
Most Classroom Learning Sucks - jmtame
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/01/most_classroom_.html
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daliso
I agree entirely with this article. From my own experience, I did a lot of
abstract maths in undergrad and really hated it because I couldn't figure out
what all these Groups, Topologies, Normed Vector Spaces, etc were all about.
What was the use of learning all these things without some practical
application? It was only later on when I started to learn more about the
people behind these theories, and the challenges that motivated them, that it
became more interesting. The founders of all this knowledge were trying to get
one thing or the other done, and this is what motivated them to construct
these mind bending abstractions.

I think it is a lot more effective to give students challenges rather than
knowledge. When they get stuck (and they will get stuck eventually), then give
them the knowledge they need to overcome their obstacles. Of course, you never
know, without having some pre-determined way of solving something, the
students might end up discovering a smarter ways of solving the same problems!

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brlewis
The "Manhattan Academy" mentioned in this article is a Montessori school.
Expensive Montessori private school for my own children is my startup
motivator. My day job would be enough otherwise.

You can see some example Montessori materials here:

<http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2006-01>

~~~
palish
I'm only one data point, so you should probably take this with a grain of
salt. I went to a Montessori school from kindergarten through third grade, and
I can't stress enough how badly that specific Montessori school failed.
Teachers were distant, more like babysitters than having any kind of
structure. Any project we wanted to work on was fine, but most of us didn't do
anything (the equivalent of pretending to work at work). We'd have to keep
track of what we did in journals and get them signed by a teacher, so most of
us made up stuff and forged the teacher's signature. I don't remember learning
any mathematics at all back then. In fact, I'm positive that it wasn't until
fourth grade that I got into basic math. I don't know if that's normal, but my
father had been teaching me math outside of school from a very early age, so I
was still strong in it. It's a very strange school system.

My final observation is that my Montessori school was so _small_! I was a shy
kid, and going to a small school from K-3rd grade, then another small school
from 4th-8th grade, did not help me to become a social person one bit. If you
do something against the group, everyone will hate you, resulting in more
shyness. Even at third grade.

You probably should evaluate your child. Is s/he shy? If so, it may be a
benefit to send them to a larger school. I'm not saying that it will cure them
of shyness, but it may help.

I'll totally respect any decision you make though :)

~~~
brlewis
My kids are not shy, and math-wise they're ahead of where I was at the same
age. I went on to get a math degree from MIT. Your story is the first time
I've heard of a Montessori school being so unstructured. Do you know if it was
accredited?

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palish
I don't know, sorry.. I am sure that it was the Montessori system though. They
even had pictures of Dr. Montessori hanging on the walls. I haven't really
looked back into that time in my life, 'til now. I'm not upset, I turned out
fine, I just personally feel that in a bigger school I could have become
social more quickly by interacting with a wider variety of other kids.

~~~
johnm
As with everything, different implementors may be better/worse at the same
thing. I've certainly seen that with my girl (who was in Montessori as a
youngster).

Also, no one approach is perfect for everybody. As frightening as it may
sounds, some people need more "structure" than others.

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palish
One way to improve the learning environment for public schools is to
centralize the process using technology, then nudge the process in a different
direction.

But we must test to make sure that the new direction is a better one.

~~~
notabel
I have to disagree with you, and vehemently. Centralization is exactly the
problem.

I was lucky enough to be educated in an International Baccalaureate program
that stressed interaction between students and teachers, convivial debate
rather than lecture, and analytic essays instead of rote recall. The strength
of the program came from its decentralization, relying on good teachers rather
than central planning. The teachers and students worked together, as
collaborators.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but in education, it generally gets in the
way of the greatest teacher: intellectual discourse. A teacher and 10-20
students talking with each other[1] is an optimal model for learning.
Educational technology generally takes the personal interaction out of things,
and certainly makes the process less engaging.[2]

[1] Very different from a teacher talking to, or at, students.

[2] I'm talking about secondary education. For primary ed, technology can be
very useful. But that is a very different environment.

~~~
palish
Well, I see now that there are two kinds of centralization.

1) The system is top-heavy, and administrators pick out what teachers teach.
This is centralized planning.

2) The content that teachers generate (assignments, quizzes) is put into a
centralized pool, which other teachers can browse through to come up with new
ideas for their teaching. This is centralized content.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear, but I didn't mean centralized planning, I meant
centralized content. If there is some way to know what a teacher taught and
how well it worked which other teachers could use as a reference, then it
becomes a memory. Teachers can improve upon other teachers' previous works.

Right now, each public school teacher is almost universally independent. My
idea is that as each assignment is completed online, the assignment goes into
the memory pool. Teachers can browse all content. Students and teachers can
rate and comment on the assignments. This seems like it would encourage good
collaboration and interaction.

