“Move fast and break things” is a monument to an aberrant culture of arrogance and dismissive impatience. Based on hypercompetitive greed. (That for a generation was funded by cheap money chasing itself around I search of a drain.)
It’s no coincidence that importing this culture to education produces experiences that are superficial and brittle. It’s difficult to think of a counterexample.
a decade of your life to get past "novice" level for teaching something like CS to high school students is not something we should be pushing to replicate in other fields.
Education is begging to be disrupted. Maybe this guy doesn't have all the answers, but pretending like what we have is good is a joke. He's on a better track than sitting in a classroom trying to get past "novice" during the most productive time of his life.
> Education is begging to be disrupted.
I rest my case.
Substantively, believe me, I agree with you. Culturally, though, you're proving my point.
My whole point is that the culture of academia is not something worth replicating, and indeed needs to be fundamentally... disrupted.
You are talking about the restrictive, punitive world of academia where you constantly have to please the powers that be in order to step up. OP was talking about their own feelings about their own abilities in their job.
The parallel to software engineering feels correct to me, particularly if we're talking about working at a giant company like Google. No matter how good of a developer you are you still need to battle yearly reviews, stack ranking, peer review etc. etc in order to advance. But you can strip all that away and still recognize that after two years in the industry you're not that advanced as a developer.
The crucial difference is that in the software engineering world you can take your misplaced confidence, strike out and try something. Worst case it'll fail and you move on. As a teacher with misplaced confidence you can strike our, try something and mess up the educations of children and parents who put their trust in you.
If a guy in a dirty denim jacket comes to you outside the bus station and tells you he's Jesus, he absolutely might be Jesus. However assuming that he's not is a perfectly good heuristic.
a) fully aware of or
b) could be measured, and
c) is precise enough to differentiate between "able to help improve education" and "not able to improve education", and
d) this skill unit is in any way accurate.
Of course none of these are true, and in fact teaching is an amorphous and situation-specific concept that defies all attempts to replicate or quantify success. All attempts thus far to do so have failed in glorious and spectacular ways at every level (e.g. No Child Left Behind Act of 2002).
In reality, the skillset a person who can successfully improve the state of CS education has may or may not be related to their time spent actually teaching or their skill at teaching.
Hell, even one's time spent teaching is mostly uncorrelated with one's skill at teaching. We all know teachers in our childhoods who had many years of experience and yet remained terrible at their jobs.
A good teacher may in fact be the very worst kind of person to fix teaching.
It's more about the social landscape than the practical requirements.
Maybe he's starting that project because the state of the art is just so abhorrently bad that two years is plenty of time to see some really low hanging fruit.
I mean, this seems very plausible to me. There's plenty of areas where this type of things happen. All the time.
I’m of the opinion that coding just something not everyone is going to like, just as I’ve never enjoyed painting or basketball. I don’t think there’s a lack of good tools, we just started with an incorrect premise that it’s possible to design a tool that makes someone like something that they assuredly don’t.
It just can't be solved by tech, unless it's a complete paradigm shift such as sentient AI teachers with emotions having productive 1on1s with students in a full-dive style VR style environment.
"Is two years enough experience to create a curriculum?" is a good discussion prompt but it's hardly a silver bullet for dismissing the project. A counter argument is that being new to the field gives the OP a fresh perspective.
OP never claimed to be an expert and there is nothing disrespectful in this post. It's too bad it's the top comment. Best of luck to OP on pursuing a new way of engaging students.
We both agreed that we learned most of what we learned about the job in the first 2-3 years.
Also we saw a lot of teachers hit burnout at around 2-3 years and become infinitely less engaged / less passionate / more toxic.
Two years is a perfect amount of time to put into teaching.
I believe it is largely accepted by economists from accross the spectrum that a key driver and indeed one of the only gurantees of long term economic growth is investing in education and yet we routinely do not do so to the point where it is simply not financially viable for teachers to remain in the profession.
As to your argument that 2-3 years is where you learn most, I would argue that is probably the same for ever profession out there, but the experience of time is what adds that extra 10%. Just like we complete 90% of a programming task in the scheduled time, its really that last 10% where most of the difficulty lies.
In the US, we pour staggