Smartphone as laptop replacement?

[Simon_Jester]

This is mostly because unlike the secondary schools, colleges are allowed to use surgery and chemo on whatever bits of the cancer get to them.

Because they're free to tell you "you flunked this course, take it over, and YES we will be collecting more of your money for the second go-round." So they can maintain a basic minimum level of effort that all students who actually remain in the college are required to respect.

At my level, kids who basically sit around doing nothing all day for months can get away with it if their parents are ineffectual and the teachers don't have the time to pursue truly epic levels of paperwork that have to be rammed through an adminstration with a lot else on its mind. And downright psychopathic kids who actively encourage others to be disruptive, to not learn, and to neglect their studies can get away with it, likewise for months at a time, if their parents are overprotective and stupid enough about not trusting other adults to warn them their kid's a psychopath.

Ultimately, kids learn to follow the basic behavioral norms needed by adults through a combination of reward and punishment. Remove the punishments or make them toothless, and if they personally happen to get their jollies by messing up the school around them... they will continue to do so indefinitely.

We're all carrot and no stick, and we're practically required by law to give the carrot to anyone who asks for it.

And as a corollary, instead of being a mark of respectable attainment for, say, 80% of the population to attain for free, just by being willing to work for it... The high school diploma's become a meaningless distinction for 95% of the population so that anyone who actually wants to be able to wear the "I'm not a complete dolt" label now has to spend thousands of dollars going to college. This has been greatly to the profit of post-secondary education, but it essentially amounts to us partially privatizing what was once publicly available, state-funded education delivered by the high schools

[Iroscato]

<snip>

Indeed, I've had some first hand experience of this in the UK education system. I was on a course to gain a diploma in business studies (an abysmally run shitshow in itself that still makes me cry-laugh to this day, but that's another story). Now back in my parent's and grandparent's day, a diploma or equivalent was a pretty big damn deal. These days, however, such things are so pitifully watered down that they mean next to nothing. As far as I know, every single one of my classmates either got a fairly normal, average day job or went to university to delay getting their fairly normal, average day job by another few years and £20,000 or so.
Incidentally, almost everyone in the class had both a blackberry and an Iphone, which they were all constantly using. Dern kids...

[Adam Reynolds]

And as a corollary, instead of being a mark of respectable attainment for, say, 80% of the population to attain for free, just by being willing to work for it... The high school diploma's become a meaningless distinction for 95% of the population so that anyone who actually wants to be able to wear the "I'm not a complete dolt" label now has to spend thousands of dollars going to college. This has been greatly to the profit of post-secondary education, but it essentially amounts to us partially privatizing what was once publicly available, state-funded education delivered by the high schools

And the unfortunate consequence of this is that college degrees(especially in the arts) are becoming nearly as worthless. And the quality of students that go to college seems ever worse. I remember having a discussion with a physics professor about how he has actually had students ask him for less word problems. In Physics.

What subject and grade level is it that you teach? My mom taught 8th grade English until last year* and had frequently commented that they seem to be less respectful each year.
* She switched to 3rd grade, though mostly due to school politics rather than the kids.

As for the original comments about the issue with relying on a smartphone for information rather than your brain, see here:

[Jub]

I'm going to open this with a bit of a story about myself, because I think I've given the wrong impression of my opinion of teachers in this thread. Frankly I respect the hell out of them, I had several great teachers through out grade school and each of them have left an impression on me. I've also taught classes myself.

With one exception, it wasn't to a classroom of kids who didn't want to be there, but back in Army Cadets as part of silver star certification I had to come up with lesson plans to teach the first year green stars to teach them things like drill or the parts of a daisy air rifle. It was fun and I was good it at and it gave me the confidence to teach a high school class. I was in a computer lab for a spare and the teacher wanted everybody to turn off their monitors and face him, I'd heard the speech before having taken his course already and knew that it really didn't demand the full attention of the class. Long story short he called me out asking if I could teach his class better so I stood up, asked him to step away from his computer so I could use the projector, and taught the fucking class. I think my lecture lasted about a third the time his would have, and clearly I didn't leave anything because he didn't have much to say when I gave him his seat back.

I actually wanted to become a teacher myself, so I asked around if it was a profession worth getting into and the common answer from teachers both working, retired, and in the early stages of their careers was don't. They said the wages were low, the hours were long, teaching to exams was a suckers game, and that if they'd known the bullshit they'd have to put up from the admin teams and politicians they'd have chosen another career. So please, just because I didn't get a degree in the field don't think I'm totally ignorant of it.

Except then you do not have an accurate measure of what that individual person knows, which means you cannot certify that they know what they are expected to know.

The fact that you have a good friend willing to tell you how to do your math and write your essays doesn't mean you should get a diploma. It doesn't mean you should be accepted to college. It doesn't mean you should get hired.

All the knowledge is in your friend's head, so all the credentials should go to them, not you. And who in their right mind would hire someone for money to do a job when every time they hit a problem of more than trivial difficulty, they have to call a friend? At that point it makes more sense to just hire the friend and have done with it.

Yes and no. Make the tests more of a real world application of knowledge and allow people with various skill sets to contribute. Social skills are a thing that can be just as important as how well you do on a test and the ability to network is often more important to future success in the real world than any knowledge you may or may not have learned in school. For myself personally I'd have cared a hell of a lot more about doing well on a test if it wasn't just my grade that would suffer. That's why I'd favor group testing, allow students to work in pair or trios and allow them to secretly vote on how much each other person contributed to the project. If anybody gets consistently low scores then it's time to look at why which leads to the next point.

Don't use tests as a means of figuring out what people know. Use pop quizzes that are worth next to nothing in the overall scheme of grades and let the students know that they aren't worth cheating on. Then to keep them relevant let the students choose to use their last quiz score in place of the grade that would have been given to a homework assignment. It means doing well on quizzes means you can blow off homework once in a while; frankly the kids that are acing the quizzes don't need the homework anyway and the kids that do badly on quizzes would probably rather take the homework score anyway.

It's more work for the teacher to do all this of course so I know why this isn't likely to happen in the current system of long hours and reams of unpaid overtime. I'm asking you to look past what it would take to implement and give me an honest take on the failure points of the rough idea I've sketched out above. I'd do it myself, but frankly you have the training and are actually in the field, I'm just some chump who wishes teaching were less politicized to death so I could actually consider joining the field.

Actually, schools all over the US (I can't speak for other nations) are scrambling to adopt modern technology. The problem isn't resistance to the technology. The problem is figuring out how the hell to get useful results from the technology. Especially when special software is called for.

Don't speak so confidently about practices in a profession of which you are ignorant.

I addressed this above, but my take isn't that teachers and school systems want to change but that they can't. Getting the software needed is out of the budget, finding time to plan the changes is tough enough with the long hours teachers and admin teams already need to put in, and getting any changes implemented in a sensible way is like pulling teeth given all the different people that need to sign off on changes to the way a core subject is taught. So scramble as they might the school system is about a decade late in reacting to something they should have seen coming.

Educators remember. Believe me, we do.

The bureaucratic administrations that run the school districts forgot.

In my district, I can give the kid an F all I want in first year algebra. They still wind up in geometry and second year algebra courses next year. It's a matter of county policy.

Why is that so? I couldn't tell you.

But it's sure as heck not the educators making this systematic mistake.

Sorry, I worded that badly. I meant that the system as a whole had forgotten that in order to grow people often need to confront failure.

The cell phones are an issue because they make an existing problem worse. The children were already undisciplined and insulated from the consequences of failure, and now they have a new way to fail, one that is if anything more seductive and appealing than the ones before.

The broken-ness of the system comes, quite simply, from the American taxpayer's insistence that 100% of their children receive a high school diploma, and that anything less indicates failure on the school's part, when in reality the failure is usually on the part of the parent or the student.

Imagine a school that is basically required, by policy from above, to keep every kid who doesn't try to blow up the school or murder someone with an axe. Regardless of whether those kids are wandering the halls instead of attending actual classes. Regardless of how many classes they fail because they never actually try to do anything. Regardless of how constantly they behave in grossly disrespectful and disruptive ways, regardless of how blatantly they spit upon the people trying to provide them with a free all-expenses-paid education.

Welcome to my world.

I am aware of these issues and I know that it isn't the teachers that want things this way.

The only reason American schools are even keeping performance on par with what it was in the 1960s and 1970s is because, even as they took away our ability to protect students from the chronic troublemakers and delinquents among their ranks, educators did a great deal of research into how to teach more effectively.

There have been major breakthroughs in theory of education in the past few decades, and computers enable a lot of very interesting teaching techniques, which a lot of educators are very actively trying to use, directly contrary to Jub's claims.

Interesting, the techniques used to teach didn't seem to change drastically from year to year as I went up through the grades. Granted I can only really speak about my high school experience as I wouldn't have been paying that much attention at a younger age. Can you go over a few of the ways teaching might have changed from say 2000 when I started middle school to when I graduated in 2006? I'm curious to see if the changes actually came into the system I was in and I missed them or if the area I was in might have been behind the curve.

