4 ms·

The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whe

The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is not clear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. Of course all the nuances and little details make all the difference: board picture, structure, teacher personality, pacing, choice of topic, interaction, motivation, excitement, etc.. It is not guaranteed to work, but as a format it is workable, and I found nothing so far that is better either as a student (long time ago) or as a prof at a top university (for some time now). A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback. EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.

psychoslave 2y ago
I have no doubt it is the best option. For certain people. But why impose a single way to learn, when there is no such a thing as a "single size fit them all" learning experience? All the more when there are alternative options.
- obscurette 2y ago
  There is. There is a ton of alternative schools, homeschooling is legal in most of places in the world etc. The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil. It's not possible.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    Maybe the solution is to segment students to the teaching style? We can't expect teachers to provide a good environment for students who are good at self paced learning, and students who need structure in the same classroom. But we might be able to have classrooms that lean one way or another...
  - randomdata 2y ago
    > The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil. Nah. The people expect EdTech to allow children to find their own suitable learning style with only babysitter oversight. But no teacher wants to "demote" themselves to being a babysitter, nor do the administrators want to become seen as running a daycare, so you end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365.
dbspin 2y ago
Worth noting that this is fine for academic subjects (although highly dependent for success on student interest), but doesn't work at all for skill based subjects.
graemep 2y ago
IMO that is about the third best method. The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching. Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.
potato3732842 2y ago
There are a lot of things, particularly in math and science, that really benefit from modern media when it comes to illustrating things.
panzagl 2y ago
My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.
- ghaff 2y ago
  There was a story in the NY Times a few months back about a basically one room schoolhouse in Alta Utah. Of course that's a small and mostly homogeneous community and, as I recall, it was unclear from the article how well students were learning other than presumably becoming good skiers.
- tejohnso 2y ago
  > My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment? I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    My impression is that both a teacher's power to do much anything about such behavior, and the rights of the non-problematic students to a viable classroom environment, are either gone, or "going, going", in most parts of America.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    - Some schools don't have the resources to send a kid who screams for 10 minutes to the office. Schools in bad areas may have a line of battery incidents waiting for admin's attention by noon. There are schools where second graders threatening the teacher with sexual assault is just a Tuesday and basically gets ignored. - Schools in nicer areas are sometimes in the middle of some dumbshit half-implemented (the other parts made admin uncomfortable) "discipline plan" that the superintendent got sold on at some damn district-paid drinking vacation away from the family... er, I mean, education conference, which may lead to insane crap like letting a kid scream in the classroom for ten minutes (sending them to the office might get the teacher in trouble for not following the plan). Half-implemented plainly-doomed-to-fail admin-driven plans for discipline, or for education approaches to any or all subject areas, are often a factor in stupid crap schools do.
samvher 2y ago
Seems like there might be some survivorship bias here, right? You teach students who made it to a top university because they thrived in the classical setup which is the most common one. Presumably your preferred teaching style aligning well with the classical approach also helped get you to that position. Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures). When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those. Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Oh I agree 100%. Recorded lectures are a miracle for the 2x speed and buffering.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    And variety of lecturers. Sometimes another person saying it changes everything.
- chamomeal 2y ago
  Same. I could never EVER pay attention in class. I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems. Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method. Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
I mean, I’d argue the chalkboard method often can’t visualize things as well as modern educational stuff like 3blue1brown, which is the kind of thing I often supplement for my relatively dry university material. For tons of things, well-produced videos are more effective, especially when compared to a class with maybe a hundred fifty people in it where questions are discouraged during lecture.
Molitor5901 2y ago
You would enjoy Cliff Stoll's writings on this topic. He hates technology in the classroom, and still firmly believes teachers with chalkboards and flashcards are superior to any technology in the classroom. I disagree with him only in so much as technology allows for media that can help simplify some things, but agree with him that nothing beats a good teacher.
braza 2y ago
> The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is unclear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least. At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me. The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer. Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU
grogenaut 2y ago
I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even overhead projectors were a lot better than most chalk on board classes I went to pre electricity. Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time. Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher. tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
  So tech bros have become experts in pedagogy. What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced. Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you
  - grogenaut 2y ago
    this is all my opinion and what works for me... sorry if that wasn't explicitly stated at the top
    - naijaboiler 2y ago
      That part was clear. It was when you started opining on “what’s better” that I felt you stepped way way out of your area of expertise. You really have no grounds to say what’s better

psychoslave 2y ago

I have no doubt it is the best option. For certain people. But why impose a single way to learn, when there is no such a thing as a "single size fit them all" learning experience? All the more when there are alternative options.

