10 ms·

One afternoon during my senior year of college, I was procrastinating by trying to estimate the height of the stack of every assignment I'd ever completed since

One afternoon during my senior year of college, I was procrastinating by trying to estimate the height of the stack of every assignment I'd ever completed since kindergarten, and suddenly realized that I had produced basically nothing of worth during my 16 years of school. Since about 3rd grade I'd felt busy and productive every school year, because I'd been diligently slogging through mountains of assignments, worksheets, problem sets, and essays. However, looking back, if I measured my production in terms of items produced that had any lasting value (artwork, essays, code that might be used outside of an assignment, etc.) I was at fewer than 2-3 "things" per year. If I measured my learnedness in terms of what I could actually recite out of the hundreds of thousands of things I'd "learned", I could probably only recite 5-6% of it, and most of it was gone. Other people typically say that all of that slogging was useful, and it was "teaching me to think critically" or "giving me practice at learning", and even if I don't remember that stuff it's still important for me to have looked at it. I tentatively agree that it's okay to take a shallow pass at some material without really mastering it, because then you have a basis to build on later. But I'm not so sure that my time in school was well-used, and I have a vague sense that I've reached less than a tenth of my intellectual potential. By seventh grade I had already optimized my "learning style" to cram hard at the last minute, burn assignments down as quickly as possible, and then aggressively purge the memories of the knowledge as soon as the next "unit" began. Many subjects I now find interesting were practically traumatizing in school because of the stress and workload. Now that I'm investigating them independently, it's far easier to remember facts. I now think that the only use for tests and worksheets is for self-reflection, for the learner to discern whether or not they understand the concept the problem set is related to. A really enlightened education would never weigh the completion of the problem set over the mastery of the problem set, and there would be no factory-production model of forcing students to complete work and then gaslighting them into thinking they'd "learned" something or that their time was well-spent. I don't know if that's possible to set up at scale, though.

reidjs 3y ago
I think a lot of it does come down to scale. Imagine the challenge of being a teacher tasked with teaching (science/english/math/etc) to 150-200 unique kids per day, often with little to no budget or support from admin, parents, etc. Unless you are truly exceptional at teaching, you have to teach to the middle to compensate, or your class will tear itself apart.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Also in the US the incentives for going into teaching are totally wrong. We should train the best and brightest so that our kids learn from them, but the salaries and working conditions are so bad that it actively discourages people.
  - AvocadoPanic 3y ago
    What's the advantage to having the best and brightest teachers if they're in a room of average and dim students? Both teachers and students should be tracked by ability. Best teachers for the best students. Mid teachers for mid students.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      that assumes that average and dim are constants and unchangeable. but the point remains is that we're not even getting the best teachers to begin with, because the job is so unattractive if it's not your passion.
      - AvocadoPanic 3y ago
        Average and dim usually seem pretty fixed by adulthood. Were teachers better in previous generations? I remember the majority of mine being excellent. Might it be more unattractive now than 30 - 40 years ago?
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        People are not going into the public school system during adulthood. Inflation-adjusted average teachers salaries have fallen over the past decade, and starting salaries are at the lowest levels measured: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/average-teacher-salary-lower-today-ten-years-ago-nea-report-finds https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/average-teac... A lot of teachers in the US now work two jobs to make ends meet, which is a recipe for disaster.
esafak 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
- secabeen 3y ago
  Mastery-based learning is good, but there is a degenerate path that is important to avoid. Some students can master basic computational tasks (like addition and multiplication), but don't have the maturity to reliably produce that mastery; in other words, they're sloppy. A human instructor teaching to the mastery approach will move on with them, and when they are learning a later skill and they make a basic error (7+4=12, for example), will point it out to the student, and let them fix that, and show that they have mastered the more advanced skill. A computer, on the other hand, will just decree that they got the question wrong, have not achieved mastery, and force them to repeat the instruction. It's very demotivating, and still not fully solved, although Khan Academy's recent change allowing students to reset/start-over tests without completing them has helped.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
Just based on your post, you seem like a pretty competent writer. That's not a natural skill; a lot of people can't do it well. Do you think you would have learned that sitting at home? Like, maybe school wasn't perfect and access to a team of private tutors would have put you in a better place today. But I'd hazard a guess your school assignments were more useful than you think. Process, not product.
- benignslime 3y ago
  Absolutely. After pondering over this website myself for 20 minutes, I felt similarly to OP regarding the long slog through elementary and secondary schooling to finally feel like there was "progress". It's clear filtering by grades in the sheets, the tempo of the exercises is painfully slow. I remember as a kindergartner being able to produce and memorize multiplication tables after being taught the process. It took at least 3 to 4 more years until school ever began expect it. The thing is many of these concepts and ideas and facts _are_ simple and straightforward. In seventh grade I literally stopped doing my work altogether, and was offered by the teaching staff to move onward to eighth grade instead. I felt then that I still understand now, that forcing yourself through the paces is important too. If I skipped a grade who knows what little things I may have missed. It's like lifting weights, you're better off being gradual about your increases and pushing your rep counts -- instead of doing two reps of something you shouldn't even be attempting. The truth is any good teacher and school would be able to provide projects and exercises that would help apply the types of rote work the sheets present. Even if you only ever did the sheets on the site, it'd still take some kids the whole year to get through them. If teachers are creative enough, there should be enough flexibility to cater to both student types.
- quacked 3y ago
  Thank you for your compliment. To clarify, I'm not saying that it's possible to learn to write without writing a great deal. I certainly wouldn't have learned to write well without writing often. However, I didn't learn to write particularly well until I was out of college and had begun writing for myself. In school I was rarely interested in ensuring that what I was writing was interesting, well-phrased, or enjoyable to read. Those qualities simply weren't prioritized, which is weird, because those are the qualities by which writing is judged in "the real world". I certainly relied on basic writing practice I received in completion-based classes, but my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything useful in school, it's that the time I did spend in school was poorly allocated and resulted in an underdeveloped product. "If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school."
dale_glass 3y ago
That's a weird way of looking at it. Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. Barring some really exceptional anecdotes like Gauss figuring out how to efficiently sum series in school, it's pretty much certain that you'll come up with nothing new whatsoever. But surely some of that had to sink in, and that was the point. In the long term, the vast majority of things fade away. I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that.
- quacked 3y ago
  > Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. That's certainly how it's set up today, but I find it difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern US. School could instead be designed around the production of art, goods, and services that are actually desired and used by people in and outside of the school. This would be a great deal more difficult to set up and maintain than a series of gradeable worksheets. > Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. Under the current model, is the knowledge really absorbed? Math class is great example. Most people struggle through algebra and trigonometry worksheets for a few hundred hours and then immediately dump the knowledge when they graduate and can't even name the three primary triangle side-ratios five years later. Was completing curated problem sets under threat of a worse career if they failed really the best use of their time? That can't be the best way to teach them. > I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that. Sure, but you were producing something of value. When you learned about an issue, you went hunting for the root cause because people were actually relying on you to do so, and when you fixed the issue you felt real satisfaction, and retained a desire to remember what you'd done. Also, you were paid. I would wager a good deal of money that what you learned while managing the app stuck in your brain a lot more effectively than if the same activity had been taught to you in a class where you completed worksheets based on the inventory management platform.
benignslime 3y ago
[dead]
gustavus 3y ago
So I am not necessarily going to disagree that the way school is setup up the optimal strategy is to cram and then purge the data after the test. However I have had a revelation recently in regards to learning where I realized that even if it is an intellectual skill we are trying to master, repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge. I think part of the problem of schooling is that we focus so much on having knowledge and completely divorce it from practice or application in any way, meaning that the knowledge largely feels useless, and it results in students being unmotivated, and feeling as though time and effort is wasted. This is probably driven because most of these tests are simply "can you regurgitate the knowledge by filling in the right bubble? After all we know that the mitchondria is the powerhause of the cell, but there isn't much application anyone gets beyond knowing that fact. I think if our efforts were on mastery of a skill there can be value in worksheets, and homework. EDIT: I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize.
- quacked 3y ago
  > I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize. Maybe--my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything in school, but that what I did learn was a fraction of what I could have learned, and that most of the material I was shown I now struggle to remember. I can barely recall a thing from any science class that wasn't reinforced by my engineering degree, and most of the things I know about history I learned after college when I started actually paying attention to it. Even my current geography skills are from repetitions outside of college as an adult. When you listen to the average American trying to put together a coherent argument about society, politics, foreign countries, history, etc., or even just to write a coherent email, you're seeing the result of years of worksheet-classes. These are people who are certain they possess a great deal of knowledge, when in fact their recall of specific facts and ability to reason logically are heavily atrophied from years of educational neglect and accidental gaslighting. "I got an A in English class and a 28 on the ACT, so I must be good at English!" > repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge. I completely agree with this. Funnily enough, one of my issues with worksheet-classes is that there's not enough repetition. Topics in classes from mathematics to English to science are treated like Pokemon moves, where once you learn the move you retain it forever. This is in stark contrast to the teaching of artisanal skills like cooking, sports, music, and art. Even if they're learned in a class, the successful execution of the skill is required every time you interact with it, and explicit attention is paid to the necessities of repetition. In music, if you can't play a passage, you slow down and repeat it many times, and if you still can't play it, you move backwards to fundamental skills and repeat those. In high school math, if you can't execute a problem, you get a few weeks to voluntarily try repeating it yourself, and then you're given an exam, and then the entire class moves on with or without you.
pnathan 3y ago
The US k-12 school system is well understood to, as a first approximation, optimize for average or a bit below. There are often carve outs for interesting tracks for kids. I'm not sure the right approach. Rigorous testing and sorting from an early age into silos of tracking kids has its own major flaws.

