I took a summer course on differential equations at Valencia Community College in Orlando in 2010. It's a perfectly fine school and it was a fun course (I really liked the professor), but what really annoyed me was that it required a $150 textbook on differential equations, and very specifically the "Valencia Edition" of it. What was even more annoying, the "non-Valencia" edition of the book was on Amazon, new and hardcover, for $26. Oh, also, the Valencia edition didn't even have a cover; it was pre-hole-punched and I was expected to put it into a binder.

Valencia might be a fine school but as far as I'm aware they're not doing cutting edge research into differential equations, and even if they were I doubt that those changes would materialize in an introductory course, so it really annoyed me that they were charging a $125 premium specifically because it would have different practice problems.

Now, in this particular story there was a happy workaround. I approached the professor after class and explained the situation to him. He said "oh dude, the homework is actually optional in this class anyway, your grade is just the tests. Just buy the cheaper book and come to me after class and I'll see if the practice problems align with what I wanted you to study." I returned the Valencia edition (which hadn't been opened) and ordered the Amazon book, and I got an A in the course.

I think it should be like in high school. You borrow the book for the semester and return it, and you only pay for the book if you damage it.

ETA:

I should point out, this is actually something I really respected about Western Governors University almost immediately. The books are digital, but they are included in the tuition.

I made an Icecast-compatible streaming server in Erlang, and an Icecast-compatible stream in Rust. Between songs, I would phone out to the cheapest GPT model and a local TTS model to get unfunny DJ banter, with an infinite stream.

I thought it would be very funny to call it "KUMM -- Playing all stickiest white-hot hits!" because I have the maturity level of a fourteen year old, only to find out that there actually is a KUMM station [1] in real life.

All the songs were from CD rips from my very large collection, and it was pretty fun to write. It was my primary music solution until I eventually got a job, it broke, and I didn't prioritize fixing it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUMM

When I dropped out of college the first time around in January 2012, I assumed that my career options were extremely limited. I knew I needed a job, so I applied to pretty much every wage-labor job I could find: McDonalds, Lowes, Starbucks, Aldi, Publix, etc. Almost as a joke to myself, I sent exactly one application to a software developer position on Craigslist for a Flash, Foxpro, and Coldfusion developer position.

The only company that called me back was the software job. I interviewed there, got the job, and thus my career as a software engineer was kicked off.

In hindsight I realized something: the less qualified you are for a job, the more likely a company might be to overlook a lack of qualifications. McDonalds and Aldi and Starbucks have lots of qualified people applying for these positions, meaning that they can be very picky with who they hire.

Now compare this to Flash/Coldfusion/Foxpro developers in 2012. I didn't know any of these at the time particularly well...but to my benefit neither did anyone else! As a result, they didn't get a ton of applications meaning their selection pool was tiny, meaning that they basically had to take whomever they could get.

I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school.

I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.

I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.

I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.

Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.

I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)

St. Olaf College for those wondering.

I am 30 now and I realized that it was very much of ADHD symptoms. I am just an edge case of college education.

However, by genetics and mathematics we know that in every classroom, there are tons of “edge cases” from different perspectives.

I will note that this was the B's get degrees approach. If I had been aiming for graduate school, I would've needed to put in significantly more time to get A's and get picked for/complete undergraduate research projects.

Different people grasp things at different rates.

But, I think teaching skills, juuuust like any other skills can be taught and improved. So if we want good teachers and educators we need to build them up, not just relie on a few good ones to carry the day.

I personally reject the notion of competency in this as a matter of "giftedness", as something you either have or don't have. I think it's something you cam build. It's something you can teach. But you need to specifically aim for it.

…yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here.

> No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence

What are you talking about? Students are extremely invested in whether their teachers have attained objective competence. If all teachers suck equally, that is very bad for me as a student. If I'm rich, my parents can probably hire me tutors or take me to a private school. If I'm naturally talented, I can teach myself. Otherwise, I'm totally screwed.

So, yes, objective competence matters. It's extremely silly to pretend otherwise.

I doubt you can pull this off unless you’re willing (and able) to fire at least 25% of teachers who appear not willing (and under strong unions cannot be required) to outperform the current 90th percentile teacher.

There are great teachers; there are also entirely lazy/entitled teachers who will never willingly be at the performance of the current top 10%.

Yes? I don't understand what you're trying to argue here. Rising standards does shift expectations. But this all sounds good. So I really don't understand what you're trying to get at.

> if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough

There are several confounding factors. It might be that teachers getting better led to better students, it might be that universal access to information led to better students. I think you're overreaching with the claim that if students get better, it means instructors got better. But, sure, let's imagine I agree. So? I am of the belief that there is a ton of room for improvement.

I think that your post stems from the belief of 2 things. That education is zero sum. And that education has a filtering function not a quality improvement function. Both of which, I deeply deeply disagree with.

I do agree in the abstract that the "human social ranking" will be just as stratified as today. But that does not preclude many many classes of improvements.

Again, sorry if I am reading too much into your position, but I feel as if you run on a set of assumption here that you expect I share with you and that to me, feel alien.

But I believe your point is great — we usually focus on average vs non-average student, and you are absolutely right that we need to focus on an average teacher just the same: what is the most effective way for a possibly non-motivated, less capable teacher to provide instruction with?

If the really gifted are documenting their lessons and publishing the framework other really good teachers can pickup where they left off.

Having those curriculums in a standard format would go a long way to making components interchangeable and remixable.

Obviously, this starts mattering with more advanced education — not sure I can offer good insight for early education though :)

you either struggle to pay the bills and teach -- a thankless job, often -- or you take those gifts and double your pay working in industry.

Teachers are always going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks: no matter what fancy perfect education method people come up with, it's still not going to be any better than what an average teacher can teach. Or equivalently, what an average teacher understands herself. And in fact, the greater the discrepancy between the theory and the teachers, the worse the actual outcome will probably be...

If we still want to introduce some new fancy ways, at the very least, we have to begin by teaching the teachers, not the students. I think this is true even if we suppose that all the teachers are "gifted" so to speak. Otherwise, teaching isn't a science so each teacher will just do things their own way, which again will probably be a mess. Even gifted people are not all the same. Or if we say that's ok, then we wouldn't need an education system to begin with: just let each teacher teach in their own way and the world should still be great a place-- but I doubt it.

On a side note, I've come to see textbooks as a great invention in that sense: the students can learn a bare minimum even from the dumbest teacher as long as you make sure they follow the text book. Put another way, the textbook is like a baseline meta-teacher teaching the teacher along with the students.. I'm not a teacher myself but I have a lot of teachers around me including family members from whom I've heard this.

Before jumping to conclusions, maybe ask for context too? In particular, this was a high school for gifted math kids, and what I learned through regular classes let me pass math uni entrance exam in the top 10 (out of ~500 students) with no extra prep and even easily pass a couple of semesters of uni math with almost no prep (I took exams for two semesters after the first semester). My (lack of) working habits did catch up to me after that.

Also, for 4 years in two uni degrees, I did not get such a good teacher ever again, and there were a few who were easy to get great grades with.

Perhaps you can give some benefit of the doubt, though?

Sometimes a teacher can also do a great job of getting you interested (also important) but I was focusing on quality instruction.

“Anyone who applies the smallest amount of effort gets a B and anyone who really tries gets an A” is a path to being seen as a great teacher in the eyes of the students, especially the students who got a B.

I've responded to them directly what that got me (like great uni entry exam scores with literally zero prep for a maths program, and a couple of semesters of exam passing with minimal prep for a maths/CS/physics majors).

On top of that, I am talking of this almost 30 years later — perhaps I have some perspective and I am not a fresh out of school guy who just loves getting off the hook easy?

This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.

And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.

The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.

I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.

But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.

While it is great that you are willing to help those in need catch up, something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world. In fact, given the immense cost of going to university, allowing them into university before they've gained that preparedness is quite unethical. It used to be that university had stringent admission standards as to not prey on those showing up mindlessness. Why do you think that fell apart?

I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.

Of course I can't catch all of my students deficiencies (alone for the reason that I can't discover all), but my base assumption is that there are fields and topics everybody has gaps in and this is normal. As a software developer I have met people who worked a decade in the field, did good work and they haven't heard of a fundamental concept in networking before. Everybody has their gaps, even people I worked with who are the most knowledgeable people I have ever worked with sometimes have gaps in basic stuff. Maybe your former teachers neglected them, you never really had to apply it, or whatever. Normal.

Good teaching means you quickly recap the required knowledge before you apply it. I can't recap simple arithmetics, but if we need integration or trigonometry I will recap in a beginner course.

An important aspect of University is that it is more free than school education. That means it teaches people to organize their own learning to a much higher degree (which you also may need after you graduate or drop out). If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.

Absolutely. Which is why we've built a society where helping others close those gaps is natural and considered to be part of a life-long process. Again, it is great that you are playing your part, but you'd be doing the same if you were standing beside someone on an assembly line. It is not clear what the significance of university is, unless you are simply biased by it being central to much of your experience?

> it is more free than school education. [...] If someone has gaps they should get the feeling that they know what to work on and not hit a brick wall and shatter.

Which is why youth life doesn't end at school. In fact, school is supposed to be just a small part of that existence. We encourage them to do things like babysit young children, get jobs, etc. where hitting a wall and shattering is plain unacceptable and even catastrophic. This forces them to quickly get up to speed on how to learn and feeling like they can learn when things get real.

It is inevitable that someone will end up living a completely sheltered life and miss out on those fundamentals, but compelling them to first un-shelter themselves is what university entrance requirements are for. If you are regularly seeing students both sheltered and accepted into university, our fundamental assumptions about university have broken down and we need to step back. You working hard to offer a bandaid is noble, but not a good solution.

Meaning it is kind of like teaching a language in a engineering school: sure it is needed, but you can't just go all hardline on your requirements if you teach that class, otherwise you're going to lose everybody, because someone who studied engineering may have done so precisely with the background that they were bad with languages during school.

Same here. Art students are generally not the abstract maths type (although there are exceptions). My goal is to teach them at least that maths can be a very good tool in their belt if they want to know how things will work out before put into reality.

I still try to demand a lot of the students and they will certainly leave better educated than they entered. I just have to do it more in a boil-the-frog-way, presenting math as a way that allows us to avoid having to do unnecessary work or spend unnecessary money. This works pretty well.

I could of course also do it like my predecessor and just do a lecture on the physics of light, writing down equations nobody will understand and then have 90% fail and curse at my existence. But I don't really see the point of why I would want to do that in terms of the outcome.

That is the problem. It should not be forced. People naturally love learning and its a matter of facilitating that. Not going into details here as I have recent comments on this and other threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397182

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409530

I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.

I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.

Kids aren't just a blob of flesh that will some day become an adult. People don't take them seriously as individuals, but they should. That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

Maybe we shouldn't be forcing people to do drills and practice at a time when they lack the cognitive skills to force themselves to do drills and practice, and we most certainly shouldn't be penalizing those who struggle with such a regimen. We live in a marvelous age where you can learn about things through a wide range of media which do not require any one particular gating skill. So long as children are engaged, eventually they're going to reach a point where there are so many things they want to read that the effort to read is no longer daunting. If well structured, they'll find that in their previous learning they've actually already picked up quite a bit of understanding that helps them.

The very worst thing you can do to a child is try to shove them through a process that was not designed for them, pressure them to succeed where they were set up to fail, then tell them the failure is due to a lack of effort on their part.

The work is in setting up education programs where interest in cultivated and challenges are calibrated to the level of a student's abilities such that what they want to learn and what they need to learn are aligned. This is not easy, but life does not guarantee there is an easy way to do everything. Children are not the only ones who must learn the value of putting in the effort to reap a bountiful reward.

> That said, if left to their own devices, they simply will not do what is best for them. You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

Of course inexperienced children left to their own devices may not make the best decisions, and experienced adults must at times force them to do things for their own good. However you have to actually know what is better for them. So many terrible practices have been perpetuated because "I was ultimately better off for it." Once you accept that no one who came before you knew what they were doing, that they were all working with less information available than what you have now, and that in many cases you succeeded in spite of those shortcomings, not because of them, then you become cautious when playing the "I know better" card.

> I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn.

My kids learned to read without being forced. They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards. As far as they were concerned it was guessing game. Then on to reading books together designed for more whole word recognition, which is reading guns stories. I wrote a blog post about it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/educating-lucy-learning

> I am 14. I have many interests. I would love to have a career revolving around those interests, but in order to do this, I have to acquire various basic skills and distinguish myself. But I am 14, etc.

You can explain to a 14 year old. My kids had been out of school for years at that age and I had not had to force them to do anything. A teenager is perfectly capable of understanding that in order to achieve somethings they have to do other things. If they want a particular career you explain that as well as the interesting things they have to do some less interesting things. If they want to study a particular subject to a higher level they have to meet entrance requirements.

> You have to make them do stuff sometimes, including learning.

Sometimes, but rarely with learning. The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.

> They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards.

Whole language learning is a perfect example of this: The fifth word on the Wikipedia page for whole language is "discredited." [1] It's been linked to systemic regressions in literacy among children. Clever kids with lots of support can succeed despite whole language methods, but in general, whole language is significantly worse than phonics. I'm glad it worked for your kids — hands-on attention from a parent is an excellent way to learn :) — but in the classroom, it is empirically much worse than the alternatives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

> The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.

It is great for kids to be intrinsically motivated & I think the course material should be as engaging as possible, but often the kids are disengaged regardless, and I'm skeptical that there's some special trick we can pull to make the majority of kids passionate about fourth grade math class. A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division, and I think it's better to make learning a smooth and efficient experience than to jangle enrichment opportunities in front of their faces like cat toys. Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?" No! Just tell me what's going to be on the test and let me do the work!

The research shows whole word learning does not work well in a classroom setting. it works well one to one. If parents do it as a game with kids it works. Its worked for at least two generations in my family and we all learned to read at least a bit before we went to school, or outside school, or in a different language and alphabet (English at home) we learned in school. Well ahead of school in the latter cases, despite a phonetic alphabet in school!

> t is great for kids to be intrinsically motivated & I think the course material should be as engaging as possible, but often the kids are disengaged regardless

They disengage because they are forced to do things that are disengaging. As other have commented kids enter schooling enjoy learning, and a few years later have lost it.

> A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division,

Why do long division? There is lots of maths that is interesting. We are talking past each other here. I am saying the curriculum learning demotivating, and your answer is that kids need to be forced to do curriculum learning. I have specifically discussed maths in other comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48409430 and there are links to more detail about some of my experiences with maths from the blog post I linked to already.

> Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?"

If they needed to ask, they are already doing it wrong. I certainly never did anything like that. I cannot even imagine why you would ask a child that.

And no, something being useful and relevant does not make it interesting on itself. Even if you know it is useful you can just dislike having to learn it.

If you know its useful you are still motived. if you are motivated overall you will develop the discipline to get through what you do not find interesting and put the work in. it avoids situations like this from the first comment in this thread: "they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade."

Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.

I find it very frustrating that people just refuse to believe there cannot be a better way to do things despite all the evidence (many, many academic studies) and the experience of people who have tried doing something different.

> If you cannot compare costs per unit

You are missing the point. You can make learning to do these things fun so kids want to do it. They will find a need for basic arithmetic to do something else and learn at that point.

> do not understand basic biology

Why not? Lots of people do not know basic biology after going through the school system.

> or cannot compare evidence

Why would someone who follows interests not be able to compare evidence? Every field has arguments and requires evidence.

For all these, my experience (and the available more formal evidence) is that allowing kids to follow interests (with guidance, help, suggestions as required) leads to far better results than forcing them to sit through a rigid and boring curriculum.

The modern education system is far from perfect, but it did not evolve in a vacuum.

These supposedly better ways to do things are how we ended up with disproven ideas like while language learning and a generation of kids who struggle to read.

Being able to opt out of calculus is not the same as being unable to add single digit numbers. I do not share your belief that a child or the average parents are anywhere near qualified to follow their interests and produce people who are competent members of society.

I'm not saying this is a "bad" thing, having a well rounded education is important, but it's still a lot of stuff that a lot of students don't want to do.

Graduate school is more fun, and in some senses kind of easier (for want of a better word). Sure, the work is "harder" on an objective level, but by the time you've made it to grad school you're probably studying a subject that you think is interesting, so you don't mind powering through the hard parts.

At least that's how it was for me.

This is why I LOVED getting my MS. Just computer science all the time! Heaven! None of those pesky, worthless general ed classes!

I was just a dumb college kid. I'm convinced I'd have done better in life overall if I'd taken those GE courses seriously and made the effort to be a more well-rounded individual. How many chances do you get where your whole job is just learning shit? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.

Like, for example, I took a multicultural film course in college the first time around. I love movies, I love analyzing everything about movies, I love discussing themes and metaphors that are in movies, and I even love writing long essays pondering movies, and I enjoyed the class.

That said...is a multicultural film course really worth ~$1200 and like 10 weeks of my time? Maybe to some people, but it certainly wasn't for me.

The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action. And not from the school, from parents. Bad grades should result in punishment. It’s should be the parent’s job to find what motivates their kid to perform under those circumstances. Being grounded, withholding allowance, reducing screen time, whatever your child responds to. The entire issue is rooted in a parenting problem. The education system wants a silver bullet solution that can ignore that but it is pretty constant.

It its full generality that's probably true, but we probably don't fully appreciate how the classical school system kills interest. I've met many 6 year olds that were so curious about the world, you could tell them stuff about any subject and they would soak it up and ask for more. 2 years later, shaped by a school system that focuses on grading and pressure, and their interest in anything had tanked. It was very sad to see.

Maybe trying to avoid killing that natural curiosity would be a useful step in improving things.

> The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action.

I don't know if you forgot a negation somewhere. That's completely unsuitable to create interest, it fosters hate with a passion for subjects and school in general. I know it did for me.

Some families will decide to push harder, A's and AP classes are required, full effort in academics at all times. Some families will decide every assignment has to be completed and A's and B's with maybe an occasional C in a very hard class is acceptable and the student is left some bandwidth for social/non-academics. Some families take a simple pass/fail, as long as the kid finds a way to pass then they are good. So on...

The throughline is the parents are involved and monitoring the whole school year. Is homework being completed, how are your grades, talk to teachers when needed, etc. I feel this basic parenting is no longer common, parents want to blame the education system without taking any responsibility.

Sure we can incrementally improve education along the way, but we have to have a good faith expectation and base line of participation as a foundation or nothing will work.

Kids lose their curiosity because they witness their peers goofing around and not taking it serious. So if my friend's parents don't care and he's allowed to goof around instead of putting in the work, then I get a sense of FOMO or feel like a sucker for putting in the work. So everything devolves to the lowest common denominator. There's a lot more group dynamics and kids obviously don't know what is best for them, so adults really need to tell them what is expected. It's amazing how quickly a class elevates when you remove 1-2 distractions and likewise when the whole class is engaged and there is no distraction to begin with, it's ideal.

At some point, kids have to develop the discipline to do the things they need to do, whether they want to or not. Carrots are better than sticks, but in the real world there are a lot more sticks than carrots.

I was a passionate and interested kid. I had a lot of boring classes in high school, but I worked hard at them anyway, even when I didn't give a shit. I got good grades because I knew bad grades could jeopardize my future. That was my stick; kids who don't take that seriously might need a different one, but ultimately you can't keep them going with carrots forever. It's good if they can be intrinsically motivated, but kids often will not be, and they need to do things anyway.

Just like you can only make your lecture so interesting, a parent can only punish their child so much until the child has nothing to lose anymore or their choice becomes boredom with effort VS boredom.

Both sides should do their part for best results.

This time of year there's always a wave of videos that hit the internet that are basically outraged parents that their kids are not passing the year or graduating. The fact they are surprised by this at the end of the school year is usually not a lack of effort on the school's part and I feel this is a good indication of how aware/engaged many parents are.

I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.

I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.

So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.

And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.

This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.

It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?

If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.

Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

That is the grain of salt all education comparisons need to be made with.

But what I'd observe is that by many metrics the US hasn't really made major progress since our glory days. For instance real median wages from 1979 to present have increased by less than 13%. [1] It'd be disingenuous to compare that to China because they started from much less so obviously you expect dramatically higher growth, but I think it's reasonable to claim that we could have, and should have, done dramatically better than 13% growth in almost 50 years.

Another point is that the US was able to 'artificially' strengthen its economy owing to the dominance of the dollar and being the center of the tech boom. I say artificially because those things were obviously going to be liminal. We needed to leverage those advantages into something long-term. Instead it looks like we've been mostly treading water and largely wasted it all.

