We have the "best" teachers already providing materials: they're in books. You can go read Kolmogorov's probability books, you can read the Feynman lectures on physics. You can even listen to the Great Courses and learn whatever the bleep you want there. And do you? Do even adults have, as a group, the discipline, attention, and stamina to self-teach like this? No.

I call it self-teaching for a reason. When I taught, I looked into students' eyes and on their papers. I walked around the room. I had them present on the board. I prodded them to discuss ideas and argue with each other. I made mistakes writing proofs or calculations on the board and made students catch them, even -- yes, this is a skill math profs practice, because it's inevitable and recovering from the fall with grace is a learned skill! Every class in person was an interactive intellectual wrestling match. Video is just not the same. Interrupting others with your questions and discussion is vital to learning.

I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.

The best teachers are those that can induce pro-learning behavior in others, and books are a good medium to learn from once induced but quite poor in inducing the necessary behavior by itself. Videos are usually better than books, but tend to fall behind compared to the best in-person teachers.

That said, no school is actually teaching people how to trigger pro-learning behavior in themselves. It is always assumed that either students learn it as a side product from all the other classes, or it is the responsibility of the teacher. That in my view what is missing from the picture when we a transitioning away from in-person education system into a online system.

I think a clear value proposition is something that’s really lacking for students at all levels. I remember a lot of vague “you’ll need this later” sentiment from my time in school, which is just not motivating.

That and counteracting the “I’m just not good at math (or whatever subject)” mentality would go a long way to addressing this self-learning issue

The learning principles in the summary you linked are also major themes we covered in the course, but I think the emphasis is a bit different because the 38-801 audience is primarily future educators (who are of course also lifelong learners)

0: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/index.html 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3557656/

• Hide the tutorial for the problem, in the "shape" of the problem, so the student won't even realize they're being taught something. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH2wGpEZVgE)

• Make the student/player feel a need for a new tool, before the tool is introduced. Have them try (and perhaps fail) to solve the problem without the tool first. (See the "keys and doors" discussion in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO1R6vFDBo&list=PLc38fcMFcV...)

• For each new concept, present its lesson as a series of spaced-chunk challenges, where each chunk ramps the difficulty up to a climax and then down again to a gentle denouement. Give the learner's mind a chance to feel a sense of mastery over already-understood concepts, not just the continual stress of new challenges. (See https://boingboing.net/2015/09/14/super-mario-maker-levels.h... or http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2011/12/a-pleasant-journey-through...)

• Gate problems behind proof of mastery of previous micro-skills, not just in the form of obvious tests, but also in the form of multi-step problems for new knowledge which can't even be approached without also having another prerequisite skill. Ensure that it becomes impossible to "leave behind" a foundational skill—i.e. ensure that the learner will get stuck without the new tool, and so realize they need to backtrack to pick up that tool, rather than flailing uselessly at the next problem.

• Meter and visualize progress. Map acquisition of micro-skills directly to some sort of measurement the student can look at (a level number; a tech tree; a skill grid), to feel that they're making progress. Ensure the system is designed such that this number goes up not just when they make progress on new skills, but also when they go back to shore up their knowledge of old skills.

Etc.

Having experienced this myself many times over, I now know exactly what to look for in a book when I am self learning. I don't know how this skill is to be taught but if remote learning was to succeed, different methods of learning needs to be outlined and taught to the students and get them to learn to select one appropriate for their learning styles and subject.

Also (another opinion) you get intuition doing practice problems and playing with the idea(s), it’s almost impossible to get intuition just by reading.

But more than that, the part I actually liked about teaching was that person-to-person engagement. The arguments, the exploring, the discovery. Seeing people (students) rise to challenges and do things they didn't think they could do. I've done a lot of online teaching, and certainly some of that can happen, but especially with struggling students -- they just don't log on. They slip away. At least if someone's sitting in your classroom you can provoke them or cajole them or charm them into a reaction that you can tease into engagement.

