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> The Wikipedia article is linked right there. Yeah, thanks. It says "a knowledge test"...? Anyway, this Bloom is clearly a crank: > Mastery learning is an

> The Wikipedia article is linked right there. Yeah, thanks. It says "a knowledge test"...? Anyway, this Bloom is clearly a crank: > Mastery learning is an educational philosophy first proposed by Bloom in 1968[8] based on the premise that students must achieve a level of mastery (e.g., 90% on a knowledge test) in prerequisite knowledge before moving forward to learn subsequent information on a topic. That's not how brains work. No wonder the educational system is so pathetic, eh? I recall when "points" were introduced in school, and even as a kid I could recognize that this was a serious degradation of educational philosophy and technique. >> in a world where talking machines can outperform them in every area? > Seems unlikely for awhile It's already happening. Jobs are evaporating. Opportunities for gainful employment are withering under the glare of the LLMs as we speak. I just checked Craigslist and there are no jobs for me there anymore. > It sure would be nice if robots could like, unclog toilets and clean, instead of usurping creative work. Yeah, that's my whole point here: "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay." People talking about robot judges and robot teachers, etc., are putting the cart before the horse. I remember when Sony made that dancing robot and I was like, "Damn it, I like to dance! Make a robot that does the #$@% dishes!" >> so that people can e.g. teach their own kids > Some people are really well equipped for this, in knowledge, temperament, and ability. Others, ehh.. "It takes a village...", eh? The "unit" of human is not the individual, or even the nuclear family or extended family. It's the village/neighborhood. Teaching kids to be adults is not exactly the hardest thing to do? We managed it for about a million years before we ever even lived in towns.

mlyle 3y ago
> Yeah, thanks. It says "a knowledge test"...? It's been reproduced on large numbers of measures of performance-- e.g. on performance on a mathematics test at the end. > That's not how brains work. There's a lot of evidence for mastery-based instruction-- which attempts to keep students working on topics they have not quite mastered-- instead of methods that advance students to material that depends upon earlier material that they've not demonstrated mastery of. It seems perhaps you're quibbling with the threshold-aspect as implemented? It's kind of annoying when people dismiss an idea without taking time to fully engage with and understand it. I expect more from my middle school students, let alone someone I'm taking time to discuss things with on HN. There's a pretty big problem in classroom style education, where students fall behind once and become accustomed to being confused. It's very, very difficult to claw back onto the line of high performance once this happens to you. There's another problem, too, in that even if you have tiered classes there's quite a lot of variation within a class and quite a lot of variation even with the high performing students on how quickly they grasp each idea. Mastery methods attempt to modulate pacing for each student for optimal outcomes. The difficult thing with mastery based methods in a normal classroom is it's difficult to keep giving meaningful lessons and coaching when you have students before you at 5 different levels of mastery and thus different places in the curriculum. It's still better than blindly advancing everyone based on where the 40th percentile of the classroom overall is performing. But the hope is LLMs can pitch in and help here and provide a little bit of differentiation and individualization. > We managed it for about a million years before we ever even lived in towns. We have much higher expectations now than we did a million years ago. We weren't trying to get a relatively big fraction of the populace to understand calculus, write eloquently, and reason deeply in the social sciences.
- carapace 3y ago
  > It's kind of annoying when people dismiss an idea without taking time to fully engage with and understand it. I expect more from my middle school students, let alone someone I'm taking time to discuss things with on HN. I fully agree, and I wish you'd do your part. What are people for?
  - mlyle 3y ago
    I doubt we disagree on that all that much, but I think we probably take very different second-order interpretations. People are agents of joy and experience and change. Life is a quest to find interest, fulfillment, and meaning, and we all end up valuing different things. It's a quest pretty much everyone struggles with. And it's one that's made harder by everything getting so big and mechanization taking away so much. But there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. Many of us enjoy the vibrancy of the larger world, and enjoy the bigger things we are able to accomplish by educating ourselves (and our children) deeply, and also enjoy our deeper engagement in this larger complicated world. Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? I know I am easily fooled by what "seems to work" and the power of the anecdote. I seek to continually improve through careful study of what can be proven. We know that we don't have the resources as a society to provide the depth of education we currently do in a one-to-one or co-op format. We also know the quality of real co-op or homeschool is terrifically variable. Some of the best education is there. Much more of the worst is.
    - carapace 3y ago
      Well met. (If you haven't, do read Wendell Berry's "What are People For?" or any of his work. His writing is so fine!) > there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. I agree, I'm pointing out that complexity itself has become the problem of the day (in my opinion.) FWIW, I just acquired some land on which to experiment with a high-tech, ecologically-harmonious lifestyle. Fingers crossed. When I was a young man I read in an old Taoist book about a farmer who was so content with his life that he had never even been to the next village over, even though he lived so close to them he could hear the cries of their rooster. At the time it gave me a feeling of dull horror. Now, nearly fifty, I envy that farmer and hope to reach his level someday before I die. Times change. > Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? Well, there it is: paucity of reliable data and research. Further, and to my point (why I'm jerking your chain) there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched. The growth of the human mind cannot be represented by a single scalar value. At least not for any admirable end, eh? It doesn't matter whether that scalar value is graduated in five increments ("A" through "F") or fifteen (A+, A, A-, ... F-, does anyone actually use F-? Hehe.) or a hundred (per cent), it's just silly. It was understood, at least I formed the impression as a child, that the A-F grade system was a dufus solution to a problem nobody was actually trying to solve. Schools are part of the anthropological machinery that societies use to get the kids to behave like the adults. Any educational value they have is a side-effect. You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. [edit to add: well, really I suspect it takes at least a whole village, eh? Where are you gonna find a whole village of mentally and emotionally sane people on Earth in this day and age, huh?] To a first approximation this is pretty much the most important human activity. All others rely on it, eh? Education is the process of growing humans out of talking primates. So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool, and in my view is automatically disqualified from having their views and ideas considered at all, let alone taken seriously. He's not "sane mentally and emotionally" and should not be let anywhere near children or schools! To me, once you get away from physics, most science seems to be a kind of cargo-cult. Chemists and biologists are mostly okay, but sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. are not actual scientists in my view. They do not do science, they ape it. So maybe you want to back away from this conversation? I won't be offended. That's why I told you. So you don't waste your time. :) (I also "believe in" Neurolinguistic Programming.) But getting back to my point: you can't measure learning by a single scalar value; the idea is pernicious and counter-productive. Corollary: people who believe such a silly thing, and who somehow get a hold of kids to experiment on, will go right ahead and plug them into talking "learning machines", and they will believe they do it "for their own good". Not to put too fine a point on it: your life is my horror story. (I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.)

mlyle 3y ago

> Yeah, thanks. It says "a knowledge test"...? It's been reproduced on large numbers of measures of performance-- e.g. on performance on a mathematics test at the end. > That's not how brains work. There's a lot of evidence for mastery-based instruction-- which attempts to keep students working on topics they have not quite mastered-- instead of methods that advance students to material that depends upon earlier material that they've not demonstrated mastery of. It seems perhaps you're quibbling with the threshold-aspect as implemented? It's kind of annoying when people dismiss an idea without taking time to fully engage with and understand it. I expect more from my middle school students, let alone someone I'm taking time to discuss things with on HN. There's a pretty big problem in classroom style education, where students fall behind once and become accustomed to being confused. It's very, very difficult to claw back onto the line of high performance once this happens to you. There's another problem, too, in that even if you have tiered classes there's quite a lot of variation within a class and quite a lot of variation even with the high performing students on how quickly they grasp each idea. Mastery methods attempt to modulate pacing for each student for optimal outcomes. The difficult thing with mastery based methods in a normal classroom is it's difficult to keep giving meaningful lessons and coaching when you have students before you at 5 different levels of mastery and thus different places in the curriculum. It's still better than blindly advancing everyone based on where the 40th percentile of the classroom overall is performing. But the hope is LLMs can pitch in and help here and provide a little bit of differentiation and individualization. > We managed it for about a million years before we ever even lived in towns. We have much higher expectations now than we did a million years ago. We weren't trying to get a relatively big fraction of the populace to understand calculus, write eloquently, and reason deeply in the social sciences.