And now pair all of this with contemporary times with a sharply divided population, unsustainably low fertility rates, terrible education outcomes, and more. And no, I don't think it's reasonable to claim that the US is doing well, let alone to the point of being able to rest on our laurels as you're implying.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Also there is plenty of reason to think that China isn't giving honest numbers, but what's the true numbers are is impossible to know

And the numbers we're citing aren't just from China, but from third party organizations. In any case, the arguments don't come to debating numbers - the change is obvious and visible. It's not like they're claiming new record low unemployment while seemingly large numbers of people somehow people struggle to find jobs.

There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.

You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.

I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.

Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades.

I eventually more or less figured out how to force myself to learn things I didn't care about, and I did eventually get my bachelors and a masters, but that wasn't until my 30's.

Honestly, these are the most important things to learn. I spend a lot of time with my kids talking about ways to get your brain to do what you want.

"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "

Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.

While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically?

When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based learning group nor the traditional schooling group - which performed better and by what metrics?

---

It seems silly to say "This group who was instructed to rote memorize material could indeed perform better on a direct memory recall examination." and then close the door on problem-based learning.

And, exams aren't that bad! A well-designed exam can't be passed by merely recalling information, because it will give you novel problems that require reasoning with the material on a deeper level.

Also, explicit test prep—where you basically teach strategies for cheating the test—universally sucks, but presumably that's not what the study is measuring.

When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).

To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.

Why? At least for me, focused goals motivate more than diffuse ones. I could treat "the humanities" as a bunch of focused goals, but there would be a large number of them. That takes a fair amount of motivation.

https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/no-explicit-instruc...

Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.

A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.

I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.

I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".

We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.

I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.

Some of it was diagnosed ADHD (I was on Ritalin; I couldn't tell the difference, but my mom said it was huge; on almost every day I forgot to take it she would get a call from the school about my behavior), but much of it is something I still can't explain to this day.

I was a voracious reader, but if the book was assigned for school, I wouldn't read it.

Science was usually my best subject, but my personality clashed with my 5th grade teacher, so I spent one quarter of 5th grade just not doing it at all. As in when it was time for science, I read a book I had brought from home instead of participating. I did absolutely no work. I didn't even turn in the homework and I handed in blank pages for the in-class work. I received a D (the lowest passing grade) for that quarter, which rather confused me.

For 7th grade, I tested into Algebra, but at the time a teacher recommendation was also needed, and my 6th grade teacher declined to do so. I got a D in pre-algebra, with a B+ test-average being pulled down by my homework (or lack of it). I did however teach myself lock raking with a 5-pin lock that was on the file-cabinet in the back of the class.

I had the flu when I took the SATs so got what was (for me) a poor score. My guidance counselor told me that there was no need to retake, as no schools that wanted a higher SAT would take me with my GPA as low as it was.

It took me 11 semesters and two summer sessions to finish college with a 2.2 GPA.

I still remember the test I took in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. For reasons I don't understand I was in a panic for nearly the entire test. My hands were shaking. I don't think I even finished it. Yet somehow I passed it and that was a turning point in actually starting to like math for me.

I eventually hit a wall with both ordinary differential equations and vector calculus[1], which forced me to switch from Physics to CS.

1: And I thought vector calculus was the coolest thing ever; you can use Gauss's theorem to derive Archimedes's Principle from integrating the partial-pressures over an arbitrary shape, which is one of the most elegant things I've ever seen.

Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.

Unless it's changed since I was active, The Carpentries does not monetize content.

Younger children will conform more easily to e.g. structured education, teacher / parent authority, and basically do what they are told/asked to do. But at college / uni ages, you're dealing with young adults, some of which are only doing an education still because it's expected of them by parents/society. Or even when they want to be there, the motivation to do the work may not be there. yet.

It's difficult because their brain is still at high learning capacity, so one has to capitalize on that. But they also have other interests, like sleeping until midday and spacing out for ages.

Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others

But primary education needs to be a requirement for every child. Coming from a country with a large illiterate population, it's easy to see how hard their lives are compared to folks with an education but similar socio-economic backgrounds.

Now obviously implementing universal primary education and the details can be debated and need to be context specific.

Makes a lot of teacher not want to be there too!

The schools also have little interest in spending time and money on the higher performing students. They teach the minimum and focus resources on the failing ones to raise school averages.

Currently, tertiary education is where a lot of real learning takes starts to happen.

Hilarious assertion.

Absolutely false in my experience.

Someone who just starts to learn in college will be years behind the students who began in high school. They probably mistake it for not “being good at” a subject, but it can really keep people away from some areas. For example, hard sciences and math, where years of training problem solving skills makes solving new problems easy.

Not saying all primary/secondary education is good, but there is a massive gap between the good and the bad.

Yes, some things are taught and sometimes learned, but only superficially.

Even basic economics and financial literacy is taught way too late. These kids have been ogling phones, tablets, apps since they were in Kindergarten and then learn a few basics over a decade later?

Acceleration in Physics is not a difficult concept. Yet, it’s often taught late in secondary school - 6 to 8 years after teaching fractions.

Each year Math classes largely repeat the previous year with just a small extra wrinkle (except for the crazy year known as Geometry).

Pre-algebra, algebra I, algebra II, advanced math, Calculus I. That’s 5 years to poorly learn lines, parabolas, and integrals — longer than an entire college education.

Imagine if we taught grammar that way. All Of Elementary education would be stuck in the simple tenses! The future perfect continuous would be taught Senior year!

