Yes. It’s amazing how memorable people find that one episode. Props to the writers.
tanagrabeast
Donated $105, making my contribution the true baseball bat in the infamous $110 question.
May we get these things right more often.
I need some advice on spaced repetition software.
I teach high school English to underclassmen who skew towards “totally unmotivated”. I have been using spaced repetition principles for years (using games, puzzles, and other spaced reviews) to help with vocabulary and terminology. These do effectively engage many of the poorly motivated.
But recently, I feel like smartphones have become ubiquitous enough among students that I’m looking for software I could use as a quasi-official SRS companion app with my students. I think many of them would use it, but only if they experience very minimal frustration setting it up and running it. My wishlist:
(1) Free app on both Android and iPhone (I’d say it’s about 50⁄50 with my students) (2) Companion web app with cloud sync to mobile apps. (3) Very easy to use and update with new cards regularly. I would like to be able to post weekly deck additions on my teacher web page that students can add to their deck.
Anki, which I use for my personal learning, seems to come closest—but the $25 cost of the iPhone app is a problem, and I worry that using the web app on the iPhone be too much of a hassle. I also worry that the “add external cards to your deck” procedure is a bit too hairy as well.
Has anyone seen anything that comes closer to my needs than Anki? Thanks!
I just played around with Memrise, and it does indeed look perfect for my audience. I had begun my SRS search with gwern’s excellent exploration of the topic, where Memrise does not appear. Thank you so much!
As a counterpoint, let me offer my own experience rediscovering cryonics through Eliezer.
Originally, I hadn’t seen the point. Like most people, I assumed cryonauts dreamed that one day someone would simply thaw them out, cure whatever killed them, and restart their heart with shock paddles or something. Even the most rudimentary understanding of or experience with biology and freezing temperatures made this idea patently absurd.
It wasn’t until I discovered Eliezer’s writings circa 2001 or so that I was able to see connections between high shock-level concepts like uploading, nanotech, and superintelligence. I reasoned that a successful outcome of cryonics is not likely to come through direct biological revival, but rather through atomically precise scanning, super-powerful computational reconstruction, and reinstantiation as an upload or in a replacement body.
The upshot of this reasoning is that for cryonics to have any chance of success, a future must be assured in which these technologies would be safely brought to bear on such problems. I continue to have trouble imagining such a future existing if the friendly AI problem is not solved before it is too late. As friendly AI seems unlikely to be solved without careful, deliberate research (which very few people are doing), investing in cryonics without also investing in friendly AI research feels pointless.
In those early years, I could afford to make donations to SIAI (now MIRI), but could not afford a cryonics plan, and certainly could not afford both. As I saw it, I was young. I could afford to wait on the cryonics, but would have the most impact on the future by donating to SIAI immediately. So I did.
That’s the effect Eliezer’s cryonics activism had on me.
This looks like a valuable book, and as a teacher I will probably read it soon. That said, at the high school level, it often feels like we are already swimming in “best practices” but being pushed under by crushing workloads. Better practices generally mean higher loads—sometimes not in the long term, but always in the short term.
Think of it this way. When you have 180 students per day, anything you do that relates to individuals gets multiplied by 180. Did you design a killer rubric that lets you read and give useful feedback on a submitted paragraph in just one minute? You’re amazing, but you will still need three solid hours to go through them all. And remember that this is on top of all of your other lesson planning and parent communication and extracurriculars and meetings and administrative paperwork etc etc.
And you have school again tomorrow.
In the same dangerous motion of not quitting after my first year, I privately swore to doggedly accumulate true effectiveness without sacrificing my personal life on the altar of public education. In the eyes of many, this makes me a bad person. How dare I draw boundaries around teaching as though it were just a job? Six years later, though, the tortoise is clearly winning this race. The corpses of the hares smolder by the side of the road; they were never as fast as they looked.
I will no doubt find some useful gems in this book, but they will be vastly outnumbered by the tears I shed for all of the great techniques I won’t see any realistic way to implement.
Thank you for writing this review.
I skimmed through Teach Like a Champion when it was first released, largely on the strength of the New York Times article about it. My take on it closely echoes this fair and critical Amazon review.
In summary, Champion can show new teachers a lot of low-hanging fruit—valuable techniques veterans like myself already use but remember figuring out the hard way. In particular, Champion shines a light on hard-to-explain non-verbal concepts that good teachers don’t always realize they’ve mastered and wouldn’t think to tell newbies about. I expect that a new teacher will get more immediate mileage out of Champion than from How Learning Works. Veteran teachers, though, are more likely to be unimpressed and notice some real blind spots in Champion. For example, the linked review’s discussion of SSR (sustained silent reading) vs. “popcorn” reading is, in my own experience, spot on.
I will make a note to revisit this comparison when I have read HLW.
Yes. Go laceless. I only discovered a few years ago that there is such thing as men’s close-toed shoes that can be appropriate semi-formal workwear yet never need to be tied. I wear something roughly similar to this at work: Amazon and a more casual variation in my free time. Very comfortable, loose-sneaker feel on the inside. An elastic-bound tongue ensures uniform snugness, rather than fluctuating between too tight and too loose. Once broken in, you can slide them on and off without hands, as you might with slippers or flip-flops.
