14 ms·

Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)

142 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

j7ake 5y ago
“In school, you are given the lesson, and then the test. In life, you are given the test, and then the lesson.”
- Archelaos 5y ago
  Non vitae sed scholae discimus. (Seneca, epistulae morales ad Lucilium 106, 11–12)
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Er, mutatis mutandis!
    - qzx_pierri 5y ago
      Waka waka - shiggy diggy doo wop!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Claude_Shannon 5y ago
    Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
lordnacho 5y ago
I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but there will be plenty of time with people in your year regardless, because the big hump of people will follow along most courses at the same rate. The theme the author is alluding to is the industrialization of education: shove a bunch of kids through, make sure there's an acceptable defect rate, let them out into society. But we don't have to live like that anymore. If you look at jobs, they don't really map to education these days, so there's not much point in making an assembly line of kids who can solve quadratic equations and write 5-paragraph essays.
- hhmc 5y ago
  Young children are not famously good decision makers, and it's easy to imagine them making very limiting choices that they would later come to regret.
  - twelvechairs 5y ago
    Also some kids are pushed hard by their parents while others will do whatever they can to not look nerdy
  - halgir 5y ago
    Young children are also famously voracious learners. That is, until institutions like schools get in the way. Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.
    - brimble 5y ago
      The challenge in public education reform is doing anything interesting/useful without doubling teacher headcount and increasing salaries (at the very least, to increase supply without decreasing quality). All sorts of approaches are possible with 5 students per teacher, but not 10, and with 10, but not with 20—let alone 25 or more.
      - kqr 5y ago
        Student-to-student mentoring is a part of the solution. Empirically shown to work really well. I don't know why more schools don't do it.
        brimble 5y ago
        I do not know if it's the case for this particular approach, but it's often the case that very effective reforms that don't require increasing teacher head-count do rely on having very good teachers and admin. Which means that a wide roll-out would require one or both of: more spending on training; more spending on salaries to increase the quality of the candidate pool. A top-quintile teacher may be way more effective than a middle-quintile teacher, to the point that entire education frameworks and strategies are viable for them that aren't for the middle quintile, but the trouble is only 20% of your teachers are top-quintile. Ditto admin. You'd be amazed at how mediocre admin can completely ruin a good plan.
ltfey 5y ago
School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning. Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired. Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  >If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired. Have you been near a grad school lately?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-breaking here. But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). So some level of meritocracy exists. It is hardly perfect, but it is there. On the other hand, school-wise I had a very wide range experiences, which kinda taught me that 'people tend to believe what they want to believe', by which I mean that teachers that think you are a good student will let you be a good student. I am writing this as I am sipping coffee preparing mentally for this year's projects.
edmcnulty101 5y ago
I think this also applies to failure. You can have many failures without much consequence on your life but a few have massive consequences on your life.
1970-01-01 5y ago
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. -Albert Einstein
- ExtraE 5y ago
  Not really an Einstein quote [0]. [0] - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/
thenerdhead 5y ago
I think there's two things. 1. The school system has been broken for many years. Learning from people who are not passionate about what they teach is the main concern I have. You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever vs. "disengaged" students who will be able to tell you how bad their teacher was. I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging teachers around the world doing an amazing job. (i.e. Khan from Khan Academy really paved the way here) 2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller portion of the population who truly knows themselves and embraces their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our identity when going through a formal means of schooling because we want to fit in and thus be "average". Even those valedictorians are quite "average" outside of working harder to get perfect grades. How many do you know that went on to do the amazing things expected of them? Usually it's the people who were eccentric and didn't do so well in school.
- whoibrar 5y ago
  > You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever Have you ever come across some topic of history or biology that just seemed soo boring at the time it was taught in school. But only years later watching some random YouTube video explaining it and now you realise how interesting it has always been.
  - peterangular 5y ago
