6 ms·

Saved you a click (from the top comment the last time this was posted): The three points from the article: > [1] Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausti

by folz 12y ago

Saved you a click (from the top comment the last time this was posted): The three points from the article: > [1] Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting. > [2] High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes. > [3] You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long. People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel). I look at this list (especially [2] and the lack of autonomy that follows) and the reason seems really clear. The basic model seems broken. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067 Original source of the story here: http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/ http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teach...

vacri 12y ago
People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel) They don't wonder it at all; it's not some mystery solved by sitting in a classroom. Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. Items 1 and 3 are common in the working world, and there's a few jobs out there as a 2 as well (particularly if you focus on the 'lack of autonomy' part), yet we don't see the same kinds of behaviour from those workers. Adolescence is a time where you're finally becoming an adult, finding where the boundaries are, and putting your own flavour on life. There's a certain amount of experimentation with that, and it's entirely normal to have more unruliness amongst adolescents.
- nilkn 12y ago
  I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break. In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me. Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch or walk around often wasn't an option.
  - bane 12y ago
    Echoing all of this plus I'm left handed and every desk in every class I ever sat in was geared for right handed students. http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/student-desk-844709.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/student-desk-844709.jpg
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      I went to high school in the south (Mississippi) and north (Washington state); I can tell you the latter was much more accommodating to lefties than the former.
      - pyre 12y ago
        > south (Mississippi) and north (Washington state) The whole concept of "North vs. South" is an anachronism from a time when most of middle-/western-America wasn't part of the picture. Washington state, while north of Mississippi, is part of the Pacific Northwest, not part of the "North." You'd be in for a rough time if you would expect (e.g.) Washington (state), North Dakota, Ohio, and Rhode Island to all have some sort of a normalized "Northern experience."
        seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        True. This was in the 80s/90s, maybe its better now, but Mississippi was like a third world country even compared to Tennessee, Kentucky, or some parts of Arkansa, while Washington definitely has better schools than next-door libertarian Idaho. On another note, no one is left handed in China, so I've had problems in Beijing with the inevitable right handed desk at work.
        eru 12y ago
        Or rather, they suppress all their lefties.
  - pyre 12y ago
    > I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break. Truly a representative case!
- hnriot 12y ago
  this is a bit condescending to teens to write them off as that. Biologically we are not programmed to sit in a classroom, teenage girls are programmed by evolution to do something not too dissimilar to HS (show off their new found sexuality and attract a mate), boys on the other hand are better suited to hitting stuff with sticks. That's exactly the kind of mate you want if you're a teenage girl, someone who can go off and bring nice big juicy protein sources for all those babies that are coming soon enough after flaunting their newly grown hips and breasts that signal sexual maturation. About the only times that boys get to be what evolution programmed them for is during war time. When boys race their cars and do crazy shit we think of it as delinquent behaviour, but those are the exact same skills that made for the best pilots. Algebra and Shakespeare didn't feature much in evolution's "plan". Even Shakespeare would rather have been shagging Queen Elizabeth than writing Elizabethan soap operas, but he needed to put food on his table... And let's not forget where Richard Feynman did some of his best work - in a strip club. The modern world sadly is something that will take us a long time to biologically catch up to.
  - vacri 12y ago
    Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'. It's merely the name for a process, like 'the water cycle' or 'the bessemer process'. Evolution can result in things, like any process, but it doesn't design, and it's wrong to characterise it this way. This being said, if you're looking to the behaviour of primitives, the male-heavy roles were not 'war', but 'hunt'. And no, we're not all driven by sex - some of us are driven heavily, others driven lightly, and others still are asexual. And even those who are heavily driven by sex find time for other things in their life. Anyway, it's ironic that you ping me for 'writing them off' (I don't see where I do that, seriously), but then turn around and say that they're only doing what 'evolution planned for them' - particularly your stated role for what teenage girls should be doing.
    - wavegeek 12y ago
      > Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'. Literally true but the effect is "as though" it designs or plans. See eg "Why evolution is true" or any evolution text book eg "Evolution" by Douglas Futuyma. As for war versus hunting, the levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies were astronomical with death rates from violence typically in the 30-50% range. So yes 'war' though not usually on a very large scale. There were some exceptions. For example San people (formerly known as the Bushmen of the South African desert) had as weapons bows and arrows with slow-acting poisons. A full-on war would result in everyone getting killed (mutually assured destruction). So they tended to avoid doing that.