reidjs 3y ago

I think a lot of it does come down to scale. Imagine the challenge of being a teacher tasked with teaching (science/english/math/etc) to 150-200 unique kids per day, often with little to no budget or support from admin, parents, etc. Unless you are truly exceptional at teaching, you have to teach to the middle to compensate, or your class will tear itself apart.

bobthepanda 3y ago
Also in the US the incentives for going into teaching are totally wrong. We should train the best and brightest so that our kids learn from them, but the salaries and working conditions are so bad that it actively discourages people.
- AvocadoPanic 3y ago
  What's the advantage to having the best and brightest teachers if they're in a room of average and dim students? Both teachers and students should be tracked by ability. Best teachers for the best students. Mid teachers for mid students.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    that assumes that average and dim are constants and unchangeable. but the point remains is that we're not even getting the best teachers to begin with, because the job is so unattractive if it's not your passion.
    - AvocadoPanic 3y ago
      Average and dim usually seem pretty fixed by adulthood. Were teachers better in previous generations? I remember the majority of mine being excellent. Might it be more unattractive now than 30 - 40 years ago?
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        People are not going into the public school system during adulthood. Inflation-adjusted average teachers salaries have fallen over the past decade, and starting salaries are at the lowest levels measured: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/average-teacher-salary-lower-today-ten-years-ago-nea-report-finds https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/average-teac... A lot of teachers in the US now work two jobs to make ends meet, which is a recipe for disaster.

esafak 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

secabeen 3y ago
Mastery-based learning is good, but there is a degenerate path that is important to avoid. Some students can master basic computational tasks (like addition and multiplication), but don't have the maturity to reliably produce that mastery; in other words, they're sloppy. A human instructor teaching to the mastery approach will move on with them, and when they are learning a later skill and they make a basic error (7+4=12, for example), will point it out to the student, and let them fix that, and show that they have mastered the more advanced skill. A computer, on the other hand, will just decree that they got the question wrong, have not achieved mastery, and force them to repeat the instruction. It's very demotivating, and still not fully solved, although Khan Academy's recent change allowing students to reset/start-over tests without completing them has helped.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

Just based on your post, you seem like a pretty competent writer. That's not a natural skill; a lot of people can't do it well. Do you think you would have learned that sitting at home? Like, maybe school wasn't perfect and access to a team of private tutors would have put you in a better place today. But I'd hazard a guess your school assignments were more useful than you think. Process, not product.

benignslime 3y ago
Absolutely. After pondering over this website myself for 20 minutes, I felt similarly to OP regarding the long slog through elementary and secondary schooling to finally feel like there was "progress". It's clear filtering by grades in the sheets, the tempo of the exercises is painfully slow. I remember as a kindergartner being able to produce and memorize multiplication tables after being taught the process. It took at least 3 to 4 more years until school ever began expect it. The thing is many of these concepts and ideas and facts _are_ simple and straightforward. In seventh grade I literally stopped doing my work altogether, and was offered by the teaching staff to move onward to eighth grade instead. I felt then that I still understand now, that forcing yourself through the paces is important too. If I skipped a grade who knows what little things I may have missed. It's like lifting weights, you're better off being gradual about your increases and pushing your rep counts -- instead of doing two reps of something you shouldn't even be attempting. The truth is any good teacher and school would be able to provide projects and exercises that would help apply the types of rote work the sheets present. Even if you only ever did the sheets on the site, it'd still take some kids the whole year to get through them. If teachers are creative enough, there should be enough flexibility to cater to both student types.
quacked 3y ago
Thank you for your compliment. To clarify, I'm not saying that it's possible to learn to write without writing a great deal. I certainly wouldn't have learned to write well without writing often. However, I didn't learn to write particularly well until I was out of college and had begun writing for myself. In school I was rarely interested in ensuring that what I was writing was interesting, well-phrased, or enjoyable to read. Those qualities simply weren't prioritized, which is weird, because those are the qualities by which writing is judged in "the real world". I certainly relied on basic writing practice I received in completion-based classes, but my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything useful in school, it's that the time I did spend in school was poorly allocated and resulted in an underdeveloped product. "If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school."