~~~
notabel
I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms. In my education,
there were effectively no assignments, and certainly none that could be
completed online. Consider my senior English or Latin classes: the only
"assignments" were to read, and occasionally to write, generally on a self-
generated topic.

In class, similarly, there was very little pre-planned content. In Latin, we
simply went through the previous night's translation, line by line, with
discussion breaking out whenever someone was perplexed or intrigued by
something.

In English, there was perhaps a bit more planned content, but not much: the
teacher would have something to talk about, and start out talking about it,
but within 5-10 minutes we would have moved out of the prepared material into
our own discussion.

Now, in the sciences, yes, there is definite content, and there, surely, there
would be value in a central content store, but it would need to be developed
outside the institutional structure, or your 2) would rapidly become 1). (Yes,
I'm a bit jaded: I went to an amazing program, but it was housed at a horribly
administered school.)

~~~
palish
"I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms."

Yes, I agree. I'm passionate about somehow improving the lives and education
of the average public high school student. My hypothesis is that the answer is
increasing the availability of student-student, student-teacher, and teacher-
teacher communication, with the memory pool to store previous content. The
internet is a wonderful thing, however programs like Blackboard fail to take
into account group interaction. (They claim they do, but their groups are
isolated to individual classrooms; I'm talking about networking across the
entire world.)

"...but it would need to be developed outside the institutional structure, or
your 2) would rapidly become 1)."

Exactly. This is why I feel it can only be created by a commercial entity,
possibly a corporation.

Also, I agree that your method of learning is superior, however the entity
that creates this must accept that public schools teach in a certain way and
change very slowly.

Another problem is dealing with online predators. Any kind of social software
created for schools is going to create huge waves of uproar unless people are
sure that predators, real or imagined, can't communicate with students. I'm
thinking that in order to communicate with other students, you must be a part
of a classroom that has at least a certain amount of students and has a
certain amount of content. Stifling communication is unsettling, but I don't
see another way.

~~~
notabel
"public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly."

I can certainly agree with you about that. IB has been around for 30 years,
and just got any foothold in American 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go
to one of the early public IB schools.

~~~
jmtame
Public education is way behind, especially in technology. I just made "my
first website" in a CS class 3 weeks ago. And I built it with the same HTML
code I taught myself at age 9.

I also am not a huge fan of the amount of "busy work." This is just the work
that professors are required to give you to fulfill some degree requirement.
Almost nothing I've learned in college has been applicable to any of my
business-related work, although I don't think we can hold an undergraduate
degree up to much glory.

~~~
notabel
There are two distinct classes of work that are called "busy work". The first
is heinous, the second is often loathed, but great.

There's real busywork: work assigned just to take your time, create something
to grade. That's crap, it should go away. (And in my collegiate experience,
largely has.)

Then there's "impractical stuff": people often malign work they do that
doesn't directly apply to the real world, but I think that it is often
worthwhile. Consider MIT's famed 6.001: few of its students ever use Scheme,
or any functional language, professionally, but the work in Scheme is never
the less worthwhile. (Disclosure, I love functional languages.)

~~~
palish
One thing I'm hoping is that if teachers use the service I described above,
they'd be less inclined to create busy work - it would be obvious to the rest
of their community that that's what they're creating, and so they'd have an
incentive to not do that.

Unless they make all their content private and don't participate in the
community, which is an option too.

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fruscica
Enter my "open source" biz plan for leveraging media -- and situation comedy
in particular -- to establish the most popular online market for customized
education.

See OpportuniTV.com for details. Two (de facto) reviews of earlier versions of
the site's content:

"I just spent about an hour surfing around with a bit of amazement."

Josh Peterson Co-Founder/CEO 43Things.com (an Amazon.com company) December 12,
2004

"Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your
only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models
require getting rid of the 'originator' within the first eighteen months. With
Netscape it took a little longer, but you get the idea."

Randy Hinrichs Manager, Learning Sciences and Technology Group Microsoft
Research December 1998

Enjoy!

Frank Ruscica

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fruscica
What is objectionable about this comment?

~~~
notabel
It's only tangentially relevant and reads like spam.

~~~
fruscica
Kathy Sierra's only point is: customized education, good; standardized, bad.

My plan describes how to make customized education available on a grand scale
ASAP.

Q.E.D. :-)

