4 ms·

After half penning comments a few times, Im just going make a top level one. This post talks as if the study of pedagogy doesn't exist and, as someone pretty in

After half penning comments a few times, Im just going make a top level one. This post talks as if the study of pedagogy doesn't exist and, as someone pretty interested in the field, it just pains me. There's a lot of progress in the field but to hear people in this tread talking about grading on a bell curve I can see why people outside of the education community might think there isn't (current [as in the past 50 years that's how behind you are] pedagogical theory focuses on the idea of mastery and building on compounding skills; there's no value in tuning a test to produce a Gaussian)[0] All the OP's proposed suggestions can, and do, fit into a semester homeec course many highschoolers already take, so I just can't see the supposed failing. The reduction of a basic foundation of facts to "useless trivia" is the reason we can have white house offficals take to the news and say they have alternative (but somehow equally valid) facts. Without this foundation (of conveniently measurable skills and masteries, who do you even evaluate a "good apology") students are essentially cut off from a memetic ocean of shared knowledge. You cannot have a functioning democracy without a populace with basic literacy and numeracy as well as a shared body of facts that acts as the training set for all subsequent facts. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

RichardHeart 10y ago
Look at a magazine stand, these are the things people actually care about. If you think of something people care about that isn't on the magazine stand, consider starting one and filling the niche. Why is it that we would focus on all the things people do not actually care about, as opposed to the things they actually do? Let learning be a pull process, not a push process. You pull in the skills you need to do things well, you don't learn all the things you might need, only to discover you didn't need them. Shoving information into peoples heads and hoping that it leads to utility somehow in the future is a long shot when compared to using utility itself to pull the required knowledge as needed, and you then have a 100 percent hit rate on the cache. You're never filling your cache up with junk. Some exceptions to this exist, obviously, such as language, speech, writing, math up to algebra, some geometry, logic, ethics, hygiene, and success tactics such as delayed gratification, goal setting, teamwork, etc. Those subjects have the largest amplification effect on other subjects. Some other subjects are better endpoints than starting points, and it would be great if the people that loved those subjects wouldn't try and pretend they were good amplification starting points. The mastery learning you linked to seems to beat a dead horse? More profit can be had by giving up on some hard things and returning to them after you've tried learning things you weren't burnt out on yet. Some people will just always hate a certain subject. If you require 90 percent performance before you move on to the next thing, you lose the profit of task switching for freshness. Also, this seems to unrelated to the point of better subjects. If teaching technology doubled in effectiveness overnight, you're still learning things you can't make money with and are unlikely to ever use, no matter how well you know it.

RichardHeart 10y ago

Look at a magazine stand, these are the things people actually care about. If you think of something people care about that isn't on the magazine stand, consider starting one and filling the niche. Why is it that we would focus on all the things people do not actually care about, as opposed to the things they actually do? Let learning be a pull process, not a push process. You pull in the skills you need to do things well, you don't learn all the things you might need, only to discover you didn't need them. Shoving information into peoples heads and hoping that it leads to utility somehow in the future is a long shot when compared to using utility itself to pull the required knowledge as needed, and you then have a 100 percent hit rate on the cache. You're never filling your cache up with junk. Some exceptions to this exist, obviously, such as language, speech, writing, math up to algebra, some geometry, logic, ethics, hygiene, and success tactics such as delayed gratification, goal setting, teamwork, etc. Those subjects have the largest amplification effect on other subjects. Some other subjects are better endpoints than starting points, and it would be great if the people that loved those subjects wouldn't try and pretend they were good amplification starting points. The mastery learning you linked to seems to beat a dead horse? More profit can be had by giving up on some hard things and returning to them after you've tried learning things you weren't burnt out on yet. Some people will just always hate a certain subject. If you require 90 percent performance before you move on to the next thing, you lose the profit of task switching for freshness. Also, this seems to unrelated to the point of better subjects. If teaching technology doubled in effectiveness overnight, you're still learning things you can't make money with and are unlikely to ever use, no matter how well you know it.