14 ms·

Disrespect in Education (2014)

78 points by luu 12y ago

mashmac2 12y ago
The article ends with a challenge - "The remaining question is how?" How can we ensure that students gifts are acknowledged and nurtured? How can we make our subjects as relevant as possible?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- EGreg 12y ago
  A smart way to reform education: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
  - Mimu 12y ago
    I live in France so maybe the situation is different here, but I feel like nothing in this article solve any real issues.
    - zkhalique 12y ago
      Why? Can you go into more detail?
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Uggh. A hamster in a cage running. Children would simply refuse to engage, with the 'remedial' classes being flooded with 95% of the pupils.
  - rapala 12y ago
    So the learning happens where? While watching the multimedia presentation? Homeworks are a central part of schooling because doing them is where most of the learning happens. Notetaking has also shown to be highly beneficial to learning. This proposal downplays both of these and replaces them with testing and ipads.
- nailer 12y ago
  Finland now teach topics, eg, 'The EU' with all the history, maths, and geography that entails, rather than individual subjects.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Yes, an interesting approach with actual resources behind it. I'm going to watch how that goes. My initial reaction is: we have 'subjects' with names on them partially through tradition but also partly through different 'rules of the game' for each subject (e.g. scientific method vs social critique vs historiography). How will the rules of the various games be taught? Or will there be no mathematics or physics degrees in Finland in 10 years?
klunger 12y ago
I was with the author until the following line in the last paragraph: "...it is not a fault only to have energy for what I care about. I don’t know what I would have become if my gifts had been acknowledged and nurtured rather than ignored." This argument comes from the same privileged perspective of the "follow your passion" line. He can only make this claim because, as an apparently gifted programmer, he is fortunate to care about skills that are currently valued in the workforce, if not in the confines of many school systems. No one has energy for the things they don't care about. However, people do their jobs regardless of whether they care about it because it is their job. Does the author suppose anyone works as a janitor because they care about cleaning other people's toilets? Of course not. Janitors have bills to pay, mouths to feed etc. Teaching students to learn the importance of doing their job, regardless of whether they care about it, is not an intrinsic flaw of modern education. There should arguably be less emphasis on it, and more done to nurture student's natural talents. However, the notion that students should not be taught at all the importance of good citizenship, following orders and doing their job -- even or especially if they don't care about it -- is unpalatable. To do away with it completely, as implied, is even more disrespectful to students than the situation he describes. It is extremely disrespectful to the people who will spend their working lives doing things that they don't particularly care about, and who go home at the end of the day to the things that give meaning to their lives.
- ctchocula 12y ago
  I was with the author until this line: "Writing the program increased my understanding of circuits a great deal, but the existence of the program itself afforded me no real advantage. Perhaps this experience is why my preferred way to use software today is as a mathematical and mind-expansion exercise rather than making a tool that can actually be used." It came off as whiny, because it comes off as a stretch to blame the school for his inability to write effective computer programs.
  - alexhill 12y ago
    My understanding was that he wrote an effective program and wasn't allowed to use it for homework and tests.
keithpeter 12y ago
"I had assumed that I was there to learn the content and the teachers were all just blind or crazy — I know now that I was there to learn to follow orders, and my education is for the ones who give them." The OA is reading Freire [1] (see other posts on the blog). The Infed article on Gramsci, especially the section headed 'Gramsci on schooling and education' [2] might help further. The clue is in the separation of the two functions. The OA was obviously able to educate himself most effectively. The challenge is now to collect a few people like his childhood self and get some self-organised education going outside the system. A few hours a week. Biographies of people like Alan Kay, Feynman &c show the influence of an adult outside the system on intellectual development. The career of Brian Harvey springs to mind. The OA is in a good place to start a dialogue with younger people around (say) social network use and surveillance (see OA's google+ feed). Direct experience of working with (say) a handful of young people will refine ideas. [1] http://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-education/ http://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-educa... [2] http://infed.org/mobi/antonio-gramsci-schooling-and-education/ http://infed.org/mobi/antonio-gramsci-schooling-and-educatio...
thaddaeus 12y ago
