
Teacher spends two days as a student (2014) - mercer
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/?utm_term=.89d6b4dd1d71
======
zer00eyz
Sitting for hours is bad ok...

For a long time I was a smoker, I would often walk out of the building with
others, and take a break. Talking about their or my problem of the minute.

One of the other engineers who DIDNT smoke started coming out with us when we
went. After a few weeks he noted out loud how his productivity had been UP
since he started taking the journey with us.

It seems counter intuitive that getting up and moving around (even to do
something bad) is good for you.

If your not a smoker, go hang out with them a few times a day (or use their
smoke breaks to take your own break away from your desk).

~~~
namarie
Since when is it counter-intuitive that exercise is good? I'd have thought the
opposite.

~~~
noxToken
Probably because people don't view walking 500 steps at 1.5 mph, standing for
5 minutes, then returning as exercise. Unless there are stairs or a
significant incline, there isn't a readily noticeable change in heart rate nor
breathing pattern. So most people probably view moseying around the office for
a couple of minutes as a waste of time.

One of the best things I did was setting an alarm to get up every 60 minutes.
But then I followed it _too_ religiously by getting up damn near immediately.
That broke productivity. I found a happy medium by finding an adequate
stopping point and then getting up.

------
magic_beans
Why do teachers always think group projects and in-class demonstrations are
great ideas? I hated that as a student. I found those classes to be really
shallow, because groups of students rarely had good ideas or grasped the
material well enough to present on it.

A good teacher can spend a whole class lecturing and is able to engage their
students.

We don't need to fix class structure. We need to fix teachers.

~~~
Consultant32452
Because you get group projects at work, And the groups at work rarely have
good ideas or grasp material well enough to work on it.

~~~
thatswrong0
"Group projects" at work are completely different from group projects in
school. Work generally has managers. If someone isn't pulling their weight in
a project, there's someone you can talk to about it and have something done
about it. People have their income on the line.

At school, my teachers were almost always explicit about not wanting to
manage. "Organize yourselves". There were countless times I had lazy project
partners, even in grad level courses in college, that I could do nothing
about. The teachers told me to just figure it out myself. They never took
action against bums. This meant that lazy people could _assume_ they'd be
taken care of by their more disciplined teammates. As a result, I never got
any value out of group projects in school - whenever I had a group project, I
always assumed I'd have to be doing _way more_ work than I'd have to for
individual projects.

I've never had to deal with coworkers who acted that way.

~~~
Consultant32452
You've never had incompetent coworkers? You've never worked at a megacorp
where it was basically impossible to get fired? One of the things you could've
done for your group projects is be the manager yourself. Assign tasks and
divvy up the work load based on skill/knowledge. Obviously, don't give the
doofus anything challenging. 99% of the time people are willing to do whatever
they're explicitly instructed to do. Track assigned tasks and completion. If
someone doesn't pull their weight, don't put their name on the finished
project and turn in the assignment tracking with the project to explain why
their name was removed.

~~~
thatswrong0
I would never work at a megacorp. That sounds miserable.

And why are you assuming I didn't try managing projects? Of course I did. I
would always divvy up the work in such a way that'd I'd have the more
difficult portion and I'd keep tabs on people. And when I'd tell my teachers
that someone wasn't pulling their weight, they'd say it's my problem. I took
_one_ class in college where the professors actually took that into account
and docked my teammates. Without threats from teachers, students do not give a
fuck. Complete waste of my time in school.

------
haburka
Those are some awesome takeaways. I think that by the time you're a teacher,
you forget what it's like to be a student. One of my biggest complaints with
class is that its entirely passive learning and I am a completely hands on
person. Additionally, after reading pedagogy of the oppressed, it's very easy
to get bitter with education in general.

~~~
jobu
The egg timer seemed like an amazing idea:

 _set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When
the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to
hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my
students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it._

Many teachers feel compelled to talk because they have a captive audience, so
they prattle on about their personal lives or current events instead of
engaging students in the topic they're supposed to be teaching.