The main obstacles to accomplishing this are the very bad disciplinary environment, and the massive waves of standardized testing that drain off so much of the time and energy we need in order to innovate. Basically, we can't afford to come up with technological solutions to our problems because we're too busy coming up with technological solutions to how to administer tests.

I fully agree and I wish there was a good fix in sight, but education reform isn't exactly a campaign winner unless it has the words 'cuts spending' or 'raises test scores' next to it.

[Simon_Jester]

And as a corollary, instead of being a mark of respectable attainment for, say, 80% of the population to attain for free, just by being willing to work for it... The high school diploma's become a meaningless distinction for 95% of the population so that anyone who actually wants to be able to wear the "I'm not a complete dolt" label now has to spend thousands of dollars going to college. This has been greatly to the profit of post-secondary education, but it essentially amounts to us partially privatizing what was once publicly available, state-funded education delivered by the high schools

And the unfortunate consequence of this is that college degrees(especially in the arts) are becoming nearly as worthless. And the quality of students that go to college seems ever worse. I remember having a discussion with a physics professor about how he has actually had students ask him for less word problems. In Physics.

What subject and grade level is it that you teach? My mom taught 8th grade English until last year* and had frequently commented that they seem to be less respectful each year.

All high school levels, mathematics that varies at the basic level (to the younger students) and includes calculus at the high end.

The calculus kids are fine, except that they are underprepared due to lack of rigorous drilling in certain areas, and that they are not formally schooled in formal logic, which was a problem with our school curriculum at least since the 1990s when I attended.

The algebra/geometry kids are, yes, getting less respectful as time goes on, although the change from year to year is harder to detect. Part of it may be the student body coming more and more disproportionately from students who live in poverty. Kids in a single-parent household struggling to make ends meet may be adequately brought up, but a lot of them aren't or are too easily influenced by their peers into acting as though they aren't.

As for the original comments about the issue with relying on a smartphone for information rather than your brain, see here: http://xkcd.com/903/

That kind of use of the Internet is not a problem. Using the Internet to look up facts is fine and good because in order to make use of those facts, you must encode them into your brain. In that comic, sure, "Me" doesn't know relevant information before, but after helping "Mike1979" there's a reasonable chance that he's learned something about spark plugs. It's win-win.

What's a problem is when people use online calculators to figure everything out for them, then don't possess any of the knowledge encoded in that calculator. Or when they use digital media to share all their work, and then have no ability to check the quality of that work because they don't understand any of it.

[hr][/hr]

I'm going to open this with a bit of a story about myself, because I think I've given the wrong impression of my opinion of teachers in this thread. Frankly I respect the hell out of them, I had several great teachers through out grade school and each of them have left an impression on me. I've also taught classes myself...

The problem is more that I think you show a lack of respect for our professionalism and willingness to innovate. Granted some of the older teachers actually have trouble learning how to use computers to do things, which is a problem in all human endeavours at the moment. Granted that some of us "don't see the point" of specific innovations, or complain about innovations that make some of our problems worse.

But there is massive effort going into using modern technology to teach better, using new knowledge of sociology and scientific research to teach better, using every damn thing under the sun to teach better. Indeed, in a real sense I'd argue that the teaching profession is desperately scrambling to find ways to teach better in the face of an increasingly hostile 'environment' of students who will, by the nature of their parents and their society and themselves, learn less well.

With one exception, it wasn't to a classroom of kids who didn't want to be there, but back in Army Cadets as part of silver star certification I had to come up with lesson plans to teach the first year green stars to teach them things like drill or the parts of a daisy air rifle. It was fun and I was good it at and it gave me the confidence to teach a high school class. I was in a computer lab for a spare and the teacher wanted everybody to turn off their monitors and face him, I'd heard the speech before having taken his course already and knew that it really didn't demand the full attention of the class. Long story short he called me out asking if I could teach his class better so I stood up, asked him to step away from his computer so I could use the projector, and taught the fucking class. I think my lecture lasted about a third the time his would have, and clearly I didn't leave anything because he didn't have much to say when I gave him his seat back.

Okay, one blustering idiot.

I will note, by the way, that having a random student teach the class works a lot better if the students are more respectful of that random student than they were of the teacher. Students' willingness to respect and heed their teacher is a 'force multiplier' for any conceivable method of instruction and education.

I actually wanted to become a teacher myself, so I asked around if it was a profession worth getting into and the common answer from teachers both working, retired, and in the early stages of their careers was don't. They said the wages were low, the hours were long, teaching to exams was a suckers game, and that if they'd known the bullshit they'd have to put up from the admin teams and politicians they'd have chosen another career. So please, just because I didn't get a degree in the field don't think I'm totally ignorant of it.

If you lack knowledge of what teachers actually do, such as might be gained by actually doing it... you may not be totally ignorant of it but you still lack a lot of important knowledge.

Getting to drive a few times does not mean you understand the freight business. Troubleshooting your own computer three or four times with a pile of Google searches does not mean you understand IT. Attending a church service once does not mean you understand the philosophy, theology, and social dynamics of that religious institution. Nailing together two pieces of wood does not mean you are a carpenter.

And teaching one sequence of lectures as a de facto teacher's assistant, plus one case of delivering one canned lecture to a class that was willing to listen to you and not to the instructor, does not mean you understand education or are qualified to condemn teachers for what they do and do not do.

Except then you do not have an accurate measure of what that individual person knows, which means you cannot certify that they know what they are expected to know.

The fact that you have a good friend willing to tell you how to do your math and write your essays doesn't mean you should get a diploma. It doesn't mean you should be accepted to college. It doesn't mean you should get hired.

All the knowledge is in your friend's head, so all the credentials should go to them, not you. And who in their right mind would hire someone for money to do a job when every time they hit a problem of more than trivial difficulty, they have to call a friend? At that point it makes more sense to just hire the friend and have done with it.

Yes and no. Make the tests more of a real world application of knowledge and allow people with various skill sets to contribute. Social skills are a thing that can be just as important as how well you do on a test and the ability to network is often more important to future success in the real world than any knowledge you may or may not have learned in school...

And yet the school's job is to certify your knowledge, not your social networking skills. Like it or not, this is what schools are expected to do, reliably and accurately- ensure that you acquire knowledge, certify that you possess it and can use it effectively, and send you on your way.

Giving degrees to well-socialized ignoramuses defeats the purpose of even having a school at all, because the well-socialized ignoramus will be very unreliable if not actively useless in many capacities that a well-educated graduate would be useful for.

For myself personally I'd have cared a hell of a lot more about doing well on a test if it wasn't just my grade that would suffer. That's why I'd favor group testing, allow students to work in pair or trios and allow them to secretly vote on how much each other person contributed to the project. If anybody gets consistently low scores then it's time to look at why which leads to the next point.

When the class is working in pairs or trios, basic social dynamics will make it very easy for the low-voted people to work out who voted against them and defeat the purpose of a secret ballot. Also, friendships will incentivize people to falsify votes. But that notwithstanding...

What you're suggesting are group projects which are all very well and are indeed actively strongly advocated as best practices in modern education. You just don't know that because you have neither educational nor work experience on how to teach.

The problem is that at the end of the day we are still called upon to give grades and more importantly diplomas to individuals, not groups. And if a test is required for graduation or some such, good fucking luck getting parents to accept that their child's ability to graduate is determined in part by a score that comes from other children's votes on how much work they did.

Don't use tests as a means of figuring out what people know. Use pop quizzes that are worth next to nothing in the overall scheme of grades and let the students know that they aren't worth cheating on...

They'll cheat anyway. That notwithstanding...

Yes, Jub, this is the distinction between a formative assessment and a summative assessment, congratulations on independently reinventing that by the way! You are now caught up with the theory of education circa 1970, at least in one respect.

Unfortunately, in my school district various level of government insist on knowing what students know, so that they can judge whether we the teachers are doing our jobs correctly... which means they need 'teacher-proof' exams that are secured and detailed so that the results can't be falsified... which in turn means a handful of Big Standardized Tests as opposed to a swarm of little quizzes. And which means we can't make up our own quizzes for this purpose. The standardized tests then become mandatory.

Plus, the kids STILL use various electronics, still cheat on the pop quizzes and homework, and still fail to pay attention in class because they'd rather be instant-messaging on their phones. Your proposed reform is not bad, but does not solve the problem we're actually talking about even when it is implemented, which I know because it is implemented in many classrooms in my own building.

Then to keep them relevant let the students choose to use their last quiz score in place of the grade that would have been given to a homework assignment. It means doing well on quizzes means you can blow off homework once in a while; frankly the kids that are acing the quizzes don't need the homework anyway and the kids that do badly on quizzes would probably rather take the homework score anyway.