What an overly dramatic article written by a whiny author. It's not disrespect, you are no one special. "I don’t know what I would have become if my gifts had been acknowledged and nurtured rather than ignored." Boohoo. Two tears in a bucket. No one in this life owes you anything. The only person that ignored your gifts was you, and now you are making excuses for yourself. If you had worked harder in school, then you would have nurtured your gifts. Respect is earned, and after read that post, I can't imagine anyone worth their salt giving the author any respect.
- reddyb 12y ago
  I think you missed the point of the article because the author states that he had very good scores at tests, so at least "working harder at school" wouldn't have helped with what he is complaning about whatever it is. However I agree that this article sounds whiny, especially when it comes to the phrase you quoted. But if we look at the bigger picture the author is drawing, we can acknowledge that Education is not only about college students, it's also about students in primary and secondary school and even high school. At these levels students won't have the critical-thinking and I-will-do attitude you are talking about, they need guidance from the system. They need that the system teach them how to respect themselves by example by respecting them in the first place.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    At least part of school is to prepare students for the bullshit of the real world. Even ignoring the "Did you get the memo about cover sheets for the TPS reports?" level of bullshit people still face a lot of bureaucracy at work and school should be helping them learn ways to deal with it.
    - quesera 12y ago
      So you suggest that we frontload that abuse onto our youngest members, just to make sure they learn to succeed in that environment and then have an incentive to perpetuate it when they get to where we are?
    - 12y ago
timthorn 12y ago
I believe that the point of the two trains problem is not to make things "relevant" but to develop the ability to translate from an English description to an abstract mathematical representation.
7952 12y ago
I can't stand the reliance on real world problems. The genius of maths and science is using mechanisms that are inherently abstract (and non-obvious) to help understand the world. Surely a main part of learning about maths and science is creating and using mental models rather than relying on your own understanding.
kirsebaer 12y ago
In democratic free schools, like Sudbury Valley School, students are free to follow their interests without any compulsory courses or exams. In follow-up studies, former students are happy and successful even though they were never formally "taught" to read, do math, or write a "book report". The typical school model was designed to control students, it is unnecessary and even harmful to real education. Non-compulsory education is not just for smart kids, all children have a natural inclination to learn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994/ http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Re...
- agumonkey 12y ago
  The need to trade nature/randomness for predictability, bandwidth and absurd indicators pops in a lot of places, it's somehow scary.
- mercer 12y ago
  I agree insofar that it greatly benefitted me that I was pretty much free to do as I pleased from age 12 to 18, and then semi-free throughout college. But looking at my siblings and some of my friends, I hesitate to make a blanket statement about this freedom. Perhaps everyone can do well if they're given this freedom from a very young age. I don't know. But I've met plenty of people who, if given this freedom in middle/high school (12+?), would not have been able to handle it. Whether this is because they already were 'corrupted' up to that age, or whether they have different personalities, I don't know. But I've seen it happen.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
    Just because you've seen it happen doesn't mean it always happens, so I'd hesitate to make a "freedom is good for me and not most people" statement. Here's an anecdote with a reference (still not that great I know), a 20 year old is arrested for armed robbery and goes to jail for 3 years, later he discovers heroin, and then much later he kicks the habit and becomes a Saxophone Colossus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Rollins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Rollins
donatj 12y ago
The problem as I see it is most teachers went straight from being taught to teaching. It's a feedback loop. The best teachers I had by far took up teaching later in life, having lived in the real world for a while. The best teacher I ever had spent a good chunk of his life developing back ends for restaurant POS systems. I learned so much from his real world experience. Going straight from being educated to educating is insular. Teachers do things because that's the way it was done to them. It's how they were taught and some sick part of their mind liked it, so they went into teaching. From my own educational experience there was a lot of "do this, or else" which isn't really education, it's just conditioning. For crying out loud we know negative reinforcement doesn't work in animals, ask any dog trainer, why would it work in students? Give me at least as much respect as a dog, please.
- japhyr 12y ago