    Often. I do know YouTube-based learning has it's flaws, but I find it much more enjoyable to engage with vs. the 9-5 teachers/professors I had growing up. The YouTube essayists are often way more passionate and informed on their topics as well. Then you get the value of a community coming along for the ride... In school there wasn't a comments section where discourse can happen regarding the subject being discussed/instruction. I get that YouTube comments are often horrible, but for many of the educational stuff I've watched good/insightful/corrective comments do seem to trickle to the top. Also - there's the "my time" aspect of it. This is _huge_ in comparison to normal education. I can move the slider back and listen to a part over and over again - sometimes topics are tough for me and I need to hear it 3-4 times. I can put the video on 1.25/1.5x if I want to bump the pacing up. I can study/learn when I personally learn best which tends to be late at night. Finally there's the technical aspect of it. I didn't go to a nice college - I went to a very expensive private school in the midwest. I went for both design and computer science. With 100% confidence I can say that every topic that I studied from math, to programming, to electronics, to art history, Adobe Suite... _all_ of it has more up-to-date and functionally better instruction on YouTube available 100% for free. This sounds like an exaggeration - I promise you it is not. Yes - YouTube learning has it's problems... but anecdotally I have learned so much. I have saved money fixing my own cars. I have jumped into topics that would have _never_ interested me before. I have improved skills professionally. It's a resource that I now can't imagine going without!
austinl 5y ago
> Looking back on it, most of our essays were not good. They were rubbish. It makes me cringe to look back at my high school essays, like I was trying to write with a thesaurus. Thankfully, senior year, a friend who went on to write professionally edited one of my essays. He crossed out almost every adverb, and over words like "utilize", he wrote "use". It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask their points with language because they have nothing to say, or are afraid to say it clearly (which is a separate problem altogether).
- quacked 5y ago
  I agree with everything you said, and had the same problems with writing when I was younger. However, I would say that it's not so much that students don't have anything to say, it's that they're not allowed to write about the things they actually care about in a way that is natural to them. Someone who's had three years of practice writing free-form persuasive essays about the non-school approved topic that they spend all their time thinking about (the NFL, girls, video games, etc.) is going to have a much easier time picking up the structured five-paragraph essay format than someone who was forced to write a bunch of five-paragraph essays about books they hated. All of the greatest essays I read now are random in length, style, topic, and presentation--why did I have to write somewhere between 50-100 structured essays about books and historical events I didn't care a whit about when Aldo Leopold was out there just dashing off whatever he was thinking about? The progression went like this: 1. I hated writing about historical events and books. 2. I graduated college. 3. I started reading unstructured essays about topics I cared about. 4. I started writing unstructured essays about topics I cared about. 5. I started writing about historical events and books.
- niknoble 5y ago
  > It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask their points with language because they have nothing to say, or are afraid to say it clearly You're right about high schoolers using needlessly complicated writing, but this isn't why. A high schooler would use needlessly complicated writing even if he was eager to share his ideas about a topic. The reason is that K-12 schools teach this style of writing as an aesthetic. Other parts of the aesthetic include scattering your stories with "symbols," so that they mean something other than they appear to, and exaggerating your and your characters' emotions. A student who grows up immersed in this aesthetic would not secretly prefer a more simplistic writing style, any more than a person who grows up eating American food would secretly prefer Indian food. Your friend was inducting you into the aesthetic of modern journalists and bloggers, but if he was instead reading the academic humanities, or if he was a time traveller from the 1950s, he would have been perfectly happy with "utilize." Of course, plain language is better at conveying information, so I'm fully on that train myself--now that I've spent some time out of high school. But it's normal to adopt the aesthetics of your surroundings, and it's not a sign of masking anything or being afraid.
magicloop 5y ago
I think one of the best things about school is the timetable. You don't need to be there too much of each day, and there are generous periods of holiday. What this means is that you have lots of time on your own to go deep and explore the thing you are most interested in, whilst having enough broad knowledge of the stuff you should know via the school curriculum. School kind of offers you a taste of so many things, so you get a chance to see what your inclinations are. People seem to think teachers can just deliver into you excellence, but excellence comes from within, and hopefully you are in an environment which permits you to grow and develop under your own personal efforts and dedication (i.e. stable home environment, warmth, food, etc.).
svilen_dobrev 5y ago
well, English (and not only) word "School" comes from greek, via latin. And it has also another teutonish meaning of "crowd", i.e. Schooling as in school of fish... Few languages have another word for it, closer to "Learn". But.. the overall system rots there too.. slowly turning into existing for the sake of existing.