~~~
rmccoy6435
Sounds very similar to the Pomodoro Technique[0] in a way.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique)

------
jansho
Not a teacher but an instructional designer. Digital courses tend to have very
high dropout rates so my job is to design the best possible eLearning
experience with maximum information/skill retention. I credit my successes
(apologies for the shamelessness but it's necessary to make my point!) to my
being a learner myself. It's simply not enough to know pedagogical, cognitive
and design theories and techniques, you really have to become a learner
yourself in order to get better at educating.

For example, in design stage where I'm scoping, scripting and storyboarding
for a digital course, it's essential to keep close relationships with the
subject matter experts and a sample of learners.

For the latter, one-off interviews are simply not enough. It's much more
revealing when you station yourself "in the field" to observe and interact
directly, so that you deeply understand their problems, work environment and
ways of working. Even if you gain no new information, the experience will
shape your design decisions and help make the course more "human."

But for subject matter experts, I tend to assume the role of the dumbest
learner ever. Actually that's not very hard, I'm a slow learner myself! But by
making no assumptions and asking the simplest questions, I find that I can get
the course to flow better and much more easily digestible.

Brief stints are still not enough though. Outside my professional life, I take
a few online courses to help me stay grounded and informed of the best and
worst techniques. (And learn new things!)

So it really boils down to empathy. As educators we can suppose so much, but
at the end of the day, it's the learners that receive it all. The closest we
can get to understanding them is then to become learners ourselves.

------
germinalphrase
As a teacher, I was hoping for a little more depth. The observations are
reasonable, if a little obvious.

I suppose it's good to remind teachers about things they already know, but are
not regularly implementing.

~~~
sophacles
I'm not sure it's the teachers' fault either. Not entirely anyway. They are
beholden to school boards and parents (and ultimately all voters via funding).
In fact - I suspect this was written for parents (etc) who are not involved in
the day to day experience of school, but who demand certain things from
schools without any concern for the real world effects (e.g. idiotic faith in
standardized testing).

Those folks may not know these things. Unfortunately, they probably don't want
to pause and think about it - If I showed this to some of my conservative
friends and relatives they would take it as evidence that teachers are
useless, not that the current teaching system needs some serious
rearrangement.

~~~
germinalphrase
The difficulty is that there is not an obvious "better way" for _all_ schools
to serve _all_ students. The underlying goals of schools are often at odds and
incompatible with each other, let alone the goals of the
students/parents/communities that direct those schools. HN is full of people
who hated the constraints of school but loved learning and succeeded based on
that personal zeal, but I've known countless young people that wouldn't
succeed in learning basic arithmetic or reasonable advanced literacy without a
strong push to get them across the line. The answer is probably a larger
variety of smaller schools (and cracking the nut of how to measure teacher
effectiveness), but we're not economically or socially prepared to attempt
that on the necessary scale.

~~~
Pulcinella
Yes. I'm a teacher as well. The goals can be very contradictory.

Students and Parents want to learning to be individualized for them based on
their specific needs. They don't want to be treated like products on an
assembly line.

Students and Parents also don't want to be treated any differently than anyone
else. They don't want another student to receive "better" treatment than what
they are receiving.

GT students need different lessons that can keep up with them. GT students
don't want to feel they are doing more work than non-GT students because they
are GT. GT students don't want to have to do the same work as non-GT students.
Otherwise what is the point? Non-GT students think it is unfair that GT
students get to do different activities.

It can be hard to explain to students and parents that Samantha gets more
unstructured learning time because she can handle it and Timmy has to be
pushed along with less unstructured learning time because he goofs off the
whole time.

------
Afton
This is a repost of [https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-
teac...](https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-
turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/)

Discussed previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067)

------
lerie
Add metal detectors, wands, and barbed wire to the mix and you'll really know
what it's like for some inner city high school kids (like myself once upon a
time). Kids today have more time away from school than I did, I had more time
away from school than my parents did, this article wasn't much of an eye
opener, sorry.

Personally, high school is a waste, a transition period for students to truly
find what they want out of life; in my opinion.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Yesterday there was a discussion here about antidepressants. I was tempted to
jump in and comment that: sometimes depression isn't clinical, it can also be
situational, that I had tried SSRIs and gotten nowhere, and the only thing
that cured my depression was dropping out of college and finally getting a
real life started.

School is a nightmare. Mix in bullying, antipathetic adults who behave like
prison guards, teenage hormones. I don't know what the solution is, but
American high school is a failed experiment.

Bravo to this principle for bothering to eat the dogfood.

(I was in cozy suburban schooling, incidentally; it felt like a prison. Now I
live around your kind of schools, and I don't understand how anyone survives
them.)

------
nicklaf
_...there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I
recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of
communication._

    
    
      No dark sarcasm in the classroom
      Teacher, leave them kids alone
      Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!
    

(All in all, I agree, this should have been obvious without having to shadow
any student at all.)

------
vivekd
This stuff seems to me to be inherent to institutionalized education. When you
have an instituion with lots of kids to teach, what option is there but to
have them all sit down all day and be passive. Also dealing with lots of kids
and their misbehavior and having to get through a lesson plan at the same time
would make adults feel like they have to be strict and direct "shh" towards
the kids. When this organization is being run by the same organization that
runs the DMV it's only natural to expect more extreme negative behaviors like
sarcasm and snark and probably even more negative things that happen when
there isn't a shadow teacher following.

In my mind home school seems like the the only real solution to these ills.