Interesting. I'm currently taking a Course through Rutger's University Online, and so far I and most in my class are also weeks ahead of schedule, and are just awaiting grading on our final projects. As for my grade on it: mine was based on an actual project I did while I was at BMW so I documented the entire process. I used it to get promoted and sent back to VW as I thought I was a better fit there so its well detailed and I got sent back in a month after, so it worked.

> I call it self-teaching for a reason.

I'm a big proponent of home schooling and online learning. I'm an autodidactic person, so I just took notes of what would be on the exam and tried my best to incorporate it when I studied at hoome and tried to find usecases to relearn it later and how I would actually understand it for future use. Its how I learned calculus, my last math class, after failing algebra because I tried doing everything the instructor's way in class--I had to go everyday to get the first failure dropped from my GPA.

To be honest, this is why I never did well in school for things that mattered on paper: I often got Bs and Cs most years and I was always told I was being an underachiever with much higher potential. The truth is I just realized that Schooling and Education are two very different things and the former did very little provided I landed a job in my career.

The classes I often got As in I just didn't care and repeated whatever the instructor said back to them or told them what they wanted to hear. Rote learning is a poor way to instruct, but it scales so they do it.

To this day I can still recall all of my essential amino acids, their molecular structures, most functional groups reactivity and about 50 reaction mechanisms and can explain them in depth because I found utility in them for my career within the laboratory: I graduated 11 years ago. Whereas when I went to office hours back then most of my peers found it hard to do that from semester to semester. I was a Cell/Molecular Biologist (that's where most of the jobs were) but excelled at Biochemistry and Microbiology because that's where my interests were but you probably couldn't tell from most of my grades. When I went into the Industry is when I really shined.

I think Online learning appeals most to people who have had an independent educational development environment, and thrive within it. I never took honors classes in school or university but in HS I was recommended for a few so was made to sit in them for a week and left as it looked like a hassle (the instructors heavily grade on class participation) only to find out later that they did that to weed the herd and the teacher often gave lots of time for independent learning to my dismay.

> I'm so glad I'm no longer in the classroom, frankly. Sigh.

I think the only two professors, or teachers for that matter, that I ever liked and enjoyed speaking with iwere grinding away to be able to say the same one day.

They did it because it was pre-requisite for funding their lab/research and tenure, none of them seemed to like it very much but they were awesome at it despite that because they approached the material from an Industry perspective and often went against conventional wisdom. I still my remember Chemistry professor eating his lunch and going over certain reactions on the dry board and then going to the teacher's protest afterward to try and get back pay for teaching back-back summer courses during the budget/strike days in the CSU/UC system... I wrote on my class evaluation that 'this University does not deserve him.'

And I meant it, too, he went to Oxford for his BSc and Edinburgh for his PhD and post doc, I just thought what a waste... but he later told me in private over some drinks its because his wife taught there with tenure and his kids didn't want to leave CA so he turned down offers before the financial crises so afterward he was stuck. I hope he is well.

To further compound the issue, in many places students don't have reliable internet access or a decent computer.

Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.

It is unfortunate, and a poor reflection on modern culture that 4th grade is too young to form strong bonds outside of school. Kids are missing the after school unstructured free/play time. Decades later, I'm sill best friends with kids I went to school with in 4th grade.

It's all a game of numbers - sure, there will be some transmissions if you let children play together in open spaces, but overall, from what current data suggests, it's not a significant vector. We generally have to think like this now, there's no such thing as absolute safety and we really have to think hard about what should be restricted and what negative effects this will have long term. Isolating kids at home for months is IMO not worth it.

On a different note, neither is allowing small businesses to fail in droves even if they can provide a good hygiene concept. Switzerland has also opened up hairdressers since this week - with masks, hand sanitizing and contact tracing being mandatory for everyone. We'll see in a couple of weeks whether this works or not.

Adults more or less try to maintain distances, as you said.

Everyone will catch this. To think otherwise is folly. Our intrepid leaders have had between 4-6 weeks to sort things out. Hope they did.

My kids can go play outside. This is getting absurd.