obscurette 2y ago
There is. There is a ton of alternative schools, homeschooling is legal in most of places in the world etc. The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil. It's not possible.
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Maybe the solution is to segment students to the teaching style? We can't expect teachers to provide a good environment for students who are good at self paced learning, and students who need structure in the same classroom. But we might be able to have classrooms that lean one way or another...
- randomdata 2y ago
  > The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil. Nah. The people expect EdTech to allow children to find their own suitable learning style with only babysitter oversight. But no teacher wants to "demote" themselves to being a babysitter, nor do the administrators want to become seen as running a daycare, so you end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365.

dbspin 2y ago

Worth noting that this is fine for academic subjects (although highly dependent for success on student interest), but doesn't work at all for skill based subjects.

graemep 2y ago

IMO that is about the third best method. The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching. Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.

potato3732842 2y ago

There are a lot of things, particularly in math and science, that really benefit from modern media when it comes to illustrating things.

panzagl 2y ago

My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.

ghaff 2y ago
There was a story in the NY Times a few months back about a basically one room schoolhouse in Alta Utah. Of course that's a small and mostly homogeneous community and, as I recall, it was unclear from the article how well students were learning other than presumably becoming good skiers.
tejohnso 2y ago
> My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment? I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.
- bell-cot 2y ago
  My impression is that both a teacher's power to do much anything about such behavior, and the rights of the non-problematic students to a viable classroom environment, are either gone, or "going, going", in most parts of America.
- vundercind 2y ago
  - Some schools don't have the resources to send a kid who screams for 10 minutes to the office. Schools in bad areas may have a line of battery incidents waiting for admin's attention by noon. There are schools where second graders threatening the teacher with sexual assault is just a Tuesday and basically gets ignored. - Schools in nicer areas are sometimes in the middle of some dumbshit half-implemented (the other parts made admin uncomfortable) "discipline plan" that the superintendent got sold on at some damn district-paid drinking vacation away from the family... er, I mean, education conference, which may lead to insane crap like letting a kid scream in the classroom for ten minutes (sending them to the office might get the teacher in trouble for not following the plan). Half-implemented plainly-doomed-to-fail admin-driven plans for discipline, or for education approaches to any or all subject areas, are often a factor in stupid crap schools do.

samvher 2y ago

Seems like there might be some survivorship bias here, right? You teach students who made it to a top university because they thrived in the classical setup which is the most common one. Presumably your preferred teaching style aligning well with the classical approach also helped get you to that position. Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures). When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those. Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Oh I agree 100%. Recorded lectures are a miracle for the 2x speed and buffering.
- randomdata 2y ago
  And variety of lecturers. Sometimes another person saying it changes everything.
chamomeal 2y ago
Same. I could never EVER pay attention in class. I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems. Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method. Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago

I mean, I’d argue the chalkboard method often can’t visualize things as well as modern educational stuff like 3blue1brown, which is the kind of thing I often supplement for my relatively dry university material. For tons of things, well-produced videos are more effective, especially when compared to a class with maybe a hundred fifty people in it where questions are discouraged during lecture.

Molitor5901 2y ago

You would enjoy Cliff Stoll's writings on this topic. He hates technology in the classroom, and still firmly believes teachers with chalkboards and flashcards are superior to any technology in the classroom. I disagree with him only in so much as technology allows for media that can help simplify some things, but agree with him that nothing beats a good teacher.

braza 2y ago

> The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is unclear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least. At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me. The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer. Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU

grogenaut 2y ago

I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even overhead projectors were a lot better than most chalk on board classes I went to pre electricity. Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time. Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher. tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.

naijaboiler 2y ago
So tech bros have become experts in pedagogy. What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced. Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you
- grogenaut 2y ago
  this is all my opinion and what works for me... sorry if that wasn't explicitly stated at the top
  - naijaboiler 2y ago
    That part was clear. It was when you started opining on “what’s better” that I felt you stepped way way out of your area of expertise. You really have no grounds to say what’s better