
Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - bane
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/?tid=sm_fb
======
folz
Saved you a click (from the top comment the last time this was posted):

The three points from the article:

> [1] Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

> [2] High School students are sitting passively and listening during
> approximately 90% of their classes.

> [3] You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled
with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel). I look at this
list (especially [2] and the lack of autonomy that follows) and the reason
seems really clear. The basic model seems broken.

Previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067)

Original source of the story here:
[http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-
teach...](http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-
turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/)

~~~
vacri
_People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and
filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel)_

They don't wonder it at all; it's not some mystery solved by sitting in a
classroom. Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging
pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. Items 1 and 3 are
common in the working world, and there's a few jobs out there as a 2 as well
(particularly if you focus on the 'lack of autonomy' part), yet we don't see
the same kinds of behaviour from those workers.

Adolescence is a time where you're finally becoming an adult, finding where
the boundaries are, and putting your own flavour on life. There's a certain
amount of experimentation with that, and it's entirely normal to have more
unruliness amongst adolescents.

~~~
nilkn
I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting
conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school
student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need,
next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall
apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back
too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a
sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me.
Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch
or walk around often wasn't an option.

~~~
pyre
> I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a
> huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

Truly a representative case!

~~~
nilkn
It's pretty representative of tons of professional workers I know from many
industries and extremely typical in technology companies. Most high quality
office chairs are pretty expensive; the Aeron chair that is used at so many
tech companies is easily in that price range, depending on where you buy it
(and in what quantity).

Maybe the only thing that's slightly unusual is the window.

If your company is not providing comfortable working spaces, then there are
plenty of competitors which are.

The real point, though, is that high school classrooms are often downright
uncomfortable and unaccommodating. I'd rather stand all day than have to sit
at those desks again for long periods of time. (And that'd be a lot healthier,
too.)

~~~
pyre
Up-thread there was a comparison from office workers to high school students.
Do you really think that the "average office worker" has a chair (in the
price-range of an Aeron), an office with a view, and a flexible schedule?

~~~
ObviousScience
As a paper pusher during college, I had a $400ish chair, a desk with more than
enough space to spread out the documents I was working with and the keyboard I
was using, and could get up and take a quick break whenever I felt like it,
just to stretch my legs, go to the bathroom without asking, grab a quick bit
of food, or whatever. I could snack at my desk as I saw fit. While they
preferred I not take personal calls at work, it was similarly acceptable to
momentarily step out to answer important calls. They were more concerned I
moved a bunch of papers than I sat obediently at my desk every second of every
day. The only difference is that I wasn't sat next to a window, but across a
cubicle farm from one, but I could clearly see out a bank of windows if I
lifted my head a bit from my desk.

So yes, I actually think that it's fairly representative of the experience of
US office workers when compared to high-schoolers, which are given a much
smaller work area in much worse conditions with considerably less freedom to
deal with the reality of every day life.

~~~
pyre
Most of these comments follow a similar pattern:

    
    
      <Single Anecdote>
    
      Therefore, I believe that my experiences are
      fairly representative the entire population.

------
Sambdala
I remember high school.

During class I hid whatever book I actually wanted to read at the time inside
the class book and drowned out the teacher.

If homework was worth >10% of the total grade for the class (so that you
couldn't get an A from tests/quizzes alone), I would copy the homework from
someone else the period before.

Tests & quizzes are so gameable it's a complete joke. Standardized tests even
more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally
come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent.

There was one class where I got busted for copying the homework and actually
had to apply myself for the rest of the semester to avoid being failed, and
this was only because the teacher felt I could rise to my potential if
challenged to do so. Thankfully, that was actually one of the more interesting
classes I had to attend.

I was warned constantly that college was going to tear me apart if I didn't
instill good study habits, but it was mostly more of the same. It actually
required even less work because most classes relied more heavily on quiz &
test scores than High School did. After my freshman year, I went to class
about 2 hours a week (out of ~18) and still kept above a 3.5 GPA.

At the two corporate jobs I've held so far, the same formula still seems to
apply where you can avoid applying yourself 98% of the time as long as you can
shine during the corporate equivalent of "tests."

To date, it's the hardest thing in the world for me to garner the self control
to apply myself to a task if I'm not passionate about it (even forcing myself
to pay bills is a challenge), and I think a large part of that is due to the
fact that I've been able to coast through every "challenge" quite easily, and
everything has seemed to work itself out so far.

This next month I'm actually striking out on my own, thankfully on something
I'm passionate about (and have been working on for the past six months on the
side), and I'm scared to death I won't be able to actually follow through on
the hard work required to be successful as an entrepreneur.