I’m not advocating teaching Calculus in 2nd grade but I think we should be doing better.

The phrase "real learning" is hard to define but I think I understand what you mean here, ie critical thinking. But this is only possible on the back of foundational literacy possible by years of primary education.

> Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.

Kids that "don't want to be in school" need to be treated with care and shown the value of education. Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers. The kids might not want to be there for a variety of reasons, but if you've ever interacted with kids informally you'll know they are typically curious and eager to learn about the world around them.

And if they aren't the reasons need to be understood and the kids would ideally be provided the care they need, although there reality is far more complex.

This exception does not invalidate the basic premise of primary education, the benefits of which can be seen globally in pretty much every context.

I have yet to see a suggestion on how to do that, that isn't obviously unworkable.

> Not ejected out of the system to protect teachers.

It is not teachers I worry about, it is the other students. Peer pressure matters and so put kids who want to be there with kids that don't and some kids will decide they don't want to either. (the reverse is also true, but there is no way to know and I wouldn't risk my kids who like school in an area where many kids don't want to be there)

But to the original point I was trying to make, troubled kids don't automatically mean they don't deserve education or we should allow them to fail out or give them the option of leaving primary or secondary education. We should really be making every attempt at figuring out ways to make them stay in school, given how stark the difference in outcomes are.

Looking back I am extremely appreciative of my time in school as much as I might've not liked it at the time, and my education has undoubtedly made me into a more intelligent and capable person in pretty much every conceivable way. Especially high school, pretty much everyone I know who's a high school dropout (and doesn't come from a wealthy family) is much worse off than their peers who finished it.

As for tertiary education, that is already completely optional. I attended university for 1 year, said "This ain't for me", and things worked out just fine for me.

You are probably right that most kids do not want to be in school, however most kids love learning. They do not have to learn in school.

Not do schools have to teach they way they do, and if they were more fun and interesting the kids would want to be there.

    > Problem is when one mixes kids who don’t want to be there with one’s that do, they all suffer.

But good luck reversing that trend.

As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.

I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.

But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.

I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

What did tutored students go on to do? Were they over represented in Nobel Prizes, hedge fund billionaires, heads of state?

Or did they do well on a meaningless test and then forget all about whatever they “learned” just like everyone else?

The entire field is absolutely littered with this problem. Everyone is targeting cholesterol and not all cause mortality.

We have a zillion natural experiments because there are so many schools in the world and within many of them teachers given a lot of leeway.

Does any of it make a damn bit of difference controlling for everything else? We have Waldorf schools teaching woodworking and cram schools shoving AP courses at eighth graders—-that’s a large difference, what do life outcomes show?

Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.

There are some early products around:

- https://www.khanmigo.ai/

- https://squirrelai.com/

I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?

To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.

I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.

here's a simple one: what is the right answer for how to use a road? more parking? more bike lanes? exclusive use for busses? we do not bid on roadway land, there is no market solution to this. you can come up with a lot of metrics for efficiencies and optimize for them, but which metrics matter? journey times? environmental impact? there are real disputes about waymos, it isn't enough to invent autonomous vehicles, there must be leadership on adopting technology. these are all political issues. okay, and you probably spend 30m to an hour on roadways every day of your life, you can't say, this isn't a real problem.

the greatest irony is it is exactly the families with this fairly myopic "all problem solving is math problem sets" point of view who disengage from political life, and despite their fixation on cultural hegemony, they have disproportionately little representation in politics. to be real, the reason parents care about math is because money. which should tell you everything you really need to know about its power to "solve problems."

Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.

Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.

I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.

No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.

Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...

I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.

I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.

[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(

Maybe briefly show how that adavanced topic will be taught and let them realize they can not possible even start to understand advanced topic because they are missing the more elementary pieces.

Similarly why they can't got further without doing their homework. How mastering the homework exercises let's you solve more problems.

I know that is not easy, the teacher may not quite understand how topics relate, why each of them is needed in a specific order, if they have not thought about that much.

The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles.

(This is why many teachers - I was among them - aren't immediately good at teaching concepts or subjects that come easily to them as they may be at teaching things they struggled a bit to learn. If you've had to break something down for yourself then you're ahead of the game when it comes to breaking it down for others.)

For a while I taught an "Improv For Teachers" workshop (I have a theatre background), which was really about listening to your class and being ready to adapt your lesson plan to where they are in their course of work, or even to their mood on the day. It was mostly elementary school teachers, and some of them really resisted that idea. I'm convinced, though, that that's an important skill: the most memorable and successful classes I've taught have happened when I've been able to take advantage of a student question or a student interest and run with it - sometimes not even knowing where it'll go - with the confidence that I'll somehow be able to pivot back to the curriculum. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable, and embrace a bit of fear, and risk a bit of failure to do it, hence why the Improv experience is so helpful.

Do you have teaching experience?

I also gave some presentations in IT-related conferences. People in conferences often get tired. So once as I entered the lectern I turned on a piece of music I had on my thumb-drive. It was the loudest hardest Rock'n'Roll I had. The audtorium had good loud-speakers. I think it woke the audience up. But soon I saw them nodding again. :-)

He always made a very special point to explain the "why" of everything. Not just "how is this used?", but he would also derive a lot of the formulas for us instead of having us just memorize forms. I think it makes you better at math in general; the whole point if mathematics education, in my mind, is to teach you the how and the why of things, not just to get to an answer.

