A story: School refuses to suspend a disruptive student who has no intention of passing any classes and often does not even attend. There’s pressure to ‘keep the suspension rate down,’ so the metric is what gets managed.
I probably already wrote this thousand times online, but I believe the root of the problem is conflict of interest: the same institution and the same people are supposed to both teach and examine the students. Guess what is the easiest way to improve the impression that you are teaching well?
The first step is grade inflation, because if I give everyone a free A that proves how wonderful teacher I am. The second step is a complete loss of discipline, because if I don’t notice any problems, that proves they don’t exist.
Re: phones in schools
Banning phone use during lessons should be common sense. Otherwise, what’s the point of being there?
Banning phones in classrooms seems like a nicely defensible Schelling point.
I hope people won’t go as far as banning phones in school (the entire building), because sometimes my kids need them for after-school activities, or I need to tell them what they are supposed to do after school.
Tangentially, I find it ironic that there are so many articles published by various psychologists on the dangers of computer use for children, but much fewer on dangers of phones. I guess the non-tech adults already treat phones as a normal part of their life, while computers are still the tools of Satan.
a school without smartphones probably cannot teach its students AI
LOL. Is that what his kids tell him when they get punished for using a phone during class? “Daddy, I was just doing research on how to build the new generation of artificial intelligence and solve the alignment problem, but the stupid teacher wanted me to focus on boring things such as multiplication!” 100% plausible.
I guess we all love to hate school. But most of us are not contrarian enough to believe that literally everything that violates the school rules must be a meaningful work of an oppressed genius.
Student suspended for three days for saying ‘illegal alien,’ in the context of asking for clarification on vocabulary
lists “Free Trade” as part of a “Pyramid of White Supremacy” in the same category as literally “Slavery”
How is this even possible? I mean, this is Trump era, if there is anything positive about it, I would expect that people are no longer afraid to push back at least against the most obvious woke nonsense.
We are now getting our kids’ grades sent directly to our phones after every assignment/test and woo boy am I happy that I grew up in the 90s with very limited internet.
We have a similar app in Slovakia, it keeps spamming me all day long (homeworks, new grades, lunch, new article on a school website), about ten messages every day. In theory there are settings where you can specify what notifications you want to achieve, in practice I have no idea which checkbox refers to what, so I keep it on to avoid accidentally missing one of the very few important messages. :(
If you are ‘better at explaining,’ but your explanations work less well? Skill Issue!
Yep. Perhaps instead of “explaining”, give the kids some exercises that illustrate the topic.
We were already supposed to learn this lesson from the failure of the online courses a few years ago. It does not matter how well you explain, if the kids remain passive, they will remember nothing. For an online course to be effective, it needs to interrupted every few minutes and give the student a problem to solve, which will verify that the student understood that part of lesson. I guess the same applies to human teachers.
The “Knowing Better” guy sounds like a troll. I mean, even the name is already like that. But I agree that many people believe similar things. (I actually wrote a post on a similar topic recently.) I know schools that teach negative numbers in the second grade, and there is nothing complicated about that, if you do it the right way. The right way is to visualize it: to draw a line or a sequence of squares or circles with positive numbers on one side, zero in the middle, and negative numbers on the other side. (Instead of e.g. counting on fingers.) There you trivially see how adding is moving the the right, and subtracting is moving to the left.
Patrick McKenzie: I could get behind a compromise: a) Mandatory annual testing for homeschool students and anyone below 10th percentile ordered to attend public school. b) Any public school teachers whose class below 10th percentile identified as Would Have Been Fired If They Were Homeschoolers:
This proposal sounds nice, but it ignores the fact than not all students are the same. It would be unfair for both teachers and homeschooling parents of retarded children.
I was tempted to suggest a prediction market (something like: the school predicts how well they are going to teach your child, and it is okay to homeschool if you do a comparable or better job), but the obvious problem is that the child could “prove” the school wrong by simply giving wrong answers at school tests on purpose.
But I like the concept that homeschooling parents don’t have to be perfect; only comparable to school.
As for ‘learning to work with others’ this is such a scam way of trying to enslave my kid to do your work for you, I can’t even.
Yep. If I wanted my child to spend a lot of time teaching others, it would be more efficient to have them tutor younger children (not classmates) for some pocket money, or maybe try making a YouTube channel.
I probably already wrote this thousand times online, but I believe the root of the problem is conflict of interest: the same institution and the same people are supposed to both teach and examine the students. Guess what is the easiest way to improve the impression that you are teaching well?
The first step is grade inflation, because if I give everyone a free A that proves how wonderful teacher I am. The second step is a complete loss of discipline, because if I don’t notice any problems, that proves they don’t exist.
Re: phones in schools
Banning phone use during lessons should be common sense. Otherwise, what’s the point of being there?
Banning phones in classrooms seems like a nicely defensible Schelling point.
I hope people won’t go as far as banning phones in school (the entire building), because sometimes my kids need them for after-school activities, or I need to tell them what they are supposed to do after school.
Tangentially, I find it ironic that there are so many articles published by various psychologists on the dangers of computer use for children, but much fewer on dangers of phones. I guess the non-tech adults already treat phones as a normal part of their life, while computers are still the tools of Satan.
LOL. Is that what his kids tell him when they get punished for using a phone during class? “Daddy, I was just doing research on how to build the new generation of artificial intelligence and solve the alignment problem, but the stupid teacher wanted me to focus on boring things such as multiplication!” 100% plausible.
I guess we all love to hate school. But most of us are not contrarian enough to believe that literally everything that violates the school rules must be a meaningful work of an oppressed genius.
How is this even possible? I mean, this is Trump era, if there is anything positive about it, I would expect that people are no longer afraid to push back at least against the most obvious woke nonsense.
We have a similar app in Slovakia, it keeps spamming me all day long (homeworks, new grades, lunch, new article on a school website), about ten messages every day. In theory there are settings where you can specify what notifications you want to achieve, in practice I have no idea which checkbox refers to what, so I keep it on to avoid accidentally missing one of the very few important messages. :(
Yep. Perhaps instead of “explaining”, give the kids some exercises that illustrate the topic.
We were already supposed to learn this lesson from the failure of the online courses a few years ago. It does not matter how well you explain, if the kids remain passive, they will remember nothing. For an online course to be effective, it needs to interrupted every few minutes and give the student a problem to solve, which will verify that the student understood that part of lesson. I guess the same applies to human teachers.
The “Knowing Better” guy sounds like a troll. I mean, even the name is already like that. But I agree that many people believe similar things. (I actually wrote a post on a similar topic recently.) I know schools that teach negative numbers in the second grade, and there is nothing complicated about that, if you do it the right way. The right way is to visualize it: to draw a line or a sequence of squares or circles with positive numbers on one side, zero in the middle, and negative numbers on the other side. (Instead of e.g. counting on fingers.) There you trivially see how adding is moving the the right, and subtracting is moving to the left.
This proposal sounds nice, but it ignores the fact than not all students are the same. It would be unfair for both teachers and homeschooling parents of retarded children.
I was tempted to suggest a prediction market (something like: the school predicts how well they are going to teach your child, and it is okay to homeschool if you do a comparable or better job), but the obvious problem is that the child could “prove” the school wrong by simply giving wrong answers at school tests on purpose.
But I like the concept that homeschooling parents don’t have to be perfect; only comparable to school.
Yep. If I wanted my child to spend a lot of time teaching others, it would be more efficient to have them tutor younger children (not classmates) for some pocket money, or maybe try making a YouTube channel.