  > Going straight from being educated to educating is insular. Teachers do things because that's the way it was done to them. Yes, this is a problem in education. I would like to see a great deal of improvement in teacher education programs. From what I've seen, many teacher ed programs that claim to be challenging simply give a heavy workload, rather than challenging people's ways of thinking about education. There are some great approaches to education, but I don't see many new teachers learning them. Or if they do, I see them going into schools where they don't see those approaches being used. Then there's the political undermining of education that's happening in much of the US. > It's how they were taught and some sick part of their mind liked it, so they went into teaching. I know there are some really bad teachers out there, but this is a pretty ugly and useless line of thinking. Most teachers that you're referring to are simply falling back on what they saw in 12+ years of being a student; there's no intention to inflict on others what was done to them because they liked it.
adam-a 12y ago
> I feel that this is a cultural phenomenon of seeing children as less than human, as incapable of making good choices for themselves. I teach primary school children (aged 10 and 11) once a week. I think the author is mistaken and using a lot of assumptions to justify a very bigoted position. Firstly, most children are not capable of making good choices for themselves. This is essentially why we teach them, if they came out of the ground fully aware and able to rationalise there would be no need for schools. My direct experience is that some children are quite self directed and can be left to pursue their interests and work around topics in their own way. Most children however find a lack of direction quite daunting and will end up not working at all if they are not given quite clear instructions. Secondly, allowing each child to pursue their education in their own preferred mode is unreasonable because of class sizes. I have found it very difficult to support more than 5 or so children who are all doing different things, even if they are focusing on a common subject and broadly similar tasks. The only way for a teacher to reasonably teach a class of 20 to 30 or more is to give them all the same work and teach them all in more or less the same way. The author makes the mistake of assuming his teachers were stupid or mean. Whenever you find yourself assuming this about other people you should take a step back, because there are very few individuals, and certainly no broad categories of people who are actually like this.
- japhyr 12y ago
  > I have found it very difficult to support more than 5 or so children who are all doing different things, even if they are focusing on a common subject and broadly similar tasks. The only way for a teacher to reasonably teach a class of 20 to 30 or more is to give them all the same work and teach them all in more or less the same way. If you were taught using traditional methods where everyone was expected to do the same thing, it is difficult to figure out a different approach all by yourself. But there are some really well-established ways to run a classroom where not everyone has to do the same thing. For example, there are various models of project-based education, where everyone is working on the same topic but students are doing a number of different things around that topic. One core skill of a decent teacher is to differentiate instruction. Good teachers have been doing this for generations.
  - 12y ago
pitt1980 12y ago
I think I had a pretty similar experience in school to the author I regret having that attitude now kids hold adults to unrealistic expectations, they expect them to be omniscient (tbf adult don't really discourage this), and then become disillusioned when they realize that isn't the case adults are human too, they make mistakes, they're not perfect, its really hard to figure out how to manage 30 some odd kids and figure out to best reach as many of them as possible, if they start making homework exceptions for 1 kid, do they have to start making them for 30 kids, how do you manage 30 unique homework assignments? how do you balence that with making things work less well for that one kid who would really do well with a unique homework assignment? Its actually a hard philosophical problem I feel I didn't have any appreciation for that when I was a kid, I wish I did now when you're a kid, you feel like adults are all up in your business, when you're an adult, you realize that its a luxury to have people who are available to turn to for help, them being in your business actually isn't that bad a tradeoff as an adult, you want access to people's time and experience, you often have to pay for it I recommend kids take ownership over your own education, the classes that are in high school actually cover wide wide swaths of human knowledge, and are actually applicable to all sorts of life goals whatever you want to do in life, there are likely things in each of your classes that apply to doing that thing you can ask your teacher whatever you like about that, figure out how to get whatever knowledge you can out of them homework is actually a gift, the science of how knowledge get imbedded in you is actually well established, you have to work with it and apply it homework is that opportunity, even if its not perfect, will you be able to draw on that knowledge when you're 25? how much you embedded that with homework as a 15 year will be the factor of that I'm rambling, but public education is a far from perfect, but its a gift, and like all things in life, its what you make of it
- qntty 12y ago
  how do you manage 30 unique homework assignments? Well one approach would be not to require students to do homework. In my experience, when I'm learning something that I'm interested in, there would be no benefit to somebody checking work that I do. If I want a second opinion, I seek it out rather than the other way around. To me, a school that really "respected" students in the way the author is suggesting would have no need for telling students into learning anything in particular.