~~~
ska
One thing that's missing here is that college really is a "you get out what
you get in" situation. As a prof, you see people like this all the time, and
hopefully you take the time to try and engage them more, but at the end of the
day it isn't your responsibility if they choose to waste the opportunity. The
"challenge" in college isn't to make a 4.0 GPA, it's to push yourself to find
your own boundaries. Many profs will bend over backwards to help a student who
is doing this, and (unlike high school) you can scale up your program to meet
and exceed any persons abilities.

Sure, maybe you can skate by and manage a decent GPA, but you aren't doing
yourself any favors, your basically telling us that you half assed four years
of personal development, and you should know that it is probably obvious to
those you've worked with and for. The corporate world has its share of people
too, skating just like they were. Typically they are the ones not being
considered for rapid advancement and grooming for bigger things.

Of course, you may just be exceptional. And it's not like you can't recover
from this with hard work. But consider this as you head out on your own:
Sometimes you just get lucky, but it's more likely that you will succeed or
fail now largely on the back of hard work (and here's the tricky part) applied
to the right places. Consider an alternative universe "you" who grabbed hold
of college with both hands and squeezed until it gave up as much useful stuff
as it could....

That guy would be eating your lunch right now. Not because of the college, per
se, but because of the attitude and experience.

~~~
Sambdala
Well, I think that theoretical guy would just be succeeding in a different
industry than the one I happened to succeed in so far.

It's not like I didn't apply myself to anything, just not to schoolwork;
except when I found a class interesting. As it turns out, the things I did
apply myself to became my career rather than what I had gone to school for.

There's a large difference between "half assed four years of personal
development" and simply concentrating more on things that are unrelated to
your official studies.

In fact, one of the big reasons I'm striking out on my own (well, as part of a
team) now is that I realized my day job was no longer providing me with nearly
as much opportunity for personal development as it had during the first few
years I worked there.

Edit: And the fact that it's entirely what you make of it isn't what's told to
the 18 & 19 year olds heading off to college (at least not in the circle's I
was in). What's told to kids is that it's the piece of paper that matters in
today's society. Once you get it, you can do anything you want, but make sure
you get that piece of paper or all opportunity will shut down for you forever
and for always.

What causes these situations is the combined narrative that the piece of paper
is what matters alongside the fact that getting that piece of paper is a
highly gameable activity.

~~~
ska
Ok, "half assed four years..." was making some assumptions I shouldn't have.
You could well have been doing other useful things at the time. At ~2hrs a
week, you didn't actually find out what you could have done there, so that's a
waste, but I understand being afraid to follow that conviction and drop
college in favor of whatever you were finding interesting. I'm the last one to
support the everyone-must-go-to-college message, but I understand it feeling
risky.

Even in your circle though, I'm sure the (unfortunate) message was clear that
the piece of paper was table stakes, not success. And every university has
some variation of this message, repeatedly.

Table stakes get you a seat at the table, that's all. It's the things that
aren't shown on that paper that decide what sort of a player you are. And
success, in the end, is most of the time dependent on getting good at doing
many of the sort of things you describe as struggling with, not because it's
what you want to do, but because it's what is necessary to achieve what you
are trying to do.