And shelter in place with strong social distancing has proven to be the most effective way to slow the spread of the virus given the current testing capacity and lack of contact tracing.

This is bullshit.

We will learn more during this time about how the virus works and how to treat it as well. Hopefully that knowledge will help us exit faster but we should expect this to be a long term new normal.

Travel and tourism is definitely going to take a bigger and continued hit. But there might be ways to make it work.

Like most people on the site, I am well adapted to the conditions forced upon us by this pandemic.

What I can’t do is go travelling, what with the airports being closed to tourists, the hotels being closed, and the airlines cancelling any flights other than repatriations, etc. — and I can’t go to local museums, because they’re closed.

I can’t go to a pub to hang out with local furries, because the pub is closed. I probably can’t go to the large furry convention that was going to happen later this year in my city, because the hotel it would be held in is currently being used as a pop-up hospital. Even if I got around the airport problems by learning to fly (I have the money and time for lessons but not for a plane), I couldn’t go to any other cons instead because their hotels have also been converted into pop-up hospitals.

I can go for walks, but I can’t go to any parks, because they’re closed.

I’m also not comfortable with selling my old home in the UK and buying a new one in Berlin — but that’s not because of risk to me, it’s because of the situation in the UK. It’s not really a “hobby”, but it is something I had planned to do and have put off because of this.

I’m not into music or dancing or spectator sports, but those are big parts of most people’s lives — now impossible because their venues are closed.

The only thing I can do is walking (on sidewalks), passive a/v entertainment, MOOCs/etc, and video games.

Suits me, but if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

If you live in an area that's a hotspot then you need to have tighter restrictions than if not. If you know you're in an at-risk group then you need to have tighter restrictions.

Our restrictions and daily routines are naturally going to have to shift about as the virus ebbs and flows. Which is why a good local testing and contact tracing regime is essential to end the most draconian lockdowns. If you don't even know how the virus is distributed locally and can't quickly act to quarantine people who have been in contact with someone who is infected then it's very hard to say mingling together is a great idea. That said the risks of kids playing together in a neighborhood seem pretty minor if otherwise people are keeping to themselves. The likely negative consequence is that if one family has a member that tests positive then all the others in the neighborhood will need to quarantine until they can be tested or enough time passes. Here that's 14 days if you're not symptomatic or 7 days after the symptoms go if you are. Then the less likely consequence is that you're the vector that passes on the infection and it kills one of your neighbors.

We're relaxing our restrictions here a bit in Iceland on Monday and I'm really interested to see how that goes.

I have my hopes, if not at least until Winter.

Luckily, I have hobbies that are easily done without large groups of people and believe I can avoid groups of 10 or more people for most of summer and probably 50 people until September. (I've not spent more than a few minutes with more than 3 others for the last month and half)

Another commenter pointed out that there were only a few school-aged kids in their neighborhood. I noticed when I graduated high school there weren't many younger school-aged kids in my neighborhood even though I grew up with a good number of people nearby. When my sister moved into a newly built neighborhood when they had kids other young families moved in, too. I think neighborhoods tend to cluster with families, it cycles and may not always catch on every generation and some kids get stuck.

Those situations sound incredibly depressing, but I don't think it necessarily reflects all of society.

In my area, kids on the B team in FIFTH GRADE play over 55 basketball games a season.

That's more than any college.

It's the same lunacy for hockey, baseball, etc.

They get social interaction from the team, sure. But it's no longer a seasonal thing. It's year round and cancels out a lot of play time in the hood.

Maybe that's because as a child I had unsupervised access to a networked playstation and a computer. I would have loved to stay at home all day.

As an adult I hate it. When my city opened back up I took up cycling as my only mode of transport because I've taken the feeling of physical exertion for granted.

It’s no different than removing sports as a separate subject. You don’t learn math or English running down a track field and you don’t learn how to swimming reading 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Living in the 3rd largest school district in America, I'm wondering if secretly ,the administrators are seeing this as an opportunity to get 1 step closer to automating away the teacher so that they can stay within budget constraints and serve more people.

Feels like it is all going the wrong way. We need to flip this narrative: massive federal funding for schools, more teachers, better pay for teachers, better facilities, more field trips, small student to teacher ratios, free tutoring.

My son is the kid who relishes every chance to miss school, but was devastated to find out there would be no more school for the year.

If your kids are struggling, it must be because you are immoral, lazy, have bad "culture," etc. Internet discussions of parenting always devolve into success theater.

But the kids themselves will eventually speak up. If you follow HN for a while, you will also read stories from a surprisingly large number of successful people who had deeply negative experiences in school as kids. I got through high school by pretty much ignoring all of the "content" and doing well enough on exams to get OK grades, plus I had fairly high test scores, and didn't aim too high with my college applications.

And that's not even to mention, any of the students that know they aren't following along, but don't really care and would rather zone out/sit on their phone the whole lecture than get 1:1 help. Do you really expect most students will seek help for themselves?

Perhaps you could modify your plan and say that students who got lower than a B+ or something on a recent quiz are required to attend the breakout group to get help from the teacher, it's not up to them to self-select. But then you're back to... the status quo, that "breakout group" is just the regular classroom. You have one class for the advanced students to go through material quicker, and another class for everyone else. That's already the way many schools are structured.

Furthermore, unless we suddenly hire a lot more teachers each student's group is going to essentially be their normal class and we are back to the whole class being kept back when someone needs extra help. Again, the only difference seems to be the main lecture is performed by someone besides the students' teacher. This could be better if the new teacher really is "world class", but I doubt it will be an extreme improvement.

But a pre-recorded lecture is usually much shorter than a live lecture. The one-way communication of a one hour class can usually be condensed into a 10-20 min video recording. This is by using a script that optimizes the time to communicate the information in the best possible way.

The rest of the time should be spent learning by doing or talking to others.

But I'm not sure it replaces anything that exists (I'm not sure you argued this!). A core reason we have teachers and not a TV screen is because they can organically read the room and adjust the lesson plan in real time. That feedback loop is constantly ongoing even if you never noticed it.

I don't want to jump too far through the experiment but I think the conclusion is the same: any good idea is really just, "we need to do more." So if the argument is that we can do more with the same resources, I fear it's because we fail to grok what those resources are actually doing today.

It's not just class too. I forget what I talked about in meetings with colleagues. I talked to people from class and my coworkers about this, and I'm far from alone with these feelings and a lack of focus on zoom. Something to do with the cadence of speech, lack of body language maybe, maybe something deeper and more primal. I thought I would love working from home, now I'm itching to get back just so I can function again.

That's a really weird way of thinking about it. You're completely ignoring the relational aspect of learning and focusing exclusively on the artifact of a particular presentation of some content. You also seems to be assuming that everyone learns the same way without variation. Commodification and mass production are improvements in a lot of areas, but not all.

I don't think you can rank the teachers of the world from best to worst, when often the best teacher is a good-enough one that understands you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi

Many of my teachers, most even, could have been replaced, with with some gain, by high-quality videos and quizzes.

The point is between a simulacrum of a dog, and an actual living breathing dog with its own wants/needs/spontaneous behavior and personality.

Similarly, the expectations of an actual teacher, vs just self learning with tests.

This issue is captured in Blooms 2 sigma problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

Someone get's hives around dogs. Perhaps the online version is better.

Depends on the need.

I want to learn about all dogs. Online would offer more. I want to learn more about this one dog perhaps locally observing is better.

Depends on the technology at the time.

Online might offer the same experiences locally in the future. VR might give you the chance to meet that dog and interact virtually.

People with CAPD are often dependent to a high degree on lip reading and video feed may disrupt the connection between words and mouth movements just enough to inject too much noise into the signal. If you don't realize this is what you are doing, you can't readily compensate when it gets disrupted.

The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered.

I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.

If all it took was the best lecturers, we could have been doing perfect distance learning since 1982 via UPS and VHS.

As for holes - Without thinking too deeply, the main issues I see with breakout sessions and student support in an online environment are:

1. Not being able to see how students are working and struggling requires that students themselves be proactive in seeking help. However, not all schools push students to behave this way nor are all students capable of realizing when they are stuck or going too far down the wrong path.

2. Lower income students are automatically ruled out and/or have a far less optimal experience. The longer remote learning runs with this type of divide, the larger the education gap becomes.

I agree. A huge chance is being missed. However, this opportunity has been missed for a long time already. The pandemic is just making this painfully obvious now.

This is very different from colleges - that generally actually focus on teaching stuff (which means students do all the important work themselves).

All the important roles of primary school are hard to accommodate via remote setup.

The main upside is that when people can finally take a breather at the end of this, I'm sure that at _that_ point more people can realistically regroup and be creative moving forward.

While theoretically this sounds good, it doesn't work in practice. Kids, espcially young ones (I have a 2nd grader), need that personal interaction with their teacher. Schools are already overwhelmed with the teacher to student ratio. Imporsonalizing this interaction will only worsen an already bad situation.

Local teachers would provide the personal interaction during work periods where kids come online and get help.

Grade 2 and younger are already learning through tv. Big Bird is rarely in person but kids know and learn from him. Is Barney still around? The Wiggles? Those top performs seem to hold attention as well as the local puppet show.

That said, all of this still requires a fully engaged adult in the room to monitor interactions and help things stay on track and answer questions. My wife plans a full curriculum for all our kids together each day with breakout sessions for grade-appropriate subjects. This has been basically interrupted by the current official video curriculum of our school system - and our system is doing better than most on this subject. I have the luxury of an adult available to teach most of the day. Many do not. But I still want to yank my kids out of official "school" and get homeschooling certified until this ends. It burns you out. I'd welcome the schools closing officially now, and offering optional assignments to pass the time for parents that want to use them but that's not really equitable, it just works best for me.

A video conference is great but it can't help keep a virtual classroom engaged and flow with the kids' questions as well as an in-person room. There just isn't enough bandwidth.

Experience: currently three gradeschool and younger in my house.

My 5th grader got reprimanded today for spending 30min on fonts & colors on an essay that itself only took 30min... as a simple example. Another example: I regularly have to prevent both kids from accessing Youtube during school time.

There is some merit to pursuing these ideas at the paradigm level for various kinds of post-secondary level education, and of course it is already happening- though still poorly.

Before that level- basically before the age of 25- about 1% of what we call "education" consists of "teaching"- having a source of truth utter statements around the intellectual architecture of various "subjects" that we have constructed and partitioned over the long years of human civilization, with varying levels of inspiration and motivation.

That "paradigm" that ideas like these hope to transform- that really is at most only 1% of what education is for the under-25s.

What's the 99%? Mimic-ing, copying, replaying, performing, processing, engaging. School is an elaborate community improv performance, staffed at best with performers whose skills are measured in EQ, not IQ. I regularly witness school staff plan the model of their interactions with the kids down to the minute, down to the second- tho just the model. The actual performance is spontaneous. It is theater. Yes, there is a curriculum, and homework, and grades, and so forth. Those are all part of the act.

There are no "best" teachers. There are only an uncountable myriad of 1-1 relationships and engagements, each of which represents a full spectrum human interaction possibility (only a fraction of the potential of which of course is ever fulfilled). And though I love "work" and do a lot of it and have my kids do a lot of it- that also is just performative. The goal isn't to complete the assignments in an intellectual progression. No. It is in service of developing behavioral- awareness of self- and emotional- empathetic, sympathetic, awareness of others- tools to engage in the world.

Not to put too high a gloss on it, but in digital terms an orchestrated ChatRoulette is a closer approximation to what actually happens in an education context than the Yale lectures and homework helper.

And there is simply no substitute for the all too real, full spectrum chemistry that develops when people are in physical space together.

So changing the digital teaching paradigm is essentially meaningless. And "remote learning" is about the worst oxymoron.