dale_glass 3y ago

That's a weird way of looking at it. Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. Barring some really exceptional anecdotes like Gauss figuring out how to efficiently sum series in school, it's pretty much certain that you'll come up with nothing new whatsoever. But surely some of that had to sink in, and that was the point. In the long term, the vast majority of things fade away. I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that.

quacked 3y ago
> Of course you produced nothing of value. Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. That's certainly how it's set up today, but I find it difficult to believe that the most optimized, useful, and productive way to teach children about reality is the method we've settled on in the modern US. School could instead be designed around the production of art, goods, and services that are actually desired and used by people in and outside of the school. This would be a great deal more difficult to set up and maintain than a series of gradeable worksheets. > Learning in school is about absorbing already existing knowledge. Under the current model, is the knowledge really absorbed? Math class is great example. Most people struggle through algebra and trigonometry worksheets for a few hundred hours and then immediately dump the knowledge when they graduate and can't even name the three primary triangle side-ratios five years later. Was completing curated problem sets under threat of a worse career if they failed really the best use of their time? That can't be the best way to teach them. > I spent a lot of time maintaining an internal inventory management app, which was eventually deprecated and now it's probably not used by anyone anywhere in the world, if not completely lost forever. Such is life. Still, I learned a lot from that. Sure, but you were producing something of value. When you learned about an issue, you went hunting for the root cause because people were actually relying on you to do so, and when you fixed the issue you felt real satisfaction, and retained a desire to remember what you'd done. Also, you were paid. I would wager a good deal of money that what you learned while managing the app stuck in your brain a lot more effectively than if the same activity had been taught to you in a class where you completed worksheets based on the inventory management platform.

benignslime 3y ago

[dead]

gustavus 3y ago

So I am not necessarily going to disagree that the way school is setup up the optimal strategy is to cram and then purge the data after the test. However I have had a revelation recently in regards to learning where I realized that even if it is an intellectual skill we are trying to master, repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge. I think part of the problem of schooling is that we focus so much on having knowledge and completely divorce it from practice or application in any way, meaning that the knowledge largely feels useless, and it results in students being unmotivated, and feeling as though time and effort is wasted. This is probably driven because most of these tests are simply "can you regurgitate the knowledge by filling in the right bubble? After all we know that the mitchondria is the powerhause of the cell, but there isn't much application anyone gets beyond knowing that fact. I think if our efforts were on mastery of a skill there can be value in worksheets, and homework. EDIT: I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize.

quacked 3y ago
> I'll add given that you are on HN you probably also remember and understand more from school than you realize. Maybe--my claim isn't that I didn't learn anything in school, but that what I did learn was a fraction of what I could have learned, and that most of the material I was shown I now struggle to remember. I can barely recall a thing from any science class that wasn't reinforced by my engineering degree, and most of the things I know about history I learned after college when I started actually paying attention to it. Even my current geography skills are from repetitions outside of college as an adult. When you listen to the average American trying to put together a coherent argument about society, politics, foreign countries, history, etc., or even just to write a coherent email, you're seeing the result of years of worksheet-classes. These are people who are certain they possess a great deal of knowledge, when in fact their recall of specific facts and ability to reason logically are heavily atrophied from years of educational neglect and accidental gaslighting. "I got an A in English class and a 28 on the ACT, so I must be good at English!" > repetition is still required to do anything other than move a vague knowledge to applicable knowledge. I completely agree with this. Funnily enough, one of my issues with worksheet-classes is that there's not enough repetition. Topics in classes from mathematics to English to science are treated like Pokemon moves, where once you learn the move you retain it forever. This is in stark contrast to the teaching of artisanal skills like cooking, sports, music, and art. Even if they're learned in a class, the successful execution of the skill is required every time you interact with it, and explicit attention is paid to the necessities of repetition. In music, if you can't play a passage, you slow down and repeat it many times, and if you still can't play it, you move backwards to fundamental skills and repeat those. In high school math, if you can't execute a problem, you get a few weeks to voluntarily try repeating it yourself, and then you're given an exam, and then the entire class moves on with or without you.

pnathan 3y ago

The US k-12 school system is well understood to, as a first approximation, optimize for average or a bit below. There are often carve outs for interesting tracks for kids. I'm not sure the right approach. Rigorous testing and sorting from an early age into silos of tracking kids has its own major flaws.