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The mistake you are making is assuming that synchronous group activities are a necessary and important part of teaching. There will always be deviations from t

by redahs 11y ago

The mistake you are making is assuming that synchronous group activities are a necessary and important part of teaching. There will always be deviations from the mean, regardless of whether or not they are pathologized as behavioral disorders, which will slow down such attempts at synchronous learning. This is why sense classical times the ultimate model for education has been that of the individual conversation, dialogue, between student and tutor. We aren't using alternative methods outside of tutorship for education because we have discovered better methodologies, we are doing so because of economics and cost. Expert tutors were formerly extremely scarce and retained by the nobility. We employ group lectures in packed classrooms not because they are a necessary or efficient way to learn, but because educated teachers used to be extremely scarce, and it gave everybody a chance to hear.

QSIITurbo 11y ago
Synchronous group activities are a necessity because of time and resource limitations, so I'm not making any mistakes nor assumptions. It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. 1:1 is used sometimes in medical sciences and practical professions that require physical demonstration, at least. For common education, the results are excellent even with larger group sizes. You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. They can also ask their peers who have better understanding of the topic. However, printing press made it possible to create text books that allow a lot more information to be learned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be, and how much they affect groups of children at sensitive development stages.
- redahs 11y ago
  > It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. Well, this assertion of impossibility is demonstrably and historically false, because since the times of Ancient Greece, that is how precisely how many people in the upper classes and great thinkers received their education. It's also within the realm of economic possibility to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio today for most disciplines while simultaneously expanding education access. You do it by only supplying lectures in the form of video recordings by the single foremost expert lecturer on that topic, drastically reducing non-tutoring related administrative expenditures and overheads, crowd-sourcing free tutors from all age groups and professional backgrounds including non-academics, and gradually replacing public education funding with a voucher system for parents to go out, find, and pay for the best and most academically qualified tutors and mentors for their children in a competitive education market. A lecture which proceeds at a pacing not controlled by the individual, in which the learner cannot interrogate each and every claim and proposition at their own pace in the order it is presented, is largely a dramatic performance. It's little more than a motivational speech for them go out and acquire the knowledge on their own time, outside of lecture, at a future date. Instead of having thousands of teachers perform daily motivational speeches on the same topic nationwide, you can just have the single best speaker on the topic make a single recording once every few years using modern technology, and pay all of those workers to expend their labor on performing 1:1 interaction to accelerate the rate of learning. > You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. You cannot rationally judge the efficiency of an existing process in comparison to a proposed alternative by only observing the output of the existing one. > The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. In a generalized form, dialogue is also conducted by learners internally through self questioning, and when engaging with an external medium which provides feedback (experimentation). It is a necessary experience for any learner to accept a new proposition as true, and something which one-to-many synchronous lectures are never directly capable of providing. > earned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. Textbooks provide an essential aide for students engaged in self questioning to verify their answers, but as a static medium, they lack the ability to make predictions about what each learner is thinking based on observed behavioral cues like a tutor or peer can. Since static media cannot make efficient inferences about the individual based on reactive observation, it cannot tell each learner what they don't know they don't know. Learning what you don't know you don't know is something which currently can only be efficiently achieved through conversation, and greatly accelerates the learning process. > As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. I would not argue that the phenomena which pathologies describe does not objectively exist, only that the principle which distinguishes atypical behavior from pathological behavior is a normative distinction containing embedded social-political beliefs rather than a purely descriptive one. It's an optional distinction to make, based on whether it provides us any utility any achieving our goals. >It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be I have met children with severe learning disabilities and it is widely accepted among teachers and parents that they are benefitted by more 1:1 interaction and shouldn't be stuck in large classrooms. My point is simply that everybody learns faster with 1:1 interaction and learns slower in large classrooms.
  - QSIITurbo 11y ago
    As I said, it is impossible to have 1:1 teacher-student ratio in common education. You seem to assume teaching is just some easy job that anyone can do with little expertise on the subject. In addition to previous examples, we already have personal teachers and students to some extents: parents and their children. Well, we still have bad parents, and we have bad children. Your proposal only works if everyone has high intelligence and education and dedicates their time to teaching. For free! So how much of your time are you currently spending on teaching for free? 8 hours a day? 12 hours? 16? There are people who mostly attend lectures and read little and do extremely well. There are also people who mostly read and attend few lectures and also do well. The more methods are available, the better the education. My point in the context of children with learning disabilities was that they must be tended to by adults. I assume you are agreeing with that.
    - douche 11y ago
      Children with severe learning disabilities and behavioral problems have to be babysat. So you commonly hire some wildly unqualified adult to follow them around and do 1-on-1 support until they age out of public school.
      - QSIITurbo 11y ago
        Yes, if the person or child is mentally disabled, then there is little that anyone can do once they've reached their maximum capacity. Then a babysitter is required and all that is really needed. However, there are other learning disabilities that can be treated by professionals and will help the child develop more normally.
- thfuran 11y ago
  Have you ever been involved in interviewing any of these "experts" for entry-level positions? It is amazing how incompetent and uneducated (in their chosen field) someone can be and still graduate university. With good marks even.
  - QSIITurbo 11y ago
    It is possible if the school they graduated from is bad, but even then the point still stands and is even stronger: if they've graduated, they still are better than naive, unschooled individuals who are even worse in educating others. They at least have _some_ idea of the concepts involved.
plonh 11y ago
Lectures in packed classrooms are certainly efficient, as you explained yourself.