The best thing we can do at a policy level is provide financial liquidity so that parents can afford to devote their full attention to their children, while we are in this phase where that is required.

Most of the time spent is just trying to keep the kids on task not actually spent trying to teach.

Some other things I've seen and experienced that have seemed to work well and that I'd like to see more of:

- course staff who serve primarily as advisors and guides to provide and help students find, discover and use resources for self-directed learning and to help when students encounter difficulties

- schools that helped students buy cheap paperback books for recreational reading

- scaled out peer tutoring, where the school pays students who have taken a course to tutor students who are currently taking the course

- self-paced learning without harsh penalties for "falling behind" other students or an arbitrary course schedule

This isn't just an issue for those of limited financial means. There are areas where internet access is not available for any price or the cost for internet access to support regular viewing of video classroom content would run into the hundreds of dollars per month.

My experience thus far, having 3rd and 5th graders at home, is that remote math learning is a piece of cake and the quarantine experience has really illuminated for me how slowly public schools move. It has also clearly demonstrated that teacher language arts & writing requires 1) skills I don't have, and 2) direct interaction with a competent instructor.

Note, too, that not all teachers have adequate internet access at home to effectively teach remotely. My 5th grader's teacher is quite rural and has 5mbps down, 1mbps up internet service. She can barely participate in online meetings and cannot effectively upload any video content.

#2: 100% agree, but some classes lend themselves this more readily than others.

The flipped classroom concept itself is nothing new. My issue is with the “remote” part of that. There is value in kids working on an art project together or working in small groups to create a poster presentation, etc. The lecture-homework paradigm might be appropriate for high school, to for younger grades, there really aren’t lectures as much as interactive discussions and hands-on exploration.

I personally think MOOC-with-tech-advancements is the future of education. And I have a suspicion brick-and-mortar educational system has played a role in crippling its progress.

And it is not like passive watching videos would be something new in education either.

Teaching requires a feedback loop. What does the child need to know? What do they know already? Are they engaged? Can they explore the problem space themselves and get feedback and direction?

There are sure to be holes, like does this lead to treating the in person teacher as a commodity and reducing the value of that in person time?

But definitely this is a time for disruption in this space.

I have reservations about fully remote programs, because in my newly remote grad program right now I am worthless with zoom only lectures, and I'm not alone.

I'm sure teacher's union would be loath to try new things like this or "rank" teachers in any way..

I mean, software developers love stack ranking, right? We can go ahead and fire anyone who doesn't close X Jira tickets per month, I'm sure. Lines of code? Business impact? (oh, sorry, that critical bugfix you did doesn't fit in our measurement framework so you're underperforming, have a PIP).

"Wait but we can just measure performance with tests" LOL OK, if you thought "teaching to the test" was bad before...

And anyway they do already measure performance with year-over-year student progress on state tests, and there are consequences if you suck at it for too long. At least around here. There's enough leeway that it's not horrible but it's also not great and does encourage some of those teach-to-the-test behaviors that people claim to hate. A good teacher would 100% for sure teach better not being judged under that system, and it's one of many things that push them out of teaching—even if they do fine on the metrics, it contributes to frustration and job dissatisfaction, having to do less-than-optimal things or else stress about test scores[1]. A bad one, perhaps, is better for being so judged.

[1] Example: several of these kids are effectively two grade levels behind on [subject]. Do I try to fill in those gaps, and leave them with little understanding of the material that will be on this year's test and so nearly certain to miss every question, or do I treat of the earlier material only when absolutely necessary so they see most of this year's stuff (even if understanding it poorly), so score a little higher than they would otherwise? The former is definitely better for the students, but if you get a "low" class you're (the teacher) gonna be fucked on your standardized testing scores if you do that. This is a real, and not uncommon, situation to be in.

Ask a preacher to solve a problem and they’ll use prayer.

Ask a politician to solve a problem and they’ll draft a law.

Ask a developer to solve a problem and they’ll write you an app.