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> 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 scho

by 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).

robomartin 4y ago
Lots of interesting elements in your comment. > 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. The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking "this guy is a bigot". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think. Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane. We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why? I love this Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY The whole thing is interesting, however the story that starts about 15 minutes in speaks loudly to this matter of treating all kids as if they were clones of some made-up model of humanity. I won't spoil it for those who might not have seen it. Watch this and think about what we are doing to our kids in school. > who just don't care about the educational process I don't know enough about this. I wish I understood it better. My uninformed thinking is that we damage both groups of kids by forcing them together. One of my kids had to ask to be moved to a desk at the front of the class because the kids in the back were not interested in the class at all and made it impossible to pay attention and learn. The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help. If their families can't support them, perhaps better programs can. I revert back to this idea that not everyone in K-12 is, or should be, college-bound. That's an unnecessary model that might just be causing more damage than good. Of course, this has policy implications that transcend schools. There has to be opportunity outside of college-centric careers for that large percentage of non-college-bound students to be able to access middle-class living. This perspective, if accurate, results in many tentacles affecting wider policy and politics. In other words, it isn't just about schools and the policies that control them. > Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome Maybe I am being naïve. My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society? Equal outcomes are a fantasy. That does not mean we don't try. I would gladly devote half or more of our war-machine budget towards a better educational system and better outcomes. For that to happen humanity needs to change. None of these things are simple. Easy to throw around grandiose ideas. Hard to make them happen. Also, very easy to throw your hands up and give up when nobody seems to care (as I have done locally). > I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic. I could be wrong. Perhaps it is because of the fact that I came up wiring raw gates together on breadboards that I feel getting down to that baseline has greater value than instantiating an entire circuit with half a dozen lines of code. Here's a thought I had for yet another attempt to help our local schools with STEM. There are so many well executed resources out there that one could create a hybrid program based on using them under supervision. My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision. This was a lot of work, yet, a lot easier than coming-up with a full curriculum and coursework from scratch. I could see taking this kind of an approach with HS kids to teach a CS class or two. They would get to boast about earning CS certificates from MIT, which I would hope would me motivating enough.

by mlyle 4y ago

robomartin 4y ago

Lots of interesting elements in your comment. > 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. The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking "this guy is a bigot". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think. Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane. We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why? I love this Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY The whole thing is interesting, however the story that starts about 15 minutes in speaks loudly to this matter of treating all kids as if they were clones of some made-up model of humanity. I won't spoil it for those who might not have seen it. Watch this and think about what we are doing to our kids in school. > who just don't care about the educational process I don't know enough about this. I wish I understood it better. My uninformed thinking is that we damage both groups of kids by forcing them together. One of my kids had to ask to be moved to a desk at the front of the class because the kids in the back were not interested in the class at all and made it impossible to pay attention and learn. The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help. If their families can't support them, perhaps better programs can. I revert back to this idea that not everyone in K-12 is, or should be, college-bound. That's an unnecessary model that might just be causing more damage than good. Of course, this has policy implications that transcend schools. There has to be opportunity outside of college-centric careers for that large percentage of non-college-bound students to be able to access middle-class living. This perspective, if accurate, results in many tentacles affecting wider policy and politics. In other words, it isn't just about schools and the policies that control them. > Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome Maybe I am being naïve. My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society? Equal outcomes are a fantasy. That does not mean we don't try. I would gladly devote half or more of our war-machine budget towards a better educational system and better outcomes. For that to happen humanity needs to change. None of these things are simple. Easy to throw around grandiose ideas. Hard to make them happen. Also, very easy to throw your hands up and give up when nobody seems to care (as I have done locally). > I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school. I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic. I could be wrong. Perhaps it is because of the fact that I came up wiring raw gates together on breadboards that I feel getting down to that baseline has greater value than instantiating an entire circuit with half a dozen lines of code. Here's a thought I had for yet another attempt to help our local schools with STEM. There are so many well executed resources out there that one could create a hybrid program based on using them under supervision. My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision. This was a lot of work, yet, a lot easier than coming-up with a full curriculum and coursework from scratch. I could see taking this kind of an approach with HS kids to teach a CS class or two. They would get to boast about earning CS certificates from MIT, which I would hope would me motivating enough.