------
1a2a3a4a
Interesting analysis, but as a current student I would find the things she
wanted to change to be annoying in high school. It probably depends a lot on
the student, but I really just wanted to listen to the teacher teach. My best
teachers really knew their stuff and assigned interesting work for homework.

The ones that tried to get us to hop around were not appreciated. I'm there
because I want to learn, not do jumping jacks.

~~~
kirsebaer
Seriously, it was so annoying when the teacher would have us get up and
"move", for instance to demonstrate a math concept. She doesn't seem to get it
that physically commanding students like that is demeaning, treating them like
a dog.

------
pdonis
The money quote to me is this one:

"I was struck by this takeaway [#2] in particular because it made me realize
how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are
directing or choosing."

What strikes me about this is how none of the solutions the author offers fix
this problem. In fact, it's unfixable with our current concept of what a
school is. No amount of monkeying with how classes are taught will change the
fact that the kids are there because they have to be there, not because they
chose to be there.

~~~
kirsebaer
Exactly, school is a prison. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DJAZ-
ByV0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DJAZ-ByV0)

It would be nice to see more attention on unschooling-style homeschooling and
also on non-coercive schools where children are free to play and explore for
themselves, so-called "democratic free schools" like Sudbury Valley School in
MA.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI)

~~~
ufmace
I've been thinking more like that lately, and came here to say pretty much
that. School is an inherently coercive institution. I think it's designed to
snuff out independence and creativity and churn out people who blindly follow
orders, who will be good corporate peons, Army privates, or something similar
for their masters, and outcomes other than that are achieved more in spite of
it than because of any attempts at positive change in the system.

I don't know exactly what removing it would look like. I tend to think it
needs to be less of a top-down organized system. More people doing whatever
feels interesting to them at the time and getting as much help and support at
it as we can practically provide, whether that's building cars, writing
computer programs, reading about history, playing sports, or just screwing
around for a while. I think that people inherently want to learn and do stuff,
and you'll get much better results just letting them go do what they want to
as great of an extent as possible than by ordering them around and restricting
their options as much as possible.

------
derekp7
Why is this so surprising? Wasn't every teacher a high school student at some
point? Is the experience so traumatic that they completely forget what the
schedule was like once they become teachers themselves?

~~~
calebhicks
I'm in my 4th year of teaching, yet I graduated from high school 10 years ago.
How well do you remember your daily schedule from 10 years ago? Do you
remember what made you restless? What made you tired? What made you stop
paying attention? And were you so meta cognizant that you recognized the
source of that restlessness?

Doubt it.

It is rare for teachers to have the time to truly consider the student's
perspective in their class, and the context of how that fits into the entire
school day experience.

EDIT: I should note that I read this article a few days ago. The entire staff
at my school held a discussion on how to make school better in that regard.
This blog post alone will at minimum affect the 1400 students at our school,
but given the number of places I've seen it shared, it will have a much larger
impact than that. Always a good reminder.

~~~
derekp7
I can appreciate the fresh aspect of it, but I do definitely recall the stark
contrast between 12th grade and my first semester at the local community
college. Just the fact that you didn't always have to be in a class room --
you could schedule an hour break between classes, and go hang out in the
cafeteria or library to catch up on some work. Or go outside between classes
and walk around (in high school it was like being in a day prison, not allowed
to leave the building). Oh, and you didn't need to get anyone's permission to
use the washroom. Not to mention that there was no forced group activities
such as dodge ball (any athletics was strictly up to you signing up for it).

~~~
zyxley
For me, the biggest change between high school and college was honestly just
being able to wake up at 8 AM instead of 6-something. Suddenly my recurring
insomnia, and my tendency to just flat-out fall asleep during afternoon
classes, were mostly gone.