~~~
_rpd
> home school seems like the the only real solution

Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or
their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but
they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option,
but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.

~~~
VLM
Parental involvement in education is kind of like eating healthy, in that its
expensive and time consuming and not always fun, but the alternative being
failure and disaster and death is kind of motivational. The stick is mightier
than the carrot.

That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but
optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals
matching your own is very low.

~~~
_rpd
Well said.

Of course, the goal should be to instruct the student as they would have
wished from the perspective of their older selves. A damnably hard goal set to
estimate. To enable fluid interaction with the bulk of society, however, my
estimation is that the goals should include at least knowledge of the most
popular curriculums, as taught to other students. There are a lot of socially
valuable games set up around such curriculums and a student may be justifiably
resentful if they are not competitive. A capable educator will go beyond that
and treat the curriculums themselves as objects of study, but here the
capabilities of the student come into play, since most are out of middle
school before being able to comfortably make such distinctions.

------
Macsenour
So basically, she thought it was OK to make fun of students when they asked a
question that had been asked already. Wow, so sorry I missed being in her
class...

~~~
ashark
Some context that may be relevant. Something like the following is not
uncommon, at pretty much any grade level:

Teacher T, Student S (not always the same student), Students Ss

T: "I've put the exact steps you need to follow on the board, right here.
Repeat that back to me."

Ss: "The steps are on the board."

T: "Great. Any questions? No? Makes sense? Cool, get started!" (walks among
students to check work and help as needed)

(10 seconds later)

S: What do we do first?

T: It's on the board. Right there. The step labelled "1". And first on the
list. Is there part of it you don't understand?

S: Oh, no, I just didn't know it was there.

(2 minutes later)

T: Uh, are you done?

S: No. I just didn't know what to do next.

T: Did... you do all the steps? On the board?

S: Oh, right! No, just step 1.

(5 minutes later)

S: Mr/Mrs T, what's step 3?

T: Did you check the board?

S: Uhhhhh, oh yeah.

(this happens some more. 6 hours later)

T: (grading papers. Several students missed one or more steps.)

(next day)

S: Why is my grade so low?

T: You didn't do step 4. At all.

S: I didn't know what to do there.

T: (points at list, still on board)

S: Oooooh, yeah.

T: (sneaks whisky from desk to make it through the day without killing self or
others)

[EDIT] formatting

~~~
VLM
How long have you been teaching grad students?