- rumcajz 12y ago
  > Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. The adolescents in middle ages were treated as adults and they have behaved so. There was also no equivalent to modern schooling back then.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Adolescents, as a demographic, have only been around for about 100 years.
earino 12y ago
And this, in a nutshell, is why my wife and I let our son "online homeschool" when he asked. He's a freshman in highschool and to quote him: "I'm happy to not have to deal with the arbitrary 'lord of the flies' social structure in High School and just be a normal person."
- jemfinch 12y ago
  How does he know what a normal person is?
  - colechristensen 12y ago
    Nobody does as it doesn't really exist. Not wanting to participate in the aptly compared Lord of the Flies culture of high school is perfectly understandable, though. Moving from high school to a large university sees most all of that culture evaporate, and that lack of a strong social structure favoring the individual can certainly seem a whole lot more normal considering in the real world a person is much more free to leave rigid social structures if they choose.
- thirdsun 12y ago
  To be honest, I'd say there's actually some value in socializing and the concept of engaging with friends and students on a daily basis - especially outside of class. Aren't you worried that your kid might be missing out on those social interactions? There's a lot more to school life than attending several 90 minute classes in a row and calling it a day.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    Everytime someone mentions "homeschool", there are always people asking: but what if the kid is missing out on (insert things). How about another point of view: high school students are (potentially) missing out on the opportunity to not wasting their time, to not being unhappy during the 3 years, to truly reach the potential they can be. I did not study high school in the US, but had I have the chance to be homeschooled, skip high school and graduate university at 20 without a social life, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
glenra 12y ago
I would have added to that list: [4] Teachers aren't good at lecturing. A great lecturer can make a subject fascinating. A great teacher can organize information in such a way that it fits together logically. But an average teacher does neither of these things. They are giving you material you could learn better and faster by simply reading the book. So far as I could tell, in most of my classes through grade school and high school the only reason for lecturing is that some kids can't or won't read the book, so the teacher needs to say out loud the exact same things that the textbook author said better in print. When choosing a textbook, you can use one written by one of the best subject-domain teachers in the entire country and that author has an editor whose job is to hone the material to minimize repetition and confusion. What's more, you're not even constrained to currently living textbook author/editor combinations. If the best treatment on the subject was written in 1947, schools can still use that 1947 textbook (or relevant quoted sections from it). But when choosing a teacher you need to find somebody who is alive and teaching today and lives in or is willing to relocate to your neighborhood, which hugely lowers the expected quality. Your math teacher might be quite good compared to most math teachers in your county but probably is not a world-renowned subject expert the way your textbook author is. Your teacher has no editor tightening up the prose. Your teacher's lectures are (compared to the book) rambling, poorly organized and repetitive. As a result, the best learning strategy to get at least some value out of the time you're forced to spend sitting in a class being talked at by idiots is to read the textbook and ignore lectures - use that time to read books or magazines that you actually enjoy.
paypaul 12y ago
I think the whole thing can be flipped. Assign the lectures as homework. Do the homework in class. This is exactly how Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/) is structured. Technology opens up entirely new teaching methodologies. We should be encouraging mastery of concepts rather then praising good marks on tests. What does getting 80% on a test mean. It means there was 20% you didn't know. I sure hope that 20% wasn't important. When you consider that concepts build upon each other that 20% deficiency compounds pretty quickly. It leads to students thinking they are stupid when maybe there was just a concept early on they struggled with and never mastered that has caused them to stumble from that point forward. I breezed through High School only to later stumble with high level university Math courses. Khan Academy has helped me correct this problem and I think it should be integrated into the school system. It demands mastery, it is addictive to use (earn points, achievements) and it standardizes the lecture quality. Being able to watch a great teacher on video and having control of the pace (fast forward, rewind) is a much better use of time then copying notes off a blackboard. Teachers can have a dashboard view of how all of their students are doing and exactly what concepts each student is struggling with. Smart students can take it as far as they want without being slowed down. Students that are struggling can get help in a much more constructive way (and can stop being convinced they are stupid). Teachers can use class time to actually help the kids learn something. Pair students who excel with the ones that struggle and use them as tutors. Make the classroom a collaborative experience. That's where I think things need to go.