unoti 12y ago
Perhaps the most important lesson the author failed to learn in school is: sometimes if you want to succeed and keep The Man off your back you gotta Play The Game. Real life isn't all about the best people encouraging and helping each other, unfortunately.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  Not sometimes, nearly every student/teacher transaction in HS involves following a scripted exercise (rote learning). This repetitive scripted practice technique "works" the first time for some; but other students need more repetition(these get left behind, and suffer in subjects that build upon the missed prerequisite unit), and yet others need less (they get bored, and the activity has a detrimental effect). But everyone gets the same amount and covers new material at the same pace. Fortunately, there is effort underway to refine and improve pedagogy at the HS level in the US, but boy has it been slow in coming.
crazy1van 12y ago
School seems mostly geared towards the average life experience. The average person will end up in a job where they take direction from another person. They will work on things that don't make sense or they don't love or have passion for. I'm not making a value judgment on that and say it is good or bad, but learning how to power through some crap work you dont like because someone told you to is a good life skill. Should we design our whole education system around learning that one life skill? No, probably not. But that skill isn't worthless.
serve_yay 12y ago
You can choose to view everything you do not agree with as an indication of disrespect. But is it? Keep in mind that how you view the world reflects not only on the world, but on yourself as well. Another way to say it may be, if you can't see how dumb you were as a kid, have you really learned anything?
saosebastiao 12y ago
I too am very much like the author. I have always done well on tests, but never had much patience for tedious school work. And yes, I have felt the same disrespect for me that the author has felt. But the author completely missed the point of silly word problems in math homework. They aren't silly because educators are disconnected with the real world, and they aren't disrespecting you either. They are silly precisely to convey the point that the words do not matter...much in the same way that the name of an algebraic variable does not matter. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, the Chinese Postman problem, and the Traveling Salesman problem are all silly word problems with a seeming disconnect from reality. And yet huge and seemingly insurmountable problems can be solved using them by employing a technique that is often called Projection: You take a problem you know but can't solve and project it onto a similar problem you know and can solve. Using this technique, not only could you take an NP-Complete production scheduling problem and project it into a basic integer linear program that can be solved trivially using the simplex algorithm with cutting planes and column generation...but you could also develop the simplex algorithm itself, just as Dantzig did. Math teachers that formulate their homework problems in terms that are immediately applicable to the real world may be more successful in getting people interested in mathematics, but if they reduce their homework problems to just those that are "real world" enough to be interesting to wandering minds, they risk destroying the creativity to solve real world problems that are actually hard. That would be a much bigger disrespect to the student than anything the author has ever experienced.
ZachWick 12y ago
I teach a programming elective course to middle school students (12-14 years old); We meet three days per week for about an hour each day. Over the course of nine weeks the students come up with a the concept of a simple game, and implement it from scratch in python. Most of the students have never programmed before, although some have created incredibly complex machinations in Minecraft or other creative building games. I try to approach the course as not an introduction to programming but as an introduction to the idea that computers can be more than just consumption devices. There are usually around 6 students in the class (with a much longer wait-list) and invariably there is at least one student who doesn't want to write code. So I try to aim them at designing the game assets (images, music) or coming up with _how_ the game should be played at a high level. I am not a teacher by education. I do contract development work and have my own bootstrapped start up. I teach because when I look back at my own education, I wish that I had had an opportunity to get away from the mindless drudgery of being "taught to a test." I also teach because I am terrified of a world in which computers (and other electronics) are only seen/used as consumption devices. I don't think that I am perfect teacher, but I think that this is how all teachers should be; Not someone who has an academic degree in teaching, but someone who has done the actual thing that they are instructing others to do. It is time to dispel the old adage of "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach."
jqm 12y ago
School is (in general) a series of humiliating, pointless, time wasting tasks overseen by people who are usually less smart and motivated than you, and on occasion, are borderline psychopathic. Then you enter the workforce.....