The kids that do badly on quizzes may be the ones too chronically irresponsible/underparented to do their homework. Then what? But that notwithstanding...

In a properly designed arrangement, quizzes and homework serve totally different purposes. Homework is for drill and practice to get basic skills polished to a usable extent, and/or for large scale projects that require more time to work on than can realistically be provided in class. Pop quizzes tell you what the students can and cannot do on demand. Letting one substitute for the other entirely is not a great idea.

It's more work for the teacher to do all this of course... so I know why this isn't likely to happen in the current system of long hours and reams of unpaid overtime. I'm asking you to look past what it would take to implement and give me an honest take on the failure points of the rough idea I've sketched out above. I'd do it myself, but frankly you have the training and are actually in the field, I'm just some chump who wishes teaching were less politicized to death so I could actually consider joining the field.

Actually it wouldn't be much harder work- grading the pop quizzes isn't harder than grading the homework, and grading projects is already a normal part of teacher's workload because unbeknownst to you, lots and lots of teachers are incorporating more and more group projects anyway and it's not like they weren't a thing ten or twenty years ago even.

The main problem is that it doesn't actually make things much better. Its intended purposes are either already achieved by other means, or cannot be achieved sufficiently by this means due to external factors.

It's sort of like trying to improve the efficiency your clunky un-aerodynamic car by slapping on a slipperier coat of paint. It can't hurt, it might help a little, but to a large extent car paint is already a smooth surface and making it incrementally smoother won't really change anything significantly.

I addressed this above, but my take isn't that teachers and school systems want to change but that they can't. Getting the software needed is out of the budget, finding time to plan the changes is tough enough with the long hours teachers and admin teams already need to put in, and getting any changes implemented in a sensible way is like pulling teeth given all the different people that need to sign off on changes to the way a core subject is taught. So scramble as they might the school system is about a decade late in reacting to something they should have seen coming.

All of this is accurate in my experience except the 'software too expensive' part because frankly it's easier to shake loose money for new software than it is to shake loose money to get my broken windowframes fixed. We've gotten numerous pieces of new software and hardware in the past two years; my windowframes are still broken so that the windows have to be propped open with two-by-fours to stay open.

But at that point, don't pin the responsibility on teachers. Many of the worst aspects of the existing system, at least in the US, are the result of impositions by politicians and bureaucrats who do not listen to teachers, and instead listen to slick presentations by for-profit consulting and testing firms, or to ideologues who disapprove of the whole idea of public education in the first place.

Interesting, the techniques used to teach didn't seem to change drastically from year to year as I went up through the grades. Granted I can only really speak about my high school experience as I wouldn't have been paying that much attention at a younger age. Can you go over a few of the ways teaching might have changed from say 2000 when I started middle school to when I graduated in 2006? I'm curious to see if the changes actually came into the system I was in and I missed them or if the area I was in might have been behind the curve.

The changes are incremental rather than being drastic. This isn't like IT where a revolutionary new piece of computer hardware is released in Year Y and is ubiquitous in Year Y+2. It's more like "we've known for a long time what works, either by experience or by science, and implementing it is a struggle."

Sort of like, oh, getting people to adopt vaccines and public sanitation to control the spread of disease. It took decades, sometimes with active official opposition, to get people to start making use of even the most basic scientific facts about how disease spreads. And even today you get crank movements that try to turn back the clock or undo scientific reforms.

Many of the key ideas date to the mid-20th century. Among them:
-Vygotsky's theories that evolved toward the idea of the zone of proximal development, which did not become widely popularized in the West until after the fall of the Soviet Union (and was rejected within the USSR for ideological reasons)
-Work by Bloom and other, paralleling researchers, on the distinctions between high-order and low-order thinking skills, and on the proper relationship between drill, synthesis of knowledge, and application of knolwedge in a given unit of instruction.
-Widespread research into the role of group learning and individual learning

The problem isn't discovering new research, the problem is getting anyone to implement the old research. Your experiences at your high school would have been governed almost entirely by your own school district's approach to these issues, so I can't predict what would have happened when.

The main obstacles to accomplishing this are the very bad disciplinary environment, and the massive waves of standardized testing that drain off so much of the time and energy we need in order to innovate. Basically, we can't afford to come up with technological solutions to our problems because we're too busy coming up with technological solutions to how to administer tests.

I fully agree and I wish there was a good fix in sight, but education reform isn't exactly a campaign winner unless it has the words 'cuts spending' or 'raises test scores' next to it.