------
markbnj
I think to some extent she underestimated the differences in her own body
after 15 years. I recall being bored and fidgety in school, but I was never so
physically drained just from sitting in the way that she describes. That's
probably something an increasingly inflexible adult experiences more than a
child does.

~~~
grimman
I personally was constantly fiddling with something, be it drilling holes in
erasers or doodling or whatever, but I was always doing something. Had I not
been able to do something (allowed... now that's a different story ;)) I would
never have passed a single subject! Just tiny tasks to keep myself busy while
I was listening. Even to this day, a couple of decades later, I can't really
concentrate on one task.

That said, people learn differently. Some people can just put their mind to it
and grind through material, others, like me, aren't quite so fortunate. If
only there was a way to gauge the learning method most suitable for a child,
and put that child in an appropriate class... I believe things in education
would look a lot brighter.

~~~
saalweachter
It's really funny, later in life, to be in a meeting full of people who have
similar coping mechanisms. A dozen grown-ass adults spinning pens, playing
with badges, anything but sitting still.

------
vorg
I recently spent a year as a full-time language student in a college (in
China, so more like US high school in many ways) after teaching English for 10
yrs, and also unexpectedly discovered point no. 1, i.e. how tiring it is to
sit down all day, and almost never did so as a teacher. Even after 1 year I
was still often yawning after 2 or 3 hrs of near continuous sitting, and
always got up to walk around outside for 5 or 15 minutes during breaks. Most
other students were much younger, usually 20-ish, and often stayed sitting in
class during breaks. I don't know how they do it, but maybe it's just their
age, or maybe they haven't done a job where they're on their feet all day for
10 yrs.

------
misuba
...does she learn how to write clickbait headlines?

~~~
mwfunk
The headline must have changed since the link was posted to HN- it's currently
"Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns",
which is about as matter-of-fact and non-clickbaity as it gets. It's just a
literal description of the article contents. What was it originally that was
so sensationalistic?

~~~
akerl_
"$person does $thing and is shocked by what they find/learn/discover" is
definitely in the first chapter of the Blogger's Guide To Clickbait Titles.

------
intopieces
I do wish that my school had had the block scheduling this school seems to
have. We had 8 periods in a day (school was a half period) and they were all
~50 minutes. This is barely enough time to accomplish anything, and days where
the classes were shorter (teachers' meetings) then each class was worthless.

~~~
bcaine
The problem is that it's near impossible for a student to pay attention during
longer classes. I think you're trying to measure accomplishing things by the
amount of material you work through during a given class, instead of by the
amount of information the student actually absorbs during that time.

That seemed to be one of the main points in the article, just getting through
material was a terrible way to look at classroom learning.

~~~
intopieces
>The problem is that it's near impossible for a student to pay attention
during longer classes.

Impossible seems a bit harsh. The situation could certainly be improved, and
it might certainly be improved if the instructor has more time to engage in
students as individuals, which can't be done much in a short period system
(this was my main complaint with HS and why I never took a huge lecture
course). I do agree that the current method of engagement, overall, is not
ideal.

~~~
wmt
The problem is not the engagement as much as trying to sit and pay attention
for 90 minutes. You will way better results by having a 5-15 minute break
every 45 minutes.

------
aarohmankad
This is one of the reasons I like my school. Points 1 and 3 in the article are
pretty close to nonexistent.

[1]: We operate on a 4x4 schedule (4 classes August - December, 4 classes
January - June). So we sit in one class for 90 minutes, a good time to focus
on a task and get it done.

[2]: Issue 2 is a problem with every school I've been in and seen. I can't
think of any school that has managed time in a way that will cover curriculum
and capture student's attention.

[3]: I'm lucky that my school is only 3 years old, extremely new for my
district. I can easily form personal connections with my teachers and
administration. My teachers know my extracurriculars and understand if I
didn't complete my homework that day (I turn it in later, but I do have to
finish it).

Overall, this article was a reflective experience and made me even more
thankful of my school.