(In a non-personal non-doxing manner, I'm just saying you read like my sister-
in-law kinda and she's got 20 years in. Which sounds like a prison term.
Um...)

~~~
ashark
I don't, but I know several teachers, and am married to one. Anecdotes from
3rd-9th grade, all running pretty much like that. I gather some level of this
occurs almost daily. Most of them teach in "good" schools, too, so these are
the students who are _easy_ to teach.

(for the record, I don't _think_ any of them actually drink at school)

------
egel
I am glad that this topic has been highlighted. It is really important to
understand that education cannot be treated like 0 & 1 in the schedule. After
some lessons student can be so much mentally exhausted that is really hard to
imagine for someone who forget how it is, when you need to spend few hours
being constantly focus and thinking.

------
nannePOPI
Classes with one guy talking to a sitting audience should have been abolished
with the rise of VHS, but now more than ever.

------
logfromblammo
I am _shocked_ \--simply _shocked_ \--to discover that most teachers do not
bother to view the experiences they supply from another perspective!

The tragedy of this article is that any lessons learned from such a stunt will
not likely survive long enough to make any actual, substantial changes in
public school pedagogy.

Students will continue to sit down and shut up, as they are expected to
passively absorb all information given to them, to be regurgitated on demand.
It would be difficult to change that even if you had the force of a published,
peer-reviewed scientific study behind you, rather than just two days worth of
anecdotes.

------
bighi
I expected some new realizations here, but all I could find was a list of the
3 most obvious things about students.

Do we really need to follow students to learn that they sit a lot and listen a
lot?

~~~
VLM
"they sit a lot and listen a lot"

For most of our couple hundred thousand year existence as a species we've been
very successful using every learning technique except "sit down shut up and
listen for a couple hours". In fact we've only done it for about a century
almost exclusively with lower to middle class white European kids and all
that's certain about that technique is its mostly resulted in the production
of a lot of cannon fodder and factory (now cubical) drones. For most of our
species history the shut up and listen technique has been limited to religion
and brainwashing; perhaps there is no difference.

Its likely that what we arrogantly claim is education or training is merely
implantation of weird religious beliefs via brainwashing, as opposed to actual
education. Does it matter if the kid mindlessly repeats that 2+2=4, or the kid
irrationally believes 2+2=4, or the kid understands how 2+2=4? In a world
where all that matters is the correct oval is filled in on the endlessly
growing number of standardized tests, I'm not optimistic anyone is learning
anything other than to fill in ovals and parrot a belief in whatever this
hour's authority claims is today's truth. Until tomorrow when it'll all be
different.

This might explain how some new grads are so hopelessly useless in that
perhaps they absorbed the "true believer" aesthetic and therefore were passed
along, but they were never actually educated, never actually learned, perhaps
algebra, or programming, or philosophy, or politics, or any other topic.

"I learned how to tell the teacher what they wanted to hear, then forgot it as
completely as possible so as to endlessly repeat" could result in a very
successful student career yet not so successful post-graduation.

------
sandworm101
Are 90-minute classes the norm? I dont have my old timetablez, but it think 60
minute classes were our norm, with much shorter breaks between.

~~~
germinalphrase
Increasingly so. ~90 minute "block" classes are fairly common at the high
school level in the US.

~~~
VLM
My middle school kids have English Lit as a block.

Honestly, as a grade school kid if I was reading something I enjoyed, 90
minutes was not much of an achievement. You can will yourself thru something
you hate for 45 minutes, gym class perhaps. You probably have to be a grown
adult (or older) to tolerate something like a worthless 90 minute class or
business meeting.

------
ColinWright
An interesting analysis would be to take the 87 (and counting) comments here
on this submission and compare them with the 178 comments from some 900 days
ago.

Can NLP do this? Can comments there be compared with comments here to see if
there is a matching?

That would be a fascinating exercise. Anyone up for it?

------
AdmiralAsshat
It's terribly disappointing to see even the Washington Post stoop to clickbait
titles.

------
lapsock
Nobody knew school could be such torture. NOBODY! This discovery was made in
the year of 2014 by Alexis Wiggins.

I know I'm bitter but it's only because I was a bottom 20% student in high
school and I'm now a top 10% student in college.

------
jstanley
Why does she need to shadow a student to learn what it's like to be a student?
Wasn't she a student once herself?

These things are pretty obvious. I always just assumed teachers didn't care.

~~~
dsmithatx
Yeah I agree, I mean, I realized all this stuff around 8 years old. Even after
reading this I don't think any other teachers actually care or will ever care.
This teacher is just getting old and forgetting how much being in school
sucks. Thankfully I can just work on computers and make tons of money and love
it. I now learn more every single week than I probably learned in a few months
of school and, I graduated. That isn't from work though as I'm over 40.

It's just because I love to read and learn. I was doing Autocad in 1988 in 8th
grade. I was learning Unix/Slackware inside out in 1993 after I graduated.
School barely gave me basics in 13 years and I could of learned all of that in
less than a year. If my wife wasn't a stay at home mom I'd probably home
school my kids. Sadly though I have to work all the time so, they go to a
boring school and only learn how to take tests.