78 points by luu 12y ago

The article ends with a challenge - "The remaining question is how?" How can we ensure that students gifts are acknowledged and nurtured? How can we make our subjects as relevant as possible?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 12y ago
A smart way to reform education: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
- Mimu 12y ago
  I live in France so maybe the situation is different here, but I feel like nothing in this article solve any real issues.
  - zkhalique 12y ago
    Why? Can you go into more detail?
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Uggh. A hamster in a cage running. Children would simply refuse to engage, with the 'remedial' classes being flooded with 95% of the pupils.
- rapala 12y ago
  So the learning happens where? While watching the multimedia presentation? Homeworks are a central part of schooling because doing them is where most of the learning happens. Notetaking has also shown to be highly beneficial to learning. This proposal downplays both of these and replaces them with testing and ipads.
nailer 12y ago
Finland now teach topics, eg, 'The EU' with all the history, maths, and geography that entails, rather than individual subjects.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Yes, an interesting approach with actual resources behind it. I'm going to watch how that goes. My initial reaction is: we have 'subjects' with names on them partially through tradition but also partly through different 'rules of the game' for each subject (e.g. scientific method vs social critique vs historiography). How will the rules of the various games be taught? Or will there be no mathematics or physics degrees in Finland in 10 years?

klunger 12y ago

I was with the author until the following line in the last paragraph: "...it is not a fault only to have energy for what I care about. I don’t know what I would have become if my gifts had been acknowledged and nurtured rather than ignored." This argument comes from the same privileged perspective of the "follow your passion" line. He can only make this claim because, as an apparently gifted programmer, he is fortunate to care about skills that are currently valued in the workforce, if not in the confines of many school systems. No one has energy for the things they don't care about. However, people do their jobs regardless of whether they care about it because it is their job. Does the author suppose anyone works as a janitor because they care about cleaning other people's toilets? Of course not. Janitors have bills to pay, mouths to feed etc. Teaching students to learn the importance of doing their job, regardless of whether they care about it, is not an intrinsic flaw of modern education. There should arguably be less emphasis on it, and more done to nurture student's natural talents. However, the notion that students should not be taught at all the importance of good citizenship, following orders and doing their job -- even or especially if they don't care about it -- is unpalatable. To do away with it completely, as implied, is even more disrespectful to students than the situation he describes. It is extremely disrespectful to the people who will spend their working lives doing things that they don't particularly care about, and who go home at the end of the day to the things that give meaning to their lives.

ctchocula 12y ago
I was with the author until this line: "Writing the program increased my understanding of circuits a great deal, but the existence of the program itself afforded me no real advantage. Perhaps this experience is why my preferred way to use software today is as a mathematical and mind-expansion exercise rather than making a tool that can actually be used." It came off as whiny, because it comes off as a stretch to blame the school for his inability to write effective computer programs.
- alexhill 12y ago
  My understanding was that he wrote an effective program and wasn't allowed to use it for homework and tests.

keithpeter 12y ago

"I had assumed that I was there to learn the content and the teachers were all just blind or crazy — I know now that I was there to learn to follow orders, and my education is for the ones who give them." The OA is reading Freire [1] (see other posts on the blog). The Infed article on Gramsci, especially the section headed 'Gramsci on schooling and education' [2] might help further. The clue is in the separation of the two functions. The OA was obviously able to educate himself most effectively. The challenge is now to collect a few people like his childhood self and get some self-organised education going outside the system. A few hours a week. Biographies of people like Alan Kay, Feynman &c show the influence of an adult outside the system on intellectual development. The career of Brian Harvey springs to mind. The OA is in a good place to start a dialogue with younger people around (say) social network use and surveillance (see OA's google+ feed). Direct experience of working with (say) a handful of young people will refine ideas. [1] http://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-education/ http://infed.org/mobi/paulo-freire-dialogue-praxis-and-educa... [2] http://infed.org/mobi/antonio-gramsci-schooling-and-education/ http://infed.org/mobi/antonio-gramsci-schooling-and-educatio...

