, that many degrees are nearly worthless, that the debt costs are huge and that if they're a straight white male the university staff will at best hate them for how they were born, and at worst try to make life deliberately hard for them.

The fact that most universities aren't even trying to stop LLM based cheating is the final nail in the coffin. Why tune in when you can get a computer to write your assignments for you, the professors won't notice and you'll get good grades without any effort.

This blasé attitude deeply offends the generation for whom university attendance was a quasi-sacred act, hence Gioia's astonishment that 40% of students would cheat in an ethics class. For younger generations they see it as a purely transactional interaction, in which they are forced to pay lots of money to listen to someone waffle about ethics despite having no particular claim to being an ethical person, in return for the ability to maybe get a job better than barista.

The fix for all this isn't to wage war on smartphones, although that is what the educational establishment will do. It's to recognize that schools have drifted too far from what kids actually need (especially boys), and to rethink the way they work to reflect a world where college degrees are devalued.

>Try doing that as a teacher with a classroom of 30+ students.

I believe that OP is saying that's exactly the problem.

What percentage of the population are in K-12 any given time -- 15%? 20%? To have 1-1 tuition for all of them, we'd have to have at least that many adults also in education.

It'll be quite possible in a few years with robots; there won't be any more need for shoving 20-30 kids together in a classroom.

One of the main points of the top level comments is that students seek connections with people, not content. We don't know yet whether they will seek connections with robots.

Yeah, they’ll figure out how to feed the robot whatever will get the robot to shut up, and then go do things teenagers do when they have no adult supervision. Great model lol.

So you go from 1:20 to 0:20?

Depends on the country.

In the US it's ~10% of the population. Completely doable, especially since the participation rate in the economy is still lower than at any point in the last 50 years (minus covid). If that seems to hard I guess we can increase class sizes by 100% and have 2 on 1 education.

I'm sure it's a sliding scale type thing. 24 students is slightly better than 25, and our numbers have slowly been increasing for a long time.

it also doesn't work for a single student case if you only start talking to them after they are already highly already at a point where you can say they have developed a sever attention deficit due to addictive dopamine loops

like you know the station most teachers are exposed to as the problem can already have takes deep root before the child goes to school

You can do it as a parent though.

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