I already loved math by the time I got into that class, but I attribute him as the reason that I love formal math so much.

So for at least some students, there might be some potential in convincing them that "it's what the big kids / cool kids / etc can do" might help motivate them. :)

That's honestly a mentality that I never completely got over.

When I was first learning to program when I was ~13-15, Python was already a fairly typical "beginners language", and my dad actually already had a book on learning Python.

Wanna know why I started with C++ instead? Because one of my classmates told me that it was too hard and that I wasn't smart enough to do it and only professional software engineers can.

I wasn't about to let some kid tell me I wasn't smart enough to do something that I knew I was capable of, so that afternoon I begged my parents to take me to a nearby used-books store and buy me a "Learn to Program in C++" book, and started on that. Eventually I also found a copy of the Sams "Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours" book that I read through online.

I still kind of have that mentality; I learned how to use Isabelle because I felt that that's what the "grown up" computer scientists use. I learned how to write Haskell because that's what the "smart" software engineers use. I learned how to use Vim as a teenager because that's what the "good" coders used.

It's probably not the best way to motivate yourself, but it seems to have worked out ok for me.

It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.

> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.

> [...] isn't interested in learning.

I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.

No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.

You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.

This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).

> They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Then they should not be there. That is the fundamental problem. Especially at that level why is anyone there who is not even motivated enough to study? Someone might not like ever undergraduate level course they need for a degree, but they should be able to push themselves through the boring stuff.

At school level, its difficult to make things work in a classroom setting with a fixed curriculum. Once I took my kids out of school they largely learned what they found interesting until they started studying towards doing exams. I made sure they learned core skills around reading, writing and maths, but they still had a say in what to do and how. A lot of it can be done by pursuing other subjects or hobbies. With the exams they had a choice (discussed, and they had to do maths and English language) but they had a choice) of what subjects to do and made choices that suited them, including some less common subjects (such as astronomy and Latin). Again, motivated and requiring very little actual teaching (they both entirely taught themselves Latin, and did other subjects with minimal help - although we did have tutors for English literature and classical civilisation, and varying amounts of parental help with other subjects).

A lot of the best universities (in the UK, at least) have tutorial systems that rely heavily on small groups rather than lectures (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews - that I know of). A lot more individual attention is a long proven method of getting better results.

At school level it might look very expensive, but that is balanced by needing a lot less time per student. A few hours of one to one a week is cheaper than school.

Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.

There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.

All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.

Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.

Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.

> The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have.

Do they actually have it? Do you think schools that have fixed a fixed curriculum are successful at teaching this to everyone? Try picking some average people and asking them to explain Boyles Law, or why and how Rome became an Empire or the causes of the Second World War.

Is the level of minimal knowledge the same for everyone regardless of talents? Some kids will know before they are teenagers than most adults ever will about any of the topics picked, and many more.

I am confused about why you think knowing Latin somehow excludes knowing history of physics or biology.

You are arguing from a position of not having an experience of eduction outside the school classroom setting. I am speaking from experience and from having actually read up on the evidence.

I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).

Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.

I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.

Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.

Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.

It's the circle of liiiiiife......

The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".

Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.

"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"

To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.

But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.

I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.

I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.

I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.

The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.

Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.

How children learn is not how adults learn.

I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.

I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.

The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.

The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.

When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.

So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.

Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.

I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?

Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?

A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].

Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.

[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.

[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.

I hate divisive language like this, but Trump's only major concrete "policy" (if you can call it that) during his 2024 campaign was that he was going to somehow lower grocery prices by instituting tariffs, so basically "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices".

That kind of idiotic quasi-doublespeak should have been a disqualifier for anyone with at least a two-digit IQ, but apparently it's not. The only scenarios that I can see for this:

1) People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs.

This is so idiotic because even if that were true, which it's not, those costs would still be ruled into the price. "No such thing as a free lunch" is very literally the first thing I learned in high school economics.

If people are that stupid then they can be blamed for their idiotic decisions to vote for a despot.

2) They didn't believe in the tariff rhetoric, and wanted to vote for Trump based on a nebulous "personality".

This is stupid. If you really are voting for people because you think you'd "like to have a beer with them", then you should be blamed when bad things happen from that idiotic decision.

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Kamala wasn't a great candidate, but I really hate this sort of "both sides"-ing people do to try and engage in apologetics for people's ridiculous decision to vote for the guy who, as far as I can tell, has literally no expertise in anything.

Many believed this, think about how many Americans do not understand the Progressive Tax system. I believe it has been intentional for many years to keep up some of these misunderstanding of basic governance.

I don't really feel like I needed to be taught that tariffs would raise prices. I'm not some hypergenius, it really seems pretty obvious to me.

I don't think I'm that smart though.

Or more practically and relevant to this? Number one Google search on Election Day? "Did Biden drop out?" Not the world's most informed electorate.

You can't talk about higher concepts with people on the low part of the scale, I mean come on we are adults and experienced this in our lives 1000x over. It can easily end up insulting to them or make them feel (even more) sidelined. trump's campaign aimed very effectively in that below-100 crowd, for the second time. Easy to understand statements even if completely incorrect, appeal to negative emotions instead of rational facts.