thaddaeus 12y ago

What an overly dramatic article written by a whiny author. It's not disrespect, you are no one special. "I don’t know what I would have become if my gifts had been acknowledged and nurtured rather than ignored." Boohoo. Two tears in a bucket. No one in this life owes you anything. The only person that ignored your gifts was you, and now you are making excuses for yourself. If you had worked harder in school, then you would have nurtured your gifts. Respect is earned, and after read that post, I can't imagine anyone worth their salt giving the author any respect.

reddyb 12y ago
I think you missed the point of the article because the author states that he had very good scores at tests, so at least "working harder at school" wouldn't have helped with what he is complaning about whatever it is. However I agree that this article sounds whiny, especially when it comes to the phrase you quoted. But if we look at the bigger picture the author is drawing, we can acknowledge that Education is not only about college students, it's also about students in primary and secondary school and even high school. At these levels students won't have the critical-thinking and I-will-do attitude you are talking about, they need guidance from the system. They need that the system teach them how to respect themselves by example by respecting them in the first place.
- DanBC 12y ago
  At least part of school is to prepare students for the bullshit of the real world. Even ignoring the "Did you get the memo about cover sheets for the TPS reports?" level of bullshit people still face a lot of bureaucracy at work and school should be helping them learn ways to deal with it.
  - quesera 12y ago
    So you suggest that we frontload that abuse onto our youngest members, just to make sure they learn to succeed in that environment and then have an incentive to perpetuate it when they get to where we are?
  - 12y ago

timthorn 12y ago

I believe that the point of the two trains problem is not to make things "relevant" but to develop the ability to translate from an English description to an abstract mathematical representation.

7952 12y ago

I can't stand the reliance on real world problems. The genius of maths and science is using mechanisms that are inherently abstract (and non-obvious) to help understand the world. Surely a main part of learning about maths and science is creating and using mental models rather than relying on your own understanding.

kirsebaer 12y ago

In democratic free schools, like Sudbury Valley School, students are free to follow their interests without any compulsory courses or exams. In follow-up studies, former students are happy and successful even though they were never formally "taught" to read, do math, or write a "book report". The typical school model was designed to control students, it is unnecessary and even harmful to real education. Non-compulsory education is not just for smart kids, all children have a natural inclination to learn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Reliant/dp/0465025994/ http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Re...

agumonkey 12y ago
The need to trade nature/randomness for predictability, bandwidth and absurd indicators pops in a lot of places, it's somehow scary.
mercer 12y ago
I agree insofar that it greatly benefitted me that I was pretty much free to do as I pleased from age 12 to 18, and then semi-free throughout college. But looking at my siblings and some of my friends, I hesitate to make a blanket statement about this freedom. Perhaps everyone can do well if they're given this freedom from a very young age. I don't know. But I've met plenty of people who, if given this freedom in middle/high school (12+?), would not have been able to handle it. Whether this is because they already were 'corrupted' up to that age, or whether they have different personalities, I don't know. But I've seen it happen.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  Just because you've seen it happen doesn't mean it always happens, so I'd hesitate to make a "freedom is good for me and not most people" statement. Here's an anecdote with a reference (still not that great I know), a 20 year old is arrested for armed robbery and goes to jail for 3 years, later he discovers heroin, and then much later he kicks the habit and becomes a Saxophone Colossus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Rollins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Rollins

donatj 12y ago

The problem as I see it is most teachers went straight from being taught to teaching. It's a feedback loop. The best teachers I had by far took up teaching later in life, having lived in the real world for a while. The best teacher I ever had spent a good chunk of his life developing back ends for restaurant POS systems. I learned so much from his real world experience. Going straight from being educated to educating is insular. Teachers do things because that's the way it was done to them. It's how they were taught and some sick part of their mind liked it, so they went into teaching. From my own educational experience there was a lot of "do this, or else" which isn't really education, it's just conditioning. For crying out loud we know negative reinforcement doesn't work in animals, ask any dog trainer, why would it work in students? Give me at least as much respect as a dog, please.

