4 ms·

> Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specif

> Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task. Understood. I do know teachers who are, objectively speaking, just terrible. Like the teacher who, years ago, was "teaching" a Lego robotics class. My kid told me she would come into the room, take out her magazines and tell the kids to do whatever they wanted. My kid ended up teaching the others, she did nothing all year. When I characterize things as "bad" I am thinking about what I will call the system rather than, for the most part, individuals. Few people are motivated --in any profession-- to push hard and excel without a process, structure and stimulus that drives them there. The colloquial term is "self starters". Most are not self-starters, that's just normal and independent of profession. Add a unionized system within which a genuinely bad teacher can "hide" and be protected for decades and you have the makings of bad educational outcomes. You seem to be the kind of teacher we should strive to have at every school. Your students are lucky to have you. As a kid I attended both private and public schools (about the same number of years each) and I know the difference. My argument is our public schools should be far better than they are and, perhaps, even better than anything private schools could deliver. For one thing, they have the financial backing of an entire nation. The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong. I come down hard on unions, not out of spite or ideology but rather out of experience. I was a member of a union for about ten years when I was in my 20's. I saw the sausage being made. Unions had every reason to exist back in the day. It is my opinion that, in a wide range of industries (maybe not all) unions are horrible beasts that exist for the benefit of the wrong people. This is to say, their management. Union members are not the problem. They are average folk who just want a good life and everything anyone else would want. Unions, however, are driven into creating the problems they do because their mission isn't aligned with the outcomes of what it is they affect; in this case, educational outcomes. Getting off that subject, I was a mentor for our local FRC team for many years. We got to Nationals a couple of times. While not a teacher, I am pretty good at teaching complex subjects in ways that make them accessible. Well, at least that's the feedback from my own kids and FRC team members. I very much understand you don't need a lot of stuff to teach. It can get in the way. I absolutely love working with kids. I would hate to be under the thumb of a system that did not allow me to help them excel (in real terms, not just pass tests). Regarding your microprocessor trainer. You'll appreciate this. I own a couple of these: https://i.imgur.com/ZsIJj1p.png https://i.imgur.com/ZsIJj1p.png I am of the 8080, 6502, MC6800 era. I actually owned an IMSAI and such things as a real DEC VT100 terminal. I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. They had a lot of fun with it. I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor and defining your own assembler instructions. From there I would implement Forth, move on to programming block-based storage, write a text/code editor and then implement a few interesting higher-level projects. I know this would be a lot of fun to do (at least for me). It's a question of time. I might be able to jump on this in a few months. It's one of those things that's been in the back of my mind for, quite literally, years.

mlyle 4y ago
> The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong. The real dirty secret is that schooling is an adverse selection problem. Private schools usually spend far less per student, but can be selective behaviorally and in learning capability. Further, parents who are willing to spend for "better" education are a far different cohort than those who are not. I'm able to teach undergrad material to MS students, because they come in primed to learn, without many substantial behavioral problems. All of the resources can go to top-end programs, because there's no need to provide services to students with learning disabilities 1:1. Etc. Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected. Indeed, the direction of policy change is to make many of these things worse, with increased mainstreaming and reduction of tracking for equity reasons. > I come down hard on unions IMO, unions are part of the problem, but really mostly a symptom of it. We have terrible administrative systems, terrible societal expectations for teachers, and unions are seen as a necessary response to make the job halfway survivable (but end up perpetuating the worst parts of the system in the process). I think we need to accept: - Education will take more resources than are currently given. - Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome. - Differentiated experiences, magnet schools, tracking, behavioral selectivity for classroom environments, etc, are necessary to get the best outcomes for top students and acceptable outcomes for students with problems. > I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. Computers are more accessible now. But the terrible thing is there's not a really good onramp to figuring out how things work anymore. I try and get students to tinker, and they're not really used to it in the way 70s and 80s kids were. > I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor This was basically what we did in my Comp Org & Design class, though after we got the "gist" of our own processor with registers, an ALU, flags, and a skeleton of control logic we pretty much hand-waved it and pivoted to ARM THUMB. We didn't do any of the higher level stuff. We didn't get to any higher level stuff (didn't even really reach procedure calls for most students-- lots of spaghetti code of branches everywhere). I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. It's a challenge, though, because our high school is relatively small. I also seem to have a bit less success getting HS students to really stretch in the way middle school students do in my classroom-- in part because there's so much other academic weight for high school students to carry. (Unfortunately, parents want this academic pressure and "rigor" even though it is often counterproductive to the best learning).

mlyle 4y ago

> The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong. The real dirty secret is that schooling is an adverse selection problem. Private schools usually spend far less per student, but can be selective behaviorally and in learning capability. Further, parents who are willing to spend for "better" education are a far different cohort than those who are not. I'm able to teach undergrad material to MS students, because they come in primed to learn, without many substantial behavioral problems. All of the resources can go to top-end programs, because there's no need to provide services to students with learning disabilities 1:1. Etc. Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected. Indeed, the direction of policy change is to make many of these things worse, with increased mainstreaming and reduction of tracking for equity reasons. > I come down hard on unions IMO, unions are part of the problem, but really mostly a symptom of it. We have terrible administrative systems, terrible societal expectations for teachers, and unions are seen as a necessary response to make the job halfway survivable (but end up perpetuating the worst parts of the system in the process). I think we need to accept: - Education will take more resources than are currently given. - Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome. - Differentiated experiences, magnet schools, tracking, behavioral selectivity for classroom environments, etc, are necessary to get the best outcomes for top students and acceptable outcomes for students with problems. > I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. Computers are more accessible now. But the terrible thing is there's not a really good onramp to figuring out how things work anymore. I try and get students to tinker, and they're not really used to it in the way 70s and 80s kids were. > I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor This was basically what we did in my Comp Org & Design class, though after we got the "gist" of our own processor with registers, an ALU, flags, and a skeleton of control logic we pretty much hand-waved it and pivoted to ARM THUMB. We didn't do any of the higher level stuff. We didn't get to any higher level stuff (didn't even really reach procedure calls for most students-- lots of spaghetti code of branches everywhere). I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. It's a challenge, though, because our high school is relatively small. I also seem to have a bit less success getting HS students to really stretch in the way middle school students do in my classroom-- in part because there's so much other academic weight for high school students to carry. (Unfortunately, parents want this academic pressure and "rigor" even though it is often counterproductive to the best learning).