by redahs 11y ago

QSIITurbo 11y ago

Synchronous group activities are a necessity because of time and resource limitations, so I'm not making any mistakes nor assumptions. It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. 1:1 is used sometimes in medical sciences and practical professions that require physical demonstration, at least. For common education, the results are excellent even with larger group sizes. You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. They can also ask their peers who have better understanding of the topic. However, printing press made it possible to create text books that allow a lot more information to be learned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be, and how much they affect groups of children at sensitive development stages.

redahs 11y ago
> It's impossible to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio in common education. Well, this assertion of impossibility is demonstrably and historically false, because since the times of Ancient Greece, that is how precisely how many people in the upper classes and great thinkers received their education. It's also within the realm of economic possibility to have a 1:1 teacher to student ratio today for most disciplines while simultaneously expanding education access. You do it by only supplying lectures in the form of video recordings by the single foremost expert lecturer on that topic, drastically reducing non-tutoring related administrative expenditures and overheads, crowd-sourcing free tutors from all age groups and professional backgrounds including non-academics, and gradually replacing public education funding with a voucher system for parents to go out, find, and pay for the best and most academically qualified tutors and mentors for their children in a competitive education market. A lecture which proceeds at a pacing not controlled by the individual, in which the learner cannot interrogate each and every claim and proposition at their own pace in the order it is presented, is largely a dramatic performance. It's little more than a motivational speech for them go out and acquire the knowledge on their own time, outside of lecture, at a future date. Instead of having thousands of teachers perform daily motivational speeches on the same topic nationwide, you can just have the single best speaker on the topic make a single recording once every few years using modern technology, and pay all of those workers to expend their labor on performing 1:1 interaction to accelerate the rate of learning. > You can judge that by just looking at the plethora of experts graduating every year from numerous professions. You cannot rationally judge the efficiency of an existing process in comparison to a proposed alternative by only observing the output of the existing one. > The dialogue is a method and is used in class rooms and lectures when the students ask the teacher questions. In a generalized form, dialogue is also conducted by learners internally through self questioning, and when engaging with an external medium which provides feedback (experimentation). It is a necessary experience for any learner to accept a new proposition as true, and something which one-to-many synchronous lectures are never directly capable of providing. > earned in much shorter time span and to circumvent the limitations in teachers' capabilities and knowledge. Same for videos, internet, and so on. Textbooks provide an essential aide for students engaged in self questioning to verify their answers, but as a static medium, they lack the ability to make predictions about what each learner is thinking based on observed behavioral cues like a tutor or peer can. Since static media cannot make efficient inferences about the individual based on reactive observation, it cannot tell each learner what they don't know they don't know. Learning what you don't know you don't know is something which currently can only be efficiently achieved through conversation, and greatly accelerates the learning process. > As for pathological behavior disorders, they are very real and vary in degree. I would not argue that the phenomena which pathologies describe does not objectively exist, only that the principle which distinguishes atypical behavior from pathological behavior is a normative distinction containing embedded social-political beliefs rather than a purely descriptive one. It's an optional distinction to make, based on whether it provides us any utility any achieving our goals. >It may be that you don't have first hand experience on how difficult those can be I have met children with severe learning disabilities and it is widely accepted among teachers and parents that they are benefitted by more 1:1 interaction and shouldn't be stuck in large classrooms. My point is simply that everybody learns faster with 1:1 interaction and learns slower in large classrooms.
- QSIITurbo 11y ago
  As I said, it is impossible to have 1:1 teacher-student ratio in common education. You seem to assume teaching is just some easy job that anyone can do with little expertise on the subject. In addition to previous examples, we already have personal teachers and students to some extents: parents and their children. Well, we still have bad parents, and we have bad children. Your proposal only works if everyone has high intelligence and education and dedicates their time to teaching. For free! So how much of your time are you currently spending on teaching for free? 8 hours a day? 12 hours? 16? There are people who mostly attend lectures and read little and do extremely well. There are also people who mostly read and attend few lectures and also do well. The more methods are available, the better the education. My point in the context of children with learning disabilities was that they must be tended to by adults. I assume you are agreeing with that.
  - douche 11y ago
    Children with severe learning disabilities and behavioral problems have to be babysat. So you commonly hire some wildly unqualified adult to follow them around and do 1-on-1 support until they age out of public school.
    - QSIITurbo 11y ago
      Yes, if the person or child is mentally disabled, then there is little that anyone can do once they've reached their maximum capacity. Then a babysitter is required and all that is really needed. However, there are other learning disabilities that can be treated by professionals and will help the child develop more normally.
thfuran 11y ago
Have you ever been involved in interviewing any of these "experts" for entry-level positions? It is amazing how incompetent and uneducated (in their chosen field) someone can be and still graduate university. With good marks even.
- QSIITurbo 11y ago
  It is possible if the school they graduated from is bad, but even then the point still stands and is even stronger: if they've graduated, they still are better than naive, unschooled individuals who are even worse in educating others. They at least have _some_ idea of the concepts involved.

plonh 11y ago

Lectures in packed classrooms are certainly efficient, as you explained yourself.