japhyr 12y ago
> Going straight from being educated to educating is insular. Teachers do things because that's the way it was done to them. Yes, this is a problem in education. I would like to see a great deal of improvement in teacher education programs. From what I've seen, many teacher ed programs that claim to be challenging simply give a heavy workload, rather than challenging people's ways of thinking about education. There are some great approaches to education, but I don't see many new teachers learning them. Or if they do, I see them going into schools where they don't see those approaches being used. Then there's the political undermining of education that's happening in much of the US. > It's how they were taught and some sick part of their mind liked it, so they went into teaching. I know there are some really bad teachers out there, but this is a pretty ugly and useless line of thinking. Most teachers that you're referring to are simply falling back on what they saw in 12+ years of being a student; there's no intention to inflict on others what was done to them because they liked it.

adam-a 12y ago

> I feel that this is a cultural phenomenon of seeing children as less than human, as incapable of making good choices for themselves. I teach primary school children (aged 10 and 11) once a week. I think the author is mistaken and using a lot of assumptions to justify a very bigoted position. Firstly, most children are not capable of making good choices for themselves. This is essentially why we teach them, if they came out of the ground fully aware and able to rationalise there would be no need for schools. My direct experience is that some children are quite self directed and can be left to pursue their interests and work around topics in their own way. Most children however find a lack of direction quite daunting and will end up not working at all if they are not given quite clear instructions. Secondly, allowing each child to pursue their education in their own preferred mode is unreasonable because of class sizes. I have found it very difficult to support more than 5 or so children who are all doing different things, even if they are focusing on a common subject and broadly similar tasks. The only way for a teacher to reasonably teach a class of 20 to 30 or more is to give them all the same work and teach them all in more or less the same way. The author makes the mistake of assuming his teachers were stupid or mean. Whenever you find yourself assuming this about other people you should take a step back, because there are very few individuals, and certainly no broad categories of people who are actually like this.

japhyr 12y ago
> I have found it very difficult to support more than 5 or so children who are all doing different things, even if they are focusing on a common subject and broadly similar tasks. The only way for a teacher to reasonably teach a class of 20 to 30 or more is to give them all the same work and teach them all in more or less the same way. If you were taught using traditional methods where everyone was expected to do the same thing, it is difficult to figure out a different approach all by yourself. But there are some really well-established ways to run a classroom where not everyone has to do the same thing. For example, there are various models of project-based education, where everyone is working on the same topic but students are doing a number of different things around that topic. One core skill of a decent teacher is to differentiate instruction. Good teachers have been doing this for generations.
- 12y ago

pitt1980 12y ago

I think I had a pretty similar experience in school to the author I regret having that attitude now kids hold adults to unrealistic expectations, they expect them to be omniscient (tbf adult don't really discourage this), and then become disillusioned when they realize that isn't the case adults are human too, they make mistakes, they're not perfect, its really hard to figure out how to manage 30 some odd kids and figure out to best reach as many of them as possible, if they start making homework exceptions for 1 kid, do they have to start making them for 30 kids, how do you manage 30 unique homework assignments? how do you balence that with making things work less well for that one kid who would really do well with a unique homework assignment? Its actually a hard philosophical problem I feel I didn't have any appreciation for that when I was a kid, I wish I did now when you're a kid, you feel like adults are all up in your business, when you're an adult, you realize that its a luxury to have people who are available to turn to for help, them being in your business actually isn't that bad a tradeoff as an adult, you want access to people's time and experience, you often have to pay for it I recommend kids take ownership over your own education, the classes that are in high school actually cover wide wide swaths of human knowledge, and are actually applicable to all sorts of life goals whatever you want to do in life, there are likely things in each of your classes that apply to doing that thing you can ask your teacher whatever you like about that, figure out how to get whatever knowledge you can out of them homework is actually a gift, the science of how knowledge get imbedded in you is actually well established, you have to work with it and apply it homework is that opportunity, even if its not perfect, will you be able to draw on that knowledge when you're 25? how much you embedded that with homework as a 15 year will be the factor of that I'm rambling, but public education is a far from perfect, but its a gift, and like all things in life, its what you make of it

qntty 12y ago
how do you manage 30 unique homework assignments? Well one approach would be not to require students to do homework. In my experience, when I'm learning something that I'm interested in, there would be no benefit to somebody checking work that I do. If I want a second opinion, I seek it out rather than the other way around. To me, a school that really "respected" students in the way the author is suggesting would have no need for telling students into learning anything in particular.