~~~
jschwartzi
My experience with a 4x4 schedule was that I would lose focus about 15 to 20
minutes in, start trying to work whatever homework the teacher had assigned,
realize I didn't understand it, refocus on the lecture, and realize that I had
missed half of it. The only reason I graduated High School on time was because
one of my math teachers gave out D's. This was really only an issue in Math
classes, where we were expected to passively absorb information. The classes I
did really well in were Honors English, AP English, and History/Social Studies
courses where the teachers asked us to think about what they were telling us.

Looking back, the only reason that I was able to go to college, get a degree,
and end up working in Engineering is that my parents were willing to support
me monetarily while I replaced my shitty High School record with a good
Community College record.

~~~
Rapzid
I recall one of my best math class grades was pre-cal my Junior year. I would
normally fall into the trap you did, and completely failed Algebra 2 but
somehow didn't swing back on it..

Anyway, the teacher, the girls soccer couch, actually gave us a good amount of
time after the lecturing to work on our homework. And often he would start the
class about 10-15 minutes late and I knew it was to give us a chance to polish
off the homework. I recall being in a class of mostly Seniors, and a group of
us always ended up working together.. The baseball teams pitcher, who was
actually quite sharp, his friend, and a girl I don't quite remember that well.
The teacher encouraged us to move our desks together as needed. This
arrangement worked out fantastically. We would often divide and conquer the
homework, or race through the problems individually. Both had advantages;
somebody(me or the pitcher) would almost always have a particular problem
figured out if the rest were stuck. It created this interaction that was part
competitive and part cooperative/supportive. I suspect we all had fun, learned
a lot, and did great on the tests and grades(I did).

I had three main takeaways from this:

1.)The lectures were focused, dense, and did not take up the entire 90
minutes.

2.)We had plenty of time to practice the problems and help each other/get help
during the period

3.)I now just recall that this was our lunch period as well, which we took the
2nd to last slot, so we had a break before the last bit of the period. This
was quite nice.

As an aside, three of the coaches I had for academic classes are probably in
my top 5 list. Their classes were very engaging.. I find this interesting.

------
pyre
Wasn't there a previous discussion/article on this (or at least something very
similar)?

~~~
mhartl
Yes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067)

------
jqm
I found her description of being tired in an icky way very good. I remember
feeling exactly that way at the end of the day in high school.

I also agree with her suggestions. Short bursts of information, plenty of
chances for physical motion, participation rather than passive listening. I
believe all of this would have greatly improved what I got out of high school.

Oh, and also cutting out a significant portion of the bullshit and
indoctrination which was passed off as eduction but which was not. That's a
different topic though I guess.

------
sopooneo
When I was a student teacher I asked permission to do this and, without
exception, was met with baffled looks. What specifically are you hoping find
out? I was asked. Why would you want to that? my mentor teacher wanted to
know. It's not that anyone had objections, they just couldn't fathom why an
adult would want to do it.

My biggest take away was how out of control and unpleasant lunch period was.
Also, how much the kids got yelled at during class transitions.

------
ARothfusz
Why were they only taking 4 classes per day?