~~~
ivanche
> School barely gave me basics in 13 years and I could of learned all of that
> in less than a year.

Oh the irony...

~~~
alunchbox
what's the irony here ? asking for a friend.

~~~
glibgil
13 years in a designated place of learning is worth less than 1 year in
unstructured freedom, according to OP. It's ironic because for OP a place
where you are suppose to learn is not a good place to learn

~~~
logfromblammo
I learned more about technical writing from _The Elements of Style_ and a one-
semester university course that I ever did from 13 years of public schooling.
I learned more about creative writing from being an immortal on a MUD and
contributing to the underground newspaper than from anything I ever did in
classes.

What I learned from the public school system was that I was not a good writer,
and didn't know how to appreciate literature. As it turns out, that was
antipodal from the truth. I have since re-synthesized the available data and
revised my conclusion: my interests in school simply did not align with the
curriculum mandated by school administrators. My grades were a measure of
correlation rather than indicative of causation.

For instance, my teachers made me read Dante's _Inferno_. If Dennis Miller
ever dropped the name Vanni Fucci into an obscure joke, I would probably get
it, still having vague memories of the Malebolge filled with thieves and bitey
reptiles. But I consider _Planescape: Torment_ to be a better work of art. It
isn't in a standard poetic form, though. Torment is a bit tougher to read in
its entirety, and no one would dare to allude to bronze spheres to make a
point without some inkling that the audience has played it. It is one thing to
be exposed to art that has been blessed as a canonical masterwork in a
controlled, sterile classroom environment: it is another thing entirely to
recognize art in the wilds of your own life, and to recognize its worth
because you feel emotion in its presence. When the system values the former
over the latter, it has failed in its purpose. It failed me.

So I consider myself fortunate that I taught myself to program in BASIC and C
many years before my public schooling system decided to offer a programming
course in Pascal. Had that been my first exposure to software development, I
would certainly not be here, writing this, now.

~~~
VLM
"canonical masterwork"

Not a constant, there isn't even an ideal.

I had the worst stereotype of a 9th grade history teacher you can imagine with
a curriculum of a dumbed down textbook written at about 80 IQ level to
maximize sales and tests consisting mostly of matching names and dates. I
almost failed that class...

We can't teach dead white male texts for political reasons anymore. Nothing
motivates a white male teenager like telling him a book is forbidden. I'm
reminded of a nearly illiterate friend who forced himself to read Huckleberry
Finn solely because it was banned. So needless to say as a little rebel I grew
up reading and enjoying Plutarch, Xenophon, Gibbon, Herodotus. In a different
era under superior political leadership, those books would have been
considered masterpieces. Today they are considered fuel for book burnings
solely for racial reasons.

There's no constant to "canonical masterwork" but if there is any constant at
all, its probably that your school textbook was not a "canonical masterwork",
LOL.

~~~
logfromblammo
Are you kidding?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon#Literary_canon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon#Literary_canon)

There is literally a literary canon. It has certainly evolved over time, but
almost everything I was assigned to read in my high school literature classes
was in it. My personal opinion is that no one would bother reading _Inferno_
today if it wasn't in the canon.

------
janwillemb
The link could be more clickbaity by adding "this": _This teacher spends two
days as a student and is shocked at what she learns_ ;)

~~~
jstanley
Doctors hate her.

------
VLM
Cut and pasted:

Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In
comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.

Now before you 'noob' me I did put in some effort. The old "google the title
and click thru from google" doesn't work. Ghostery isn't helping. Adblock Plus
isn't helping. Its a clickbait article and there's nothing wrong with that but
it is a relevant issue in that I'm not switching browsers to read it.

~~~
wyldfire
The 'web' link is supposed to take you to the "google the title and click
through from google" trick.

When I clicked on the link directly I did not get a paywall. FWIW I do not
have ABP.

~~~
porpoisemonkey
I've been on HN for almost 4 years now and didn't know about the 'web' link.
Thank you!