by folz 12y ago

vacri 12y ago

People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel) They don't wonder it at all; it's not some mystery solved by sitting in a classroom. Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. Items 1 and 3 are common in the working world, and there's a few jobs out there as a 2 as well (particularly if you focus on the 'lack of autonomy' part), yet we don't see the same kinds of behaviour from those workers. Adolescence is a time where you're finally becoming an adult, finding where the boundaries are, and putting your own flavour on life. There's a certain amount of experimentation with that, and it's entirely normal to have more unruliness amongst adolescents.

nilkn 12y ago
I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break. In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me. Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch or walk around often wasn't an option.
- bane 12y ago
  Echoing all of this plus I'm left handed and every desk in every class I ever sat in was geared for right handed students. http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/student-desk-844709.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/student-desk-844709.jpg
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    I went to high school in the south (Mississippi) and north (Washington state); I can tell you the latter was much more accommodating to lefties than the former.
    - pyre 12y ago
      > south (Mississippi) and north (Washington state) The whole concept of "North vs. South" is an anachronism from a time when most of middle-/western-America wasn't part of the picture. Washington state, while north of Mississippi, is part of the Pacific Northwest, not part of the "North." You'd be in for a rough time if you would expect (e.g.) Washington (state), North Dakota, Ohio, and Rhode Island to all have some sort of a normalized "Northern experience."
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        True. This was in the 80s/90s, maybe its better now, but Mississippi was like a third world country even compared to Tennessee, Kentucky, or some parts of Arkansa, while Washington definitely has better schools than next-door libertarian Idaho. On another note, no one is left handed in China, so I've had problems in Beijing with the inevitable right handed desk at work.
        eru 12y ago
        Or rather, they suppress all their lefties.
- pyre 12y ago
  > I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break. Truly a representative case!
hnriot 12y ago
this is a bit condescending to teens to write them off as that. Biologically we are not programmed to sit in a classroom, teenage girls are programmed by evolution to do something not too dissimilar to HS (show off their new found sexuality and attract a mate), boys on the other hand are better suited to hitting stuff with sticks. That's exactly the kind of mate you want if you're a teenage girl, someone who can go off and bring nice big juicy protein sources for all those babies that are coming soon enough after flaunting their newly grown hips and breasts that signal sexual maturation. About the only times that boys get to be what evolution programmed them for is during war time. When boys race their cars and do crazy shit we think of it as delinquent behaviour, but those are the exact same skills that made for the best pilots. Algebra and Shakespeare didn't feature much in evolution's "plan". Even Shakespeare would rather have been shagging Queen Elizabeth than writing Elizabethan soap operas, but he needed to put food on his table... And let's not forget where Richard Feynman did some of his best work - in a strip club. The modern world sadly is something that will take us a long time to biologically catch up to.
- vacri 12y ago
  Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'. It's merely the name for a process, like 'the water cycle' or 'the bessemer process'. Evolution can result in things, like any process, but it doesn't design, and it's wrong to characterise it this way. This being said, if you're looking to the behaviour of primitives, the male-heavy roles were not 'war', but 'hunt'. And no, we're not all driven by sex - some of us are driven heavily, others driven lightly, and others still are asexual. And even those who are heavily driven by sex find time for other things in their life. Anyway, it's ironic that you ping me for 'writing them off' (I don't see where I do that, seriously), but then turn around and say that they're only doing what 'evolution planned for them' - particularly your stated role for what teenage girls should be doing.
  - wavegeek 12y ago
    > Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'. Literally true but the effect is "as though" it designs or plans. See eg "Why evolution is true" or any evolution text book eg "Evolution" by Douglas Futuyma. As for war versus hunting, the levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies were astronomical with death rates from violence typically in the 30-50% range. So yes 'war' though not usually on a very large scale. There were some exceptions. For example San people (formerly known as the Bushmen of the South African desert) had as weapons bows and arrows with slow-acting poisons. A full-on war would result in everyone getting killed (mutually assured destruction). So they tended to avoid doing that.
rumcajz 12y ago
> Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. The adolescents in middle ages were treated as adults and they have behaved so. There was also no equivalent to modern schooling back then.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Adolescents, as a demographic, have only been around for about 100 years.

