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The difficulty is that there is not an obvious "better way" for all schools to serve all students. The underlying goals of schools are often at odds and incompa
by germinalphrase 10y ago
The difficulty is that there is not an obvious "better way" for all schools to serve all students. The underlying goals of schools are often at odds and incompatible with each other, let alone the goals of the students/parents/communities that direct those schools. HN is full of people who hated the constraints of school but loved learning and succeeded based on that personal zeal, but I've known countless young people that wouldn't succeed in learning basic arithmetic or reasonable advanced literacy without a strong push to get them across the line. The answer is probably a larger variety of smaller schools (and cracking the nut of how to measure teacher effectiveness), but we're not economically or socially prepared to attempt that on the necessary scale.
- Pulcinella 10y agoYes. I'm a teacher as well. The goals can be very contradictory. Students and Parents want to learning to be individualized for them based on their specific needs. They don't want to be treated like products on an assembly line. Students and Parents also don't want to be treated any differently than anyone else. They don't want another student to receive "better" treatment than what they are receiving. GT students need different lessons that can keep up with them. GT students don't want to feel they are doing more work than non-GT students because they are GT. GT students don't want to have to do the same work as non-GT students. Otherwise what is the point? Non-GT students think it is unfair that GT students get to do different activities. It can be hard to explain to students and parents that Samantha gets more unstructured learning time because she can handle it and Timmy has to be pushed along with less unstructured learning time because he goofs off the whole time.