But more importantly than the ergonomics… why waste time time tying shoes? Why risk injury tripping over laces, or getting them caught places?
If merely looking to elevate into yellow/red levels of arousal through safe means, let me suggest a digital approach: not “ego shooters” but rather 1 vs. 1 competitive Real-Time Strategy (RTS) vs. anonymous human opponents. I’m sure one can build up a tolerance, but a 2-month fling with Starcraft II taught me that stress gets amplified by the following:
1.Complex cognitive demands.
2.Knowing that no-one will come to your aid.
3.Feeling like your opponent has absolutely no reservations about eviscerating you (probably helped by not being able to see them)
I studied the game intently, advanced above the 50th percentile quickly… and had to give it up. By the end of each round I was often too shaky to manipulate my mouse. I would have to run in place and then pace for long periods to lower my heart rate. The clincher, though, was the impact on my temper. I would become enraged at little things, and the mindset could persist for 12 hours or more.
For me, playing felt too much like being a hunted animal. Interestingly, a friend of mine gave up the game for similar reasons—but described his experience as feeling too predatory, like he was stalking and literally killing his opponents, with resulting damage to his own psyche.
He may have been better than I was.
This is probably my dream job… the job I would do for free if I had the means. But any idea of the salary range? Could someone with a family (and a spouse’s teacher salary) possibly hope to live close enough to Berkeley to be effective?
That’s a fair question with a surprisingly complicated answer.
Before I get to it, let me explain that I had a weekly ritual for reminding them about the potential for personal Anki use and the value I placed on it. Every Monday morning started with a written reminder on the board and an oral reminder from me that the class deck had been updated, uploaded, and was now ready for them to download. I invited them to pull out their phones and download the latest deck at that time, and gave them a couple of minutes to do it. Depending on the season, I would also remind them that “Anki is school EZ MODE”, and “Anki is our study guide” for the mid-term, final, etc.
Of course, way more phones came out than were ever downloading my deck, but I felt the cost was acceptable.
This brings up another limitation of Anki: the fact that it costs 25$ on iOS. From a survey I gave the year before, I know that more than half of my students use iPhones. I made sure they knew they could be using it for free on their desktops, linking their desktop profiles to Ankiweb, and studying for free from their phone’s web browser… but that smells like effort. Effort AND cost? They rejected it out of principle, offended by the suggestion.
Anyway, I didn’t directly poll my students because I felt like I already knew the answer from the downloads and didn’t feel it was worth the risk of lowering the prestige of Anki further. You see, by about 6 weeks in there were maybe 1 or 2 students per class still downloading. If I asked the class to “raise your hand if you’re using Anki on your own” those 1 or 2 people would have felt like losers, and maybe not even raised their hands. The same effect would have been only moderately reduced with a written survey, because the first thing students do after a survey is ask their peers what they wrote. Either way, they would have gotten the impression that “nobody is using Anki on their own”. You know how studies show that teens think their peers are having way more sex than they really are? I chose to let my students think their peers were getting way more Anki. Never underestimate the power of social proof on teenagers.
Another fun dilemma: It occurred to me that whole-class Anki use was probably cannibalizing personal Anki use. I suspect that many of the ~25 people who downloaded my deck during the first two weeks soon stopped because it felt redundant. I was left to choose between two scenarios:
Scenario 1: We use Anki together in class, and about 110 of my ~180 students get something out of it, but only 3 people get the most of it by using it on their own.
Scenario 2: We don’t use Anki in class. 25 students (optimistically) get the most out of Anki. Nobody else gets anything from it.
Even if I felt like total learning was higher in Scenario 2, I’m strongly incentivized to choose option 1. I know who those 25 students would be. They were destined to pass the state test and get As in my class with or without Anki.
Guess which scenario looks better on my annual performance review?
If I were currently teaching honors students I would also be less skeptical. My district persistently pushes its honors and AP offerings in a way that leads to an evaporative cooling of work ethic in the lower classes. I think I only had a handful of students using Anki on their own because pretty much everyone with enough ambition to have been persuaded by me was in honors.
Not seeing the benefits of what I do in the classroom goes with the territory. I do plan to give the presentation again when we start back up in a few weeks.
I don’t give nearly as many tests and quizzes as you might think, as they are costlier than commonly appreciated. Not only do I have to write them and score them, I have to dedicate precious, precious class time to them. Lots of class time, because we have to wait for everyone to finish, and in my classes some students will always take forever. More than that, even, because if I give anything that smells like formal assessment, I’m required to send students with accommodations to a special testing room where they can get extra help and time. So not only do I have to work out the logistics on that, some of my most needy students might be missing from my class for an extra day.
My testing minimalism raises some eyebrows. I get away with it because my students consistently beat expectations on the tests people care about the most.
You’re absolutely right, though, about assessments acting as an additional review. I do give some regular “take-home quizzes” in the form of vocab/terminology matching sheets or crosswords just to have something to put in the grade book.
Also, that team-based review game we play on the interactive whiteboard has very high overlap with my Anki deck. This did help keep some vocab words that were languishing on the bottom of the Anki deck in circulation. Not every class has the same leeches and due cards on a given day, though, so it’s not really practical to tweak the game that precisely.
By the way, gwern, let me thank you directly for your web page about spaced repetition. This experiment never would have happened without it. My “heartfelt presentation” is basically the CliffsNotes version of your research, and I attribute you at the end of it.
Because of this, people are reluctant to become teachers and the occupation tends to attract folks who lack better options.
It has not been my experience that people go into teaching because they lack better options. You’re right that it’s a hard job and the pay isn’t commensurate. This means, though, that there are almost always “better options”.
People go into teaching because they like to teach. Some want to feel like they’re making a difference. Some like the challenge of it. It’s complicated. Yes, many regret the decision and then feel trapped in education. But they usually make it out eventually.
What I will say, though, is that our country doesn’t get nearly enough of its very smartest to think seriously about teaching kids, especially if the subject they could teach is one that’s easy to get an exciting and high-paying job doing instead.
According to this theory, Teach for America helps by making teaching in to a high-prestige occupation that you’ll want to put on your resume.
In my experience, American teachers generally do enjoy a certain amount of prestige with a wide cross-section of the population. But it’s mostly a kind of “moral” prestige that comes from that combination of low pay and difficult conditions. Many people see teachers the same way they see charity workers. This perversely helps keep salaries low, I think, because there’s a sense that teachers shouldn’t be in it for the money.
Teachers have an appreciation day, you know. Of course, I have a stand-up comedy bit about how you know you’re getting shafted if there’s an appreciation day in your honor...
Also, I’m gonna be obnoxious and ask you what you think of Paul Graham’s essay on English classes since you’re an English teacher.
I love Paul Graham’s writing, and that essay in particular. But he’s operating several meta levels higher than my student writers, and at least one level higher than me. I might get two or three students a year who need to stop worrying so much about structure and follow their guts more. The rest just need to master the traditional 5-paragraph essay so they can pass the state test and survive the rest of high school.
I don’t disagree with any of this. Overall, Anki is very smart about how it prioritizes. The only behavior I really question is the one I highlighted in my “Triage” section:
if you tell Anki to review a deck made from subdecks, due cards from subdecks higher up in the stack are shown before cards from decks listed below, no matter how overdue they might be.
There is talk of me giving some training on it, yes.
Teachers are so different from each other, though, and we easily become set in our ways. I’ll count myself lucky for getting even a few to try it, and some of those may be doomed to fail because of their very different styles.
That said, the foreign language department, at least, should have a way easier time capitalizing on SRS than I did. I’ll try to give them some extra attention.
Done.
(I didn’t need a whole lot of convincing.)
I expanded MIRI’s pool of quality candidates for their office manager position by submitting my application.
If you can see yourself stepping into that role, please do likewise!
I think you may overestimate my odds in both domains, but the sentiment is appreciated.
That was an interesting link you posted. I read it with much affirmative nodding, and only the occasional impulse to make a snarky remark about the cute little sample size :)
Greetings.
I’m a long-time singularitarian and (intermediate) rationalist looking be a part of the conversation again. By day I am an English teacher in a suburban American high school. My students have been known to Google me. Rather than self-censor I am using a pseudonym so that I will feel free to share my (anonymized) experiences as a rationalist high school teacher.
I internet-know a number of you in this community from early years of the Singularity Institute. I fleetingly met at a few in person once, perhaps. I used to write on singularity-related issues, and was a proud “sniper” of the SL4 mailing list for a time. For the last 6-7 years I’ve mostly dropped off the radar by letting “life” issues consume me, though I have continued to follow the work of the key actors from afar with interest. I allow myself some pride for any small positive impact I might have once had during a time of great leverage for donors and activists, while recognizing that far too much remains undone. (If you would like to confirm your suspicions of my identity, I would love to hear from you with a PM. I just don’t want Google searches of my real name pulling up my LW activity.)
High school teaching has been a taxing path, along with parenting, and it has been all too easy to use these as excuses to neglect my more challenging (yet rewarding) interests. I let my inaction and guilt reinforce each other until I woke up one day, read HPMoR, and realized I had long-ago regressed into an NPC.
Screw that.
Other background tidbits: I’m one of those atheist ex-mormons that seem so plentiful on this page (since 2000ish). I’m a self-taught “hedge coder” who has successfully used inelegant-but-effective programming in the service of my career. I feel effective in public education, which is not without its rewards. But on some important levels teaching at an American public high school is also a bit like working security at Azkaban, and I’m not sure how many more years I’ll be able to keep my patronus going.
I’ve been using GTD methodologies for the last eight years or so, which has been great for letting me keep my mind clear to work on important tasks at hand; however, my dearest personal goals (which involve writing, both fiction and non) live among some powerful Ugh Fields. If I had been reading LW more closely, I probably would’ve discovered the Pomodoro method a lot sooner. This is helping.
My thanks to all who share their insights and experiences on this forum.