142 points by enigmatic02 5y ago

j7ake 5y ago

“In school, you are given the lesson, and then the test. In life, you are given the test, and then the lesson.”

Archelaos 5y ago
Non vitae sed scholae discimus. (Seneca, epistulae morales ad Lucilium 106, 11–12)
- OJFord 5y ago
  Er, mutatis mutandis!
  - qzx_pierri 5y ago
    Waka waka - shiggy diggy doo wop!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

lordnacho 5y ago

I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but there will be plenty of time with people in your year regardless, because the big hump of people will follow along most courses at the same rate. The theme the author is alluding to is the industrialization of education: shove a bunch of kids through, make sure there's an acceptable defect rate, let them out into society. But we don't have to live like that anymore. If you look at jobs, they don't really map to education these days, so there's not much point in making an assembly line of kids who can solve quadratic equations and write 5-paragraph essays.

hhmc 5y ago
Young children are not famously good decision makers, and it's easy to imagine them making very limiting choices that they would later come to regret.
- twelvechairs 5y ago
  Also some kids are pushed hard by their parents while others will do whatever they can to not look nerdy
- halgir 5y ago
  Young children are also famously voracious learners. That is, until institutions like schools get in the way. Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.
  - brimble 5y ago
    The challenge in public education reform is doing anything interesting/useful without doubling teacher headcount and increasing salaries (at the very least, to increase supply without decreasing quality). All sorts of approaches are possible with 5 students per teacher, but not 10, and with 10, but not with 20—let alone 25 or more.
    - kqr 5y ago
      Student-to-student mentoring is a part of the solution. Empirically shown to work really well. I don't know why more schools don't do it.
      - brimble 5y ago
        I do not know if it's the case for this particular approach, but it's often the case that very effective reforms that don't require increasing teacher head-count do rely on having very good teachers and admin. Which means that a wide roll-out would require one or both of: more spending on training; more spending on salaries to increase the quality of the candidate pool. A top-quintile teacher may be way more effective than a middle-quintile teacher, to the point that entire education frameworks and strategies are viable for them that aren't for the middle quintile, but the trouble is only 20% of your teachers are top-quintile. Ditto admin. You'd be amazed at how mediocre admin can completely ruin a good plan.

ltfey 5y ago

School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning. Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired. Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.

selimthegrim 5y ago
>If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired. Have you been near a grad school lately?
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-breaking here. But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). So some level of meritocracy exists. It is hardly perfect, but it is there. On the other hand, school-wise I had a very wide range experiences, which kinda taught me that 'people tend to believe what they want to believe', by which I mean that teachers that think you are a good student will let you be a good student. I am writing this as I am sipping coffee preparing mentally for this year's projects.

edmcnulty101 5y ago

I think this also applies to failure. You can have many failures without much consequence on your life but a few have massive consequences on your life.

1970-01-01 5y ago

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. -Albert Einstein

ExtraE 5y ago
Not really an Einstein quote [0]. [0] - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/

thenerdhead 5y ago

I think there's two things. 1. The school system has been broken for many years. Learning from people who are not passionate about what they teach is the main concern I have. You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever vs. "disengaged" students who will be able to tell you how bad their teacher was. I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging teachers around the world doing an amazing job. (i.e. Khan from Khan Academy really paved the way here) 2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller portion of the population who truly knows themselves and embraces their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our identity when going through a formal means of schooling because we want to fit in and thus be "average". Even those valedictorians are quite "average" outside of working harder to get perfect grades. How many do you know that went on to do the amazing things expected of them? Usually it's the people who were eccentric and didn't do so well in school.