carapace 3y ago
> It's kind of annoying when people dismiss an idea without taking time to fully engage with and understand it. I expect more from my middle school students, let alone someone I'm taking time to discuss things with on HN. I fully agree, and I wish you'd do your part. What are people for?
- mlyle 3y ago
  I doubt we disagree on that all that much, but I think we probably take very different second-order interpretations. People are agents of joy and experience and change. Life is a quest to find interest, fulfillment, and meaning, and we all end up valuing different things. It's a quest pretty much everyone struggles with. And it's one that's made harder by everything getting so big and mechanization taking away so much. But there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. Many of us enjoy the vibrancy of the larger world, and enjoy the bigger things we are able to accomplish by educating ourselves (and our children) deeply, and also enjoy our deeper engagement in this larger complicated world. Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? I know I am easily fooled by what "seems to work" and the power of the anecdote. I seek to continually improve through careful study of what can be proven. We know that we don't have the resources as a society to provide the depth of education we currently do in a one-to-one or co-op format. We also know the quality of real co-op or homeschool is terrifically variable. Some of the best education is there. Much more of the worst is.
  - carapace 3y ago
    Well met. (If you haven't, do read Wendell Berry's "What are People For?" or any of his work. His writing is so fine!) > there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest. I agree, I'm pointing out that complexity itself has become the problem of the day (in my opinion.) FWIW, I just acquired some land on which to experiment with a high-tech, ecologically-harmonious lifestyle. Fingers crossed. When I was a young man I read in an old Taoist book about a farmer who was so content with his life that he had never even been to the next village over, even though he lived so close to them he could hear the cries of their rooster. At the time it gave me a feeling of dull horror. Now, nearly fifty, I envy that farmer and hope to reach his level someday before I die. Times change. > Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)? Well, there it is: paucity of reliable data and research. Further, and to my point (why I'm jerking your chain) there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched. The growth of the human mind cannot be represented by a single scalar value. At least not for any admirable end, eh? It doesn't matter whether that scalar value is graduated in five increments ("A" through "F") or fifteen (A+, A, A-, ... F-, does anyone actually use F-? Hehe.) or a hundred (per cent), it's just silly. It was understood, at least I formed the impression as a child, that the A-F grade system was a dufus solution to a problem nobody was actually trying to solve. Schools are part of the anthropological machinery that societies use to get the kids to behave like the adults. Any educational value they have is a side-effect. You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. [edit to add: well, really I suspect it takes at least a whole village, eh? Where are you gonna find a whole village of mentally and emotionally sane people on Earth in this day and age, huh?] To a first approximation this is pretty much the most important human activity. All others rely on it, eh? Education is the process of growing humans out of talking primates. So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool, and in my view is automatically disqualified from having their views and ideas considered at all, let alone taken seriously. He's not "sane mentally and emotionally" and should not be let anywhere near children or schools! To me, once you get away from physics, most science seems to be a kind of cargo-cult. Chemists and biologists are mostly okay, but sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. are not actual scientists in my view. They do not do science, they ape it. So maybe you want to back away from this conversation? I won't be offended. That's why I told you. So you don't waste your time. :) (I also "believe in" Neurolinguistic Programming.) But getting back to my point: you can't measure learning by a single scalar value; the idea is pernicious and counter-productive. Corollary: people who believe such a silly thing, and who somehow get a hold of kids to experiment on, will go right ahead and plug them into talking "learning machines", and they will believe they do it "for their own good". Not to put too fine a point on it: your life is my horror story. (I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.)