At the end, everybody knew what kind of POS they are dealing with and everybody voted accordingly. Talks about strong/weak candidate are beyond useless and pathetic excuse and attempt to shift blame - even if you have a choice between strong leader hitler and weaker freedom-liking candidate its ridiculous to state 'but the other person was weak so I went against all my moral values'. If one actually has them - maybe thats core of the issue, many people like to pretend but deep inside are not that nice or caring.

I didn't downvote your comment (and couldn't even if I wanted to because it's a direct reply), but I did think the comment was pretty silly.

When I worked at BigCo [1], we were interviewing a candidate for a position. He was pretty good, and we were in the process of making him an offer, but he was asking for more money and trying to negotiate his salary higher.

I don't have an issue with this, BigCo has plenty of money, but other people, including a manager, were complaining. They felt that this is a good job and he shouldn't be doing this for the money.

I, not realizing that this was controversial, said "yeah, but come on, we all do this for the money."

Some people got defensive, explaining that they love the job. I responded "sure, it's good to like your job and your coworkers, I'm not trying to discourage that, but if BigCo stopped paying you then you'd probably stop showing up for work. At least I would hope so."

They kind of begrudgingly agreed, and the day went on as normal. The next day, I have an impromptu meeting scheduled with my manager's manager, explaining that I have a "bad attitude" and he mentioned that specific comment as a reason that this meeting was being called.

Now, to be fair, at the time I did have a bad attitude (in no small part due to at-the-time-undiagnosed sleep apnea), but the fact that I got in trouble for mentioning something that is objectively true really confused me. We weren't working for a charity, we weren't trying to cure cancer, we were working for a for-profit corporation. Of course we were doing it for the money, just like the corporation hired us so that they could make more money.

But I guess people just like to believe a collective lie.

[1] I'm sure you might be able to go through history and find the specific BigCo, and that is fine, but I politely ask that you don't post it here in relation to this comment.

A pretty high level one is that our jobs are meaningfully making a positive difference in the world, when in fact, most white collar jobs are just producing bullshit to grease the corporate wheels of modern society. Most people don't like to admit that though, so we tell ourselves little lies and go along with the corporate narrative. That's what you experienced.

But it goes deeper the more truthful you try to be. Down near the bottom of this pile of self deception is that humans are making the world a better place, when in fact we're ruining the world, causing environmental damage at an unprecedented rate in geological history, all the while exhausting the readily-accessible non-renewable resources, like hydrocarbons and minerals, that'll make the chance of a better future civilization on Earth highly unlikely.

I just think it's important to be honest with yourself, and realize that a job is transactional. When I work for BigCo, I am selling my time and/or expertise for money and/or benefits (e.g. health insurance). If the company doesn't feel like they're getting their money's worth out of me they might fire me. If I feel like I'm getting a reasonable enough compensation then I might go to another company.

Such is the way with capitalism; I don't love it, but until we change to a different system that's just how it is. I absolutely hate when companies say "we're a family here", because that's simply not true. I don't get cut from being my parents' son because I'm not meeting some bottom line this quarter.

Some examples:

- Russians (or insert any other dictatorship trying to appear otherwise) faking "democratic" elections. Who are you kidding, yourselves? No one believes it. Just tell the west: to hell with your democracy. Like, I just don't see why they need to go though that charade that everybody can see through.

- A country where pretty everybody is stealing from each other, and they all know it, and are still trying to fake uprightness to each other. I guess most countries fit this scenario. Like, we all know what's going on. The world does not end if you come right out and say to the effect of, yeah, we steal from each other (if not in so direct a fashion). But for some weird reason, people seem to feel it is important that the elephant in the room remain unacknowledged.

- The world is a very shitty and harsh place, especially to those with seemingly little status. Injustice abounds. Stupidity and absurdity reigns. And yet, almost all of us are expected to put on a happy, confident, optimistic face. Those unable to keep all the horror in are labeled freaks, anti-social, maladjusted, etc. People that fail are labeled lazy, not driven, etc. And yet, we pretty much all know the truth, but we like to lie to each other.

It's hard to understand.

1. Our society is a complex system of independent actors, most of which are willing to lie for their personal benefit. It's not hard to argue that given enough time, there will emerge lies that most people do believe.

2. Most people aren't capable of holding a thought in their mind without being emotionally affected by it. This means that if some problem isn't immediately actionable, they don't want to discuss it, because that makes them feel bad.

3. Most people are simply stupid and do not think logically.

Because there is a conspiracy of rich elites who are trying keep you down. They don't even hide it, and they've been so successful at it that they have bought their way into the highest levels of government. They actively campaign to ensure regular peoples' taxes subsidize their lavish lifestyles and then actively try and turn us against each other instead of us collectively realizing that we need the people who actually do the work much more than we need the people who leach off of it.

- The candidate was asking for more than what the others on the panel made, which was a no-no.

- The candidate was asking for what they currently make while being younger/less tenured than the others; also a no-no.

- The others on the panel had cost savings to the company as a performance target.

- They had beef with you and the candidate.

- They preferred another candidate, and they were fine with the comp.

I don't dispute that they probably had a beef with me; my manager's manager wasn't completely wrong to say I had an attitude problem at the time. I'm going to blame undiagnosed sleep apnea a bit, but I think there was a lack of maturity on my end as well.

The reason I blame the sleep apnea is that multiple people have commented how much nicer I see to be after I got treatment for it. I've also probably just grown up a bit since then as well.