unoti 12y ago

Perhaps the most important lesson the author failed to learn in school is: sometimes if you want to succeed and keep The Man off your back you gotta Play The Game. Real life isn't all about the best people encouraging and helping each other, unfortunately.

fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
Not sometimes, nearly every student/teacher transaction in HS involves following a scripted exercise (rote learning). This repetitive scripted practice technique "works" the first time for some; but other students need more repetition(these get left behind, and suffer in subjects that build upon the missed prerequisite unit), and yet others need less (they get bored, and the activity has a detrimental effect). But everyone gets the same amount and covers new material at the same pace. Fortunately, there is effort underway to refine and improve pedagogy at the HS level in the US, but boy has it been slow in coming.

crazy1van 12y ago

School seems mostly geared towards the average life experience. The average person will end up in a job where they take direction from another person. They will work on things that don't make sense or they don't love or have passion for. I'm not making a value judgment on that and say it is good or bad, but learning how to power through some crap work you dont like because someone told you to is a good life skill. Should we design our whole education system around learning that one life skill? No, probably not. But that skill isn't worthless.

serve_yay 12y ago

You can choose to view everything you do not agree with as an indication of disrespect. But is it? Keep in mind that how you view the world reflects not only on the world, but on yourself as well. Another way to say it may be, if you can't see how dumb you were as a kid, have you really learned anything?

saosebastiao 12y ago

I too am very much like the author. I have always done well on tests, but never had much patience for tedious school work. And yes, I have felt the same disrespect for me that the author has felt. But the author completely missed the point of silly word problems in math homework. They aren't silly because educators are disconnected with the real world, and they aren't disrespecting you either. They are silly precisely to convey the point that the words do not matter...much in the same way that the name of an algebraic variable does not matter. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem, the Chinese Postman problem, and the Traveling Salesman problem are all silly word problems with a seeming disconnect from reality. And yet huge and seemingly insurmountable problems can be solved using them by employing a technique that is often called Projection: You take a problem you know but can't solve and project it onto a similar problem you know and can solve. Using this technique, not only could you take an NP-Complete production scheduling problem and project it into a basic integer linear program that can be solved trivially using the simplex algorithm with cutting planes and column generation...but you could also develop the simplex algorithm itself, just as Dantzig did. Math teachers that formulate their homework problems in terms that are immediately applicable to the real world may be more successful in getting people interested in mathematics, but if they reduce their homework problems to just those that are "real world" enough to be interesting to wandering minds, they risk destroying the creativity to solve real world problems that are actually hard. That would be a much bigger disrespect to the student than anything the author has ever experienced.

ZachWick 12y ago

I teach a programming elective course to middle school students (12-14 years old); We meet three days per week for about an hour each day. Over the course of nine weeks the students come up with a the concept of a simple game, and implement it from scratch in python. Most of the students have never programmed before, although some have created incredibly complex machinations in Minecraft or other creative building games. I try to approach the course as not an introduction to programming but as an introduction to the idea that computers can be more than just consumption devices. There are usually around 6 students in the class (with a much longer wait-list) and invariably there is at least one student who doesn't want to write code. So I try to aim them at designing the game assets (images, music) or coming up with _how_ the game should be played at a high level. I am not a teacher by education. I do contract development work and have my own bootstrapped start up. I teach because when I look back at my own education, I wish that I had had an opportunity to get away from the mindless drudgery of being "taught to a test." I also teach because I am terrified of a world in which computers (and other electronics) are only seen/used as consumption devices. I don't think that I am perfect teacher, but I think that this is how all teachers should be; Not someone who has an academic degree in teaching, but someone who has done the actual thing that they are instructing others to do. It is time to dispel the old adage of "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach."

jqm 12y ago

School is (in general) a series of humiliating, pointless, time wasting tasks overseen by people who are usually less smart and motivated than you, and on occasion, are borderline psychopathic. Then you enter the workforce.....