Ironically, cutting spending by expelling the 5% of worst-behaving kids would actually save quite a bit of money and give the school system in general far more educational 'bang' for the financial 'buck.'

The problem is that we'd have to increase spending on prisons and juvenile detention facilities to compensate...

[White Haven]

Only one part of your omnimegapost came as a surprise to me, unfortunately. It's a doozy, however; group projects are seen by educators as a good idea? In what parallel dimension is it considered a good idea to either allow useless assholes to latch ontot he one competent person in the group and try to drag him/her down while being hauled along to a passing grade? Because in my own experience that's been the actual real-world result of a group project almost every time I can remember suffering through one. Less so in college admittedly, but still definitely a trend even there.

[Zaune]

Because collaborating with other people on large tasks is a thing that happens pretty often in the real world, presumably.

[White Haven]

What also happens in the real world are consequences for being a colossally useless fuckwit in a business environment, something that Simon has pointed out quite eloquently is not the case for public school students at the moment. That being the case, the only real outcome I see from the proliferation and continuation of group projects is to splash the frustration and misery that arises from that around from the educators onto the few students who actually do give a shit in the first place.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

A lot of business environments are like that, too. Loud asshats often fail upwards and become your manager. I hated group projects in school, too, but they were good training for dealing with some of the useless bosses I had later.

[Adam Reynolds]

A lot of business environments are like that, too. Loud asshats often fail upwards and become your manager. I hated group projects in school, too, but they were good training for dealing with some of the useless bosses I had later.

Perhaps that is part of the point. Just like how learning to write papers in college is mostly about learning how to bullshit effectively. Though more generally I suspect that it is that projects teach people to work together which is required in life in general.

In my experience on group projects I can think of literally two cases in which my group actually was effective. The first was in a regular history class in which my group happened to be a third of our school's academic decathlon team(oddly none of us took AP history). The second was economics taught opposite AP Government(and thus with only AP students).

More generally I wonder how much education could be improved if less people tried to go to college in general.

[Jub]

The problem is more that I think you show a lack of respect for our professionalism and willingness to innovate. Granted some of the older teachers actually have trouble learning how to use computers to do things, which is a problem in all human endeavours at the moment. Granted that some of us "don't see the point" of specific innovations, or complain about innovations that make some of our problems worse.

But there is massive effort going into using modern technology to teach better, using new knowledge of sociology and scientific research to teach better, using every damn thing under the sun to teach better. Indeed, in a real sense I'd argue that the teaching profession is desperately scrambling to find ways to teach better in the face of an increasingly hostile 'environment' of students who will, by the nature of their parents and their society and themselves, learn less well.

My blame doesn't rest with the teachers or any but the worst administrators, the issue isn't with the end user side of things so to speak. My blame rests with the policy makers and the voting public who won't let kids fail and who seem to think standardized test are a meaningful measure of anything besides the ability to take a standardized test.

Okay, one blustering idiot.

I will note, by the way, that having a random student teach the class works a lot better if the students are more respectful of that random student than they were of the teacher. Students' willingness to respect and heed their teacher is a 'force multiplier' for any conceivable method of instruction and education.

This teacher was a pretty massive bore so it wouldn't surprise me if he's lost a lot of his audience by that point. Plus no matter how many times you'd taken the course he wanted to give the same lecture. He was a nice enough person, but frankly he was far more suited to teaching drafting than animation; he taught both because they used the same computer lab.

*It was repeatable for credits with different projects each time you took it, but not set up as separate courses.

If you lack knowledge of what teachers actually do, such as might be gained by actually doing it... you may not be totally ignorant of it but you still lack a lot of important knowledge.

Getting to drive a few times does not mean you understand the freight business. Troubleshooting your own computer three or four times with a pile of Google searches does not mean you understand IT. Attending a church service once does not mean you understand the philosophy, theology, and social dynamics of that religious institution. Nailing together two pieces of wood does not mean you are a carpenter.

And teaching one sequence of lectures as a de facto teacher's assistant, plus one case of delivering one canned lecture to a class that was willing to listen to you and not to the instructor, does not mean you understand education or are qualified to condemn teachers for what they do and do not do.

I'm not attempting to condone any particular teacher, I'm just saying it's something I muse about and not something I'm completely ignorant about. As you've by now seen I do respect your opinion, if I didn't I wouldn't be here engaging with you.

And yet the school's job is to certify your knowledge, not your social networking skills. Like it or not, this is what schools are expected to do, reliably and accurately- ensure that you acquire knowledge, certify that you possess it and can use it effectively, and send you on your way.

