Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

The Socratic method as practiced by Socrates and described by Plato was used with a handful of interlocutors at most and often with only one. The responses were individual not collective.

That's what bothers me about the article. It's about instructing a class, a way of going through motions, not about teaching any individual. What about the third grader who doesn't know Roman numerals? What about the one who can't read "ten"? What about the one who has only eaten a bag of Cheetos in the past 24 hours? Or the kid on the autism spectrum and the one who saw his mother beaten by her boyfriend last night and just about every other night for as long as he can remember?

How does this work when the 11 year old third grader hits Jamison in the back of the head with a book and the quiet girl wants to use the restroom because she is sobbing just like yesterday?

The reality of third grade isn't theoretical. Yeah there are little pods of protected well cared for children. There may even be a sweet spot where none are smart asses and love the call and response and each is equally bright and learns the same way. Just look for the full pony rack by the school front door and the M&M truck backed to the cafeteria loading dock.

The fount of well meaning amateur pedagogy is not the solution to the woes of public education. The lesson of the article is that kids can be incredibly kind and polite to adults.

[Edit: None of which is to say that I think trying to teach the ideas of boolean algebra to 3rd graders isn't a good idea. I'm all for pushing the limits of children's intellect.]

How is any of this relevant or isolated to any particular teaching method?

You're just distracting from the variable by mentioning constants. The method of teaching he sees in his classroom isn't going to stop little Timmy from seeing his mother beaten to a pulp every night, but you mention it anyway because... well, why did you?

>How is any of this relevant or isolated to any particular teaching method?

It's evidence that pretending all the students in a classroom are one person (or a small handful of people) flies in the face of reality and is a bad abstraction that you should not use.

A good teaching method gracefully handles the problem that there are ~30 different individuals with different circumstances who cannot be reasoned about as a collective. The Socratic method is not that, because it engages a handful of people at a time.

This is the wrong place to have that conversation. This is a submission based on the premise that one must teach a group of students, as is the case in any classroom environment such as the one described.

You're arguing with the premise, which is unhelpful. You either accept the premise and engage in this topic, or you disagree with the premise and leave the rest of us alone.

Of course you must teach a group of students. Grandparent is arguing that, because you must teach a diverse group of students, the Socratic method is not the magic bullet one might think, i.e. contradicting the thesis, not the premise, of the article.

I didn't see any place where this method was claimed to be a magic bullet, or even a more common silver bullet. In fact, the author specifically mentioned this:

> When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher > believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and > excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The > three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very > beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at > all.

That's a very clear explanation that this method didn't work for every child in the class. In any class there will be children that are difficult to reach. This isn't necessarily an article about that.

Thank you. Correct, the method is not claimed to be foolproof, but just a good method for many students, and it works well in large groups, often even better than with one student at a time, because if someone gets stuck, others have ideas to keep the discussion going.

> Of course you must teach a group of students.

`brudger was not agreeing with this premise. You are.

Welcome to the conversation.

I talked to a really cool, smart teacher about 2 years ago and I have some murky version of an idea brewing from that chat. She thought about these problems in terms of economics, pedagogy and how it affects the classroom. I am not a teacher but I have been a student so the subject is naturally interesting to me. I also care because I think teaching is a core thing in a society. A lot of other things hang on it.

Some key things that are directly determined by the school system seem to be class size & learning pace. At the same time, children's attention spans and other complicated realities of learning and how it works in kids or not really in tune with the "industry" of teaching on a society wide scale.

Nine year olds in groups of 30 40 or even 20 are a handful when you put them together 6 to 8 hours every day and make them learn reading. Kids only have so much attention span, it varies, but 6 hours is far above the median in practice. A lot of the controversial learning related medication is used primarily to improve a child's ability to make it through a school day. Class size. School hours.

Learning pace is related to class sizes too. The reality is that the number of hours it takes to teach a 9 year old reading or multiplication varies, but it the vast majority of cases classrooms go at a pace much slower than could be achieved by a competent teacher 1-on-1. I don't know what the multiple is but I think it's reasonable to assume it's high. Call that the reference point for efficiency. That means the potential number of hours needed per child are lower, if the learning quality is higher.

Another "economic"issue other than cost and subsequent scarcity of teacher hours is parents' "babysitting" needs. Parents work. You can't work if you need to pick up an eight year old at 11:30 and an eleven year old at 12:45. I have heard interesting ideas here. All sorts of ideas that I don't really have the understanding to evaluate, but they sound interesting. If you don't need the kids to learn math for half the school hours, teachers don't need to be teachers. High schoolers can work at camps, youth clubs. They could also do it in after schools during school hours. They could spend time outside. There are a lot of options. An important note is that these hours are cheaper than classroom hours.

Anyway... technology could play an interesting role. If technology and pedagogy can figure out a formula that gives teachers a lever a lot of the economic problems become more solvable and a lot of new models are possible.

I think public education is completely broken and has gotten worse over the years. Other countries seem to achieve better outcomes for a lot less money. Perhaps they do not have such poor parenting that allows their children to hit others or to sob all day.

The reason for amateur pedagogy is that the professionals have completely screwed it up. Look at the controversy over "no child left behind" or "common core" or "STEM." The experts do not agree on anything, which means the body of knowledge is very weak. I think it is time for amateurs to step in.

>Look at the controversy over "no child left behind" or "common core" or "STEM." The experts do not agree on anything, which means the body of knowledge is very weak. I think it is time for amateurs to step in.<

In the case of Common Core, the amateurs have stepped in, in the form of politicians, parents and media who fail to realize that the standards were developed and agreed upon by a team of professional educators representing nearly every state in the country. Those same amateurs are stoking fear and paranoia with baseless claims about "the federal government deciding what my kid should learn". They even fail to recognize that the CC is not a curriculum.

To be fair, every example of Common Core I've ever seen only succeeded in confusing the hell out of me. I understand that everyone should have the same foundation, but not everyone learns the same way and Common Core seems to gloss that over.

Basically, I think it's gone a little to far by saying "how" something should be taught.

Common Core does not prescribe "how" to teach anything. It only describes "what" should be taught.

I didn't understand common core. But I have observed it working well for my child. I had the same experience of questioning the content until I saw the results when my child was at a Montessori preschool years earlier. That's how I know I'm an amateur.

That's interesting. Which countries? What outcomes? What costs?

I'm a lecturer at a large university -- my class sizes are usually on the order of 75 students. During my office hours, I use this style almost exclusively whereas in my lectures I am much more predicate-based.

I agree with you -- this works spectacularly when you're in a 1-on-1 or 1-on-few setting, but in front of a class it breaks down very quickly.

I used the method in large groups and it has worked well for me, but there are other (psychological) elements you have to employ to make it do that. I have not been able to get it to work well with asynchronous online classes, however, because it is difficult to employ some of those elements and because the response times have too much of a lag to keep the conversation interesting or efficient. That could be overcome if students gave longer, more thorough answers each time, but most of them do not tend to do that, and I have not been able to get them to.

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