They are 30 minutes longer than my high school classes were, but we had 7+
different classes per day. I'm pretty sure our day lasted till 3:30 or 4pm. We
had 5 minutes to get to the next class, and on a big campus, that could result
in some pretty good cardio workouts. So maybe inadvertently we were getting
those stretches recommended by the author.

~~~
bzbarsky
The article covers this:

    
    
      (Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day)
    

The reality is that in a typical 1-hour class with 5 minute breaks between
classes on a big campus you lose the first 5 minutes of class to people
arriving late and the last 5 minutes to everyone packing up their books so
they can rush our the door. So you get 50-minute classes, or about 5/6 of your
nominal instruction time. And if you have to do a lab or something, you either
have to do double-period classes or stick to labs that can be effectively
completed in 40-45 minutes (because you need time to set up and clean up too).

So enter block scheduling: the idea is to lengthen the classes to 90 minutes
or so and alternate days when they meet. You still lose 10 minutes of each
class, but that's 8/9 of your nominal instruction time, not 5/6\. And teachers
get a bit more flexibility in terms of what things can be done with a class.
The drawback is that if you lecture for the full 80 minutes, the outcome is
typically not so great: it takes an exceptional lecturer, or an exceptional
student, or for some sorts of material both, to pull off someone still being
able to absorb information in a lecture that's longer than an hour.

------
bane
I found this interesting. I worked for a few years teaching technical subjects
to mid-career adults and ended up adopting an educational theory not too
dissimilar to the author, but for mostly different reasons.

Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251569)

I remember high school very well, and it was a pretty torturous experience. If
you could design an educational program that was almost guaranteed not to be a
conducive learning environment with poor mastery outcomes, the public k-12
system in the U.S. would probably be it. Even worse, when they measure
educational outcomes, the place systems like South Korea's at the top, a
system that's absolutely optimized and excels at the lowest possible form of
learning, rote memorization.

In the previous discussion, I point out that I believe students need to
"complete the circuit", go from input/reception to output/production to say
they've learned a topic. In today's school environment, _if_ this happens at
all, it happens by accident:

1) The teacher gives a lecture, information is shoved in

2) The students do homework and tests, okay, the students "produce" what
they've learned, usually a brain dump of what they've memorized, but let's be
honest, not a demonstration of learning or mastery.

3) The homework and tests get an impersonal grade, the "feedback loop"
necessary to complete the circuit. But if the student got it wrong? Too bad,
the lesson is moving on anyways. There's no time really spent in education to
have the student go back with this new course correction and see if they got
it now. And out of schedule help in most schools is woeful.

Because of this systematic failure, by the time many students are involved in
"advanced" topics in high school, their foundational knowledge is so flimsy
and filled with holes that new topics are like turning a strong fan on in a
room with a house of cards. Yet the professional educational establishment
seems unable to figure this out and correct it.

Keep in mind, without even a template of any kind, we're all fluently able to
learn a complex language, a mass of complex social rules so complex that
libraries are full of books describing them and how to sanitarily complete a
digestion cycle on our own (everybody poops) before we even show up for day 1
of 1st grade. Keep in mind that we spent the first two of those 6-7 years not
even being able to talk - so we did all that in about the same time it takes
to get through high school. If we learned as much in our 4 years of high
school, we'd all be leaving with the equivalent of advanced degrees in
physics.

Children can learn at phenomenal paces, yet it takes _years_ before students
accumulate any worthwhile new skills in this kind of environment -- skills
that should take them weeks or months.

School is doing it wrong.

~~~
wavegeek
As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come
out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months
in the same country will produce a person with real useful usable skills in
the language.

If you believed that school was there to teach people this is shocking. But it
all makes sense on the basis that school is there to keep young people out of
the way.

~~~
ufmace
I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I
don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda
disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you
started.

I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to
order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained
anything at that point by being surrounded by Spanish speech and media.

I think that the first hard part or learning a new language is just bridging
that gap of memorizing thousands of new words and their meanings. If you
haven't done that, any amount of exposure to the language is mostly
meaningless gibberish that you don't know where to start at deciphering. I
don't see how that helps you learn it.

For what it's worth, I learned a lot more from using Duolingo for a while than
from immersion. I figure a better way to really get started would be to work
at that, and translate newspaper articles by hand for a few hours a day, not
that I've tried it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant
> most of the time_ //

So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus
tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people
spoke English?