earino 12y ago

And this, in a nutshell, is why my wife and I let our son "online homeschool" when he asked. He's a freshman in highschool and to quote him: "I'm happy to not have to deal with the arbitrary 'lord of the flies' social structure in High School and just be a normal person."

jemfinch 12y ago
How does he know what a normal person is?
- colechristensen 12y ago
  Nobody does as it doesn't really exist. Not wanting to participate in the aptly compared Lord of the Flies culture of high school is perfectly understandable, though. Moving from high school to a large university sees most all of that culture evaporate, and that lack of a strong social structure favoring the individual can certainly seem a whole lot more normal considering in the real world a person is much more free to leave rigid social structures if they choose.
thirdsun 12y ago
To be honest, I'd say there's actually some value in socializing and the concept of engaging with friends and students on a daily basis - especially outside of class. Aren't you worried that your kid might be missing out on those social interactions? There's a lot more to school life than attending several 90 minute classes in a row and calling it a day.
- NhanH 12y ago
  Everytime someone mentions "homeschool", there are always people asking: but what if the kid is missing out on (insert things). How about another point of view: high school students are (potentially) missing out on the opportunity to not wasting their time, to not being unhappy during the 3 years, to truly reach the potential they can be. I did not study high school in the US, but had I have the chance to be homeschooled, skip high school and graduate university at 20 without a social life, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

glenra 12y ago

I would have added to that list: [4] Teachers aren't good at lecturing. A great lecturer can make a subject fascinating. A great teacher can organize information in such a way that it fits together logically. But an average teacher does neither of these things. They are giving you material you could learn better and faster by simply reading the book. So far as I could tell, in most of my classes through grade school and high school the only reason for lecturing is that some kids can't or won't read the book, so the teacher needs to say out loud the exact same things that the textbook author said better in print. When choosing a textbook, you can use one written by one of the best subject-domain teachers in the entire country and that author has an editor whose job is to hone the material to minimize repetition and confusion. What's more, you're not even constrained to currently living textbook author/editor combinations. If the best treatment on the subject was written in 1947, schools can still use that 1947 textbook (or relevant quoted sections from it). But when choosing a teacher you need to find somebody who is alive and teaching today and lives in or is willing to relocate to your neighborhood, which hugely lowers the expected quality. Your math teacher might be quite good compared to most math teachers in your county but probably is not a world-renowned subject expert the way your textbook author is. Your teacher has no editor tightening up the prose. Your teacher's lectures are (compared to the book) rambling, poorly organized and repetitive. As a result, the best learning strategy to get at least some value out of the time you're forced to spend sitting in a class being talked at by idiots is to read the textbook and ignore lectures - use that time to read books or magazines that you actually enjoy.

paypaul 12y ago

I think the whole thing can be flipped. Assign the lectures as homework. Do the homework in class. This is exactly how Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/) is structured. Technology opens up entirely new teaching methodologies. We should be encouraging mastery of concepts rather then praising good marks on tests. What does getting 80% on a test mean. It means there was 20% you didn't know. I sure hope that 20% wasn't important. When you consider that concepts build upon each other that 20% deficiency compounds pretty quickly. It leads to students thinking they are stupid when maybe there was just a concept early on they struggled with and never mastered that has caused them to stumble from that point forward. I breezed through High School only to later stumble with high level university Math courses. Khan Academy has helped me correct this problem and I think it should be integrated into the school system. It demands mastery, it is addictive to use (earn points, achievements) and it standardizes the lecture quality. Being able to watch a great teacher on video and having control of the pace (fast forward, rewind) is a much better use of time then copying notes off a blackboard. Teachers can have a dashboard view of how all of their students are doing and exactly what concepts each student is struggling with. Smart students can take it as far as they want without being slowed down. Students that are struggling can get help in a much more constructive way (and can stop being convinced they are stupid). Teachers can use class time to actually help the kids learn something. Pair students who excel with the ones that struggle and use them as tutors. Make the classroom a collaborative experience. That's where I think things need to go.