whoibrar 5y ago
> You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever Have you ever come across some topic of history or biology that just seemed soo boring at the time it was taught in school. But only years later watching some random YouTube video explaining it and now you realise how interesting it has always been.
- peterangular 5y ago
  Often. I do know YouTube-based learning has it's flaws, but I find it much more enjoyable to engage with vs. the 9-5 teachers/professors I had growing up. The YouTube essayists are often way more passionate and informed on their topics as well. Then you get the value of a community coming along for the ride... In school there wasn't a comments section where discourse can happen regarding the subject being discussed/instruction. I get that YouTube comments are often horrible, but for many of the educational stuff I've watched good/insightful/corrective comments do seem to trickle to the top. Also - there's the "my time" aspect of it. This is _huge_ in comparison to normal education. I can move the slider back and listen to a part over and over again - sometimes topics are tough for me and I need to hear it 3-4 times. I can put the video on 1.25/1.5x if I want to bump the pacing up. I can study/learn when I personally learn best which tends to be late at night. Finally there's the technical aspect of it. I didn't go to a nice college - I went to a very expensive private school in the midwest. I went for both design and computer science. With 100% confidence I can say that every topic that I studied from math, to programming, to electronics, to art history, Adobe Suite... _all_ of it has more up-to-date and functionally better instruction on YouTube available 100% for free. This sounds like an exaggeration - I promise you it is not. Yes - YouTube learning has it's problems... but anecdotally I have learned so much. I have saved money fixing my own cars. I have jumped into topics that would have _never_ interested me before. I have improved skills professionally. It's a resource that I now can't imagine going without!

austinl 5y ago

> Looking back on it, most of our essays were not good. They were rubbish. It makes me cringe to look back at my high school essays, like I was trying to write with a thesaurus. Thankfully, senior year, a friend who went on to write professionally edited one of my essays. He crossed out almost every adverb, and over words like "utilize", he wrote "use". It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask their points with language because they have nothing to say, or are afraid to say it clearly (which is a separate problem altogether).

quacked 5y ago
I agree with everything you said, and had the same problems with writing when I was younger. However, I would say that it's not so much that students don't have anything to say, it's that they're not allowed to write about the things they actually care about in a way that is natural to them. Someone who's had three years of practice writing free-form persuasive essays about the non-school approved topic that they spend all their time thinking about (the NFL, girls, video games, etc.) is going to have a much easier time picking up the structured five-paragraph essay format than someone who was forced to write a bunch of five-paragraph essays about books they hated. All of the greatest essays I read now are random in length, style, topic, and presentation--why did I have to write somewhere between 50-100 structured essays about books and historical events I didn't care a whit about when Aldo Leopold was out there just dashing off whatever he was thinking about? The progression went like this: 1. I hated writing about historical events and books. 2. I graduated college. 3. I started reading unstructured essays about topics I cared about. 4. I started writing unstructured essays about topics I cared about. 5. I started writing about historical events and books.
niknoble 5y ago
> It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask their points with language because they have nothing to say, or are afraid to say it clearly You're right about high schoolers using needlessly complicated writing, but this isn't why. A high schooler would use needlessly complicated writing even if he was eager to share his ideas about a topic. The reason is that K-12 schools teach this style of writing as an aesthetic. Other parts of the aesthetic include scattering your stories with "symbols," so that they mean something other than they appear to, and exaggerating your and your characters' emotions. A student who grows up immersed in this aesthetic would not secretly prefer a more simplistic writing style, any more than a person who grows up eating American food would secretly prefer Indian food. Your friend was inducting you into the aesthetic of modern journalists and bloggers, but if he was instead reading the academic humanities, or if he was a time traveller from the 1950s, he would have been perfectly happy with "utilize." Of course, plain language is better at conveying information, so I'm fully on that train myself--now that I've spent some time out of high school. But it's normal to adopt the aesthetics of your surroundings, and it's not a sign of masking anything or being afraid.

magicloop 5y ago

I think one of the best things about school is the timetable. You don't need to be there too much of each day, and there are generous periods of holiday. What this means is that you have lots of time on your own to go deep and explore the thing you are most interested in, whilst having enough broad knowledge of the stuff you should know via the school curriculum. School kind of offers you a taste of so many things, so you get a chance to see what your inclinations are. People seem to think teachers can just deliver into you excellence, but excellence comes from within, and hopefully you are in an environment which permits you to grow and develop under your own personal efforts and dedication (i.e. stable home environment, warmth, food, etc.).

svilen_dobrev 5y ago

well, English (and not only) word "School" comes from greek, via latin. And it has also another teutonish meaning of "crowd", i.e. Schooling as in school of fish... Few languages have another word for it, closer to "Learn". But.. the overall system rots there too.. slowly turning into existing for the sake of existing.