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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

  > The best lectures follow a question-trytoanswer-getrightanswer pattern where students are basically doing homework as part of the lecture.

Are you referring to the Socratic Method?

I agree that homework is where a significant chunk of learning happens but I'm highly skeptical that the utility is preserved through such a short timeframe. Spaced repetition is highly effective for memory, and this is baked into any method which has take home assignments. A collaborative style lecture is good, but this serves a different purpose.

  > We wrote all graded essays during class.

Sorry, you jumped a little here. Who is "we"? Is there a "when" and "where" to this too? Are you a current high schooler? Recent grad? Was this years ago? I've lost the context here.

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> Sorry, you jumped a little here. Who is "we"?

Right, this was in high school some 20 years ago in Slovenia and also in college after. Anything graded happened at school. All tests were open answer where you have to write 2 or 3 sentences. We also had oral exams in front of the whole class where the teacher asks you questions and you answer. In college the orals were more private because the classes were huge and the exam periods more condensed.

Homework was graded in that you’d get a + for doing it and a - for not doing it. Collect enough - and you get an F. This was more to make us do the homework than to actually check the work.

Afaik this hasn’t changed but I don’t know any recent school children in Slovenia so maybe it has.

> Are you referring to the Socratic Method?

I don’t know what it’s called. The approach where you challenge students to try figuring out the answer/explanation before you explain it to them because that has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes even though, or because, it’s harder and slower.

Thanks that helps. I mean it appears Slovenia has a pretty good general education system but I don't know much about their higher ed (it is really weird how the US is so good at higher ed but not general education[0])

I'm not opposed to the idea, but I still think things can be done a lot better. I left a much more detailed comment in the cousin to this one.

But yeah, that's called the Socratic Method. Big fan. When I taught I'd frequently ask students to answer. Basically while lecturing I'd stop at some points and ask them how they would go about solving certain challenges or whatever. Usually directly related to what would be on the next slide. This style is pretty common fwiw, and I even saw it throughout my education even prior to high school. But it is also unfortunate that there's also a lot of teachers who just begin talking and don't stop.

[0] As a side note, I made the claim in another comment about how you could drop a random but average student into a top school and I'd expect not a high variance on outcome. Well I think this discrepency is part of the evidence to that. Though the US varies widely in general education, with some states being world class and others being... well... Alabama is a state after all...)

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