Giving degrees to well-socialized ignoramuses defeats the purpose of even having a school at all, because the well-socialized ignoramus will be very unreliable if not actively useless in many capacities that a well-educated graduate would be useful for.

It depends on the field they attempt to go into after high school, loads of what students are expected to learn won't be used as taught after high school even if it's all useful to some extent. Plus if you don't intend to go into post secondary after high school you could cut a lot of courses in the last two years and replace them with finance, home economics, shop, and drivers ed courses*. Take Australia for example, they allow students to opt out of classes after grade 10 and opt into work experience programs that get them the same level of certification, but doesn't put them in a position to go to a post secondary school easily. It allows those that don't want to go into college to gain a foothold in the work force before they're expected to be independent. I think you'll agree that high schools need to do a better job of sorting wheat from chaff and further sort droppings from the chaff; but that was a digression.

Yes schools do need to certify what a student knows, but they should allow specialization of knowledge and a narrowing of expectations earlier and stop testing in such a broad but ultimately shallow way with standardized tests. After all, specialist > generalist in nearly all fields.

*This may be done in some places, and I know for certain that part of it is done today in Australia, but I don't think as a rule high school does a good job of getting kids ready for the real world.

When the class is working in pairs or trios, basic social dynamics will make it very easy for the low-voted people to work out who voted against them and defeat the purpose of a secret ballot. Also, friendships will incentivize people to falsify votes.

Sounds like real world working conditions to me. Some guys will skate by on their gift of gab, some guys are smart and hard working but too meek to avoid being used, and yet others will be able to organize others but are useless when it comes to doing things on their own.

What you're suggesting are group projects which are all very well and are indeed actively strongly advocated as best practices in modern education. You just don't know that because you have neither educational nor work experience on how to teach.

Modern teaching must be amazing compared to what I had a decade ago if you're to be taken at face value.

The problem is that at the end of the day we are still called upon to give grades and more importantly diplomas to individuals, not groups. And if a test is required for graduation or some such, good fucking luck getting parents to accept that their child's ability to graduate is determined in part by a score that comes from other children's votes on how much work they did.

I don't give a fuck what the parents think, they're by and large even less qualified to judge what a good education looks like than I am and we both agree I'm not a great judge of that. I care about finding the best way to ensure kids leaving high school have the best shot in the real world while not assuming that parents will have any meaningful input in teaching their kids life skills. I suspect that worrying less about what they know and more about how kids function in real life situations will be better for all but the top 20 or so percent of students.

Yes, Jub, this is the distinction between a formative assessment and a summative assessment, congratulations on independently reinventing that by the way! You are now caught up with the theory of education circa 1970, at least in one respect.

Hey, you can't say that's bad for a guy who's never taken a teaching degree before and is trying to work out solutions without a formal education to work off of. I've never claimed to be an expert at this and you'd do better to think of most of my posts, especially in this thread, as aggressively spit balling ideas than trying to insult teachers.

Unfortunately, in my school district various level of government insist on knowing what students know, so that they can judge whether we the teachers are doing our jobs correctly... which means they need 'teacher-proof' exams that are secured and detailed so that the results can't be falsified... which in turn means a handful of Big Standardized Tests as opposed to a swarm of little quizzes. And which means we can't make up our own quizzes for this purpose. The standardized tests then become mandatory.

We both already know this sucks and that the reality is far from what would be ideal. Can we step back from that and look at what would be ideal without worrying about the reality of implementation for a while?

Plus, the kids STILL use various electronics, still cheat on the pop quizzes and homework, and still fail to pay attention in class because they'd rather be instant-messaging on their phones. Your proposed reform is not bad, but does not solve the problem we're actually talking about even when it is implemented, which I know because it is implemented in many classrooms in my own building.

So in your ideal world, what would you do as a teacher to educate students without removing their phones and laptops?

The kids that do badly on quizzes may be the ones too chronically irresponsible/underparented to do their homework. Then what?

In an ideal system those kids then fail or are shunted to a different class that caters to their needs. The fact is that we spend to much time ignoring the top and middle of the class to try to drag the bottom, kicking and screaming all the way, to something near par. But we both already agree on this so is it okay if we don't take my ideas as anything more than ideal world spit balling?

In a properly designed arrangement, quizzes and homework serve totally different purposes. Homework is for drill and practice to get basic skills polished to a usable extent, and/or for large scale projects that require more time to work on than can realistically be provided in class. Pop quizzes tell you what the students can and cannot do on demand. Letting one substitute for the other entirely is not a great idea.