~~~
ufmace
It was a trip for work, so I was mostly accompanied by people who did speak
Spanish.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ah, people speaking other languages around me annoys me enough that I want to
know what they're saying!

~~~
ufmace
Yeah, it could be kind of annoying in a way. I could catch maybe 5-10% of a
Spanish conversation. Like I was saying in the original, I think I'd need to
boost my vocabulary by at least 10x before listening to spoken Spanish would
have much benefit.

Trying to listen actually kinda reminds me of learning Vim, where you spend
what feels like forever at first totally lost, and doing the simplest edit
seems to require so much mental effort that you can't actually think about the
code you're working on.

------
reledi
One of the best high school teachers I had used to teach Dutch to adult
immigrants before becoming a Dutch high school teacher. She treated her
previous students with respect and expected them to do the same. She taught us
with the same approach and had thoughtful discussions with us, and it made a
world of difference.

------
WalterBright
It's true in any profession that one learns a lot by spending a day in your
customers' shoes.

------
Meekro
This is reminiscent of a book called My Freshman Year, by a college professor
who actually enrolled as a student at the same school. She writes about
numerous discoveries that she found shocking, despite having taught at the
same school for many years. It's a great read.

------
mschuster91
iirc either McDonalds or BK has rumors of an internal rule that even the
uppermost layers of management have to spend at least one full day each year
standing behind the cash register and selling burgers.

It would be nice if a) this was more than an urban legend and b) if more
companies embraced variations of this rule.

I believe it to be a good way to catch problems (e.g. unrealistic expectations
of workers) before shit hits the fan like in a Mannheim (Germany) hospital
where medical instruments were not disinfected properly due to too few workers
and time - and reports to upper levels vanished in bureaucracy.

~~~
glenra
There's a reality tv show based on this premise called "Undercover Boss".

------
j2kun
It would be easier for teachers to notice these things if their schedules
included some time for reflection and preparation instead of packing as many
classes as possible into an eight hour day.

------
marco1
"Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-
learning-type activities [...]"

Is that normal usage of "blitzkrieg"? Do you use it in everyday language?

------
rootlocus
Aren't teachers supposed to go through college / university before they become
teachers? Why are their own experiences irrelevant?

------
Freeboots
This article actually made me angry, to the point of pacing and muttering,
that these points are not commonly understood and addressed.

How can these be new concepts? how can this be news? Students are bored
because they have no autonomy, are force to sit and be talked down to all day,
are not empowered to be involved in their own learning. WOW! AMAZING!

How out of touch do educators have to be for this to be considered innovative
thinking?

------
analog31
From now on I'll be more tolerant when someone plays with their cellphone
during one of my presentations.

------
pbreit
Wow, 7:45 sounds awfully early. And out at 2:35?

~~~
bane
I lived in a rural area during this time in my life. School started at 7:30am,
the school bus picked us up at 6:30am, which meant I had to be up at 5:30-6:00
to eat breakfast, shower and get ready for the day.

This meant a 9:30 bed-time.

This also meant that I got home by about 3:30-4:00 depending on traffic. An
hour for dinner gave me 4.5 hours to study. Let's be honest, I also took an
hour for free-time otherwise I wouldn't have any. So 3.5 hours to study every
day.

In college at least, when you plan your schedule, you should plan 2-3 hours of
study-time per week for every hour of class time. As you can see I really only
had time to study 1 subject a day, maybe 2 if I didn't give myself free time
by that standard.

Recipe for success? Ha!

------
cmdrfred
How can someone who has been teaching for 14 years pass themselves off as a 16
year old?

~~~
scoot
OFFS, RTFA.

~~~
cmdrfred
The question stands, She isn't experiencing what a student experiences she is
experiencing what a student experiences when there is another adult in the
room. Two very different things.

~~~
vacri
Are you taking the position that she can gain no useful insight at all from
the activity?

~~~
cmdrfred
No but the problem with the schools isn't that kids don't get to play
basketball a minute before class. My history teacher sent me to the office for
saying columbus was a slaver, my computer teacher wrote me up for proving he
wrote insecure code (sql injection), my science teacher chewed me out for
stating that every legitimate scientific body acknowledges evolution is a
fact. The problem is the education system isn't about education it's about
control.