It wouldn't be entirely, most units are what a half dozen to a dozen lessons and there might be what a quiz or two per unit? If you assign homework each lesson and limit the quiz swapping idea to only homework where it's less likely to be a detriment (like problem lists rather than large (ideally) exam replacing projects) it is less of an issue. Plus those that can recall knowledge on demand are likely the ones that absorb knowledge quickly and are less likely to need to have homework heaped upon them. Less homework is half the reason I took honors courses in school.

Actually it wouldn't be much harder work- grading the pop quizzes isn't harder than grading the homework, and grading projects is already a normal part of teacher's workload because unbeknownst to you, lots and lots of teachers are incorporating more and more group projects anyway and it's not like they weren't a thing ten or twenty years ago even.

Group projects weren't the focus of the curriculum in my school, sure group discussion was encouraged, but most homework was meant to be done solo or with limited quiet talking among students seated near one another. I think that it might due to encourage even more group work as the core focus and make solo work more of an exception.

The main problem is that it doesn't actually make things much better. Its intended purposes are either already achieved by other means, or cannot be achieved sufficiently by this means due to external factors.

It's sort of like trying to improve the efficiency your clunky un-aerodynamic car by slapping on a slipperier coat of paint. It can't hurt, it might help a little, but to a large extent car paint is already a smooth surface and making it incrementally smoother won't really change anything significantly.

Yes, but how likely are you as a teacher to make a dent in the large scale external policies? If all you can do is freshen up the paint while lobbying for a better car isn't it better to use the best damned paint you can?

]All of this is accurate in my experience except the 'software too expensive' part because frankly it's easier to shake loose money for new software than it is to shake loose money to get my broken windowframes fixed. We've gotten numerous pieces of new software and hardware in the past two years; my windowframes are still broken so that the windows have to be propped open with two-by-fours to stay open.

That's broken as shit, but it makes sense. New stuff is shiny and gets better reviews than fixing infrastructure and the problem of shiny new road versus fixing a crumbling overpass is typical of the thinking of many American politicians.

But at that point, don't pin the responsibility on teachers. Many of the worst aspects of the existing system, at least in the US, are the result of impositions by politicians and bureaucrats who do not listen to teachers, and instead listen to slick presentations by for-profit consulting and testing firms, or to ideologues who disapprove of the whole idea of public education in the first place.

I'm not meaning to come off as blaming the teachers Simon and I hope my words above in this post make that clear to you.

The changes are incremental rather than being drastic. This isn't like IT where a revolutionary new piece of computer hardware is released in Year Y and is ubiquitous in Year Y+2. It's more like "we've known for a long time what works, either by experience or by science, and implementing it is a struggle."

Sort of like, oh, getting people to adopt vaccines and public sanitation to control the spread of disease. It took decades, sometimes with active official opposition, to get people to start making use of even the most basic scientific facts about how disease spreads. And even today you get crank movements that try to turn back the clock or undo scientific reforms.

I can understand that.

Many of the key ideas date to the mid-20th century. Among them:
-Vygotsky's theories that evolved toward the idea of the zone of proximal development, which did not become widely popularized in the West until after the fall of the Soviet Union (and was rejected within the USSR for ideological reasons)
-Work by Bloom and other, paralleling researchers, on the distinctions between high-order and low-order thinking skills, and on the proper relationship between drill, synthesis of knowledge, and application of knolwedge in a given unit of instruction.
-Widespread research into the role of group learning and individual learning

You've got me engaged and wanting to learn more about this subject, can you give me an idea of what to plug into google scholar to learn more on these concepts?

The problem isn't discovering new research, the problem is getting anyone to implement the old research. Your experiences at your high school would have been governed almost entirely by your own school district's approach to these issues, so I can't predict what would have happened when.

That makes sense.

Ironically, cutting spending by expelling the 5% of worst-behaving kids would actually save quite a bit of money and give the school system in general far more educational 'bang' for the financial 'buck.'

I agree with you on this. I was in some schools where this was an issue (they were close to the dumping ground school for problem kids and were where problem kids went to reintegrate with the normal school system) so I saw first hand what ignoring the average and above average in favor of the worst managed to accomplish. It wasn't always pretty or effective.

The problem is that we'd have to increase spending on prisons and juvenile detention facilities to compensate...

Better to fix, or at least identify, the problems early than deal with these people as adults. Prevention > cure or some such, but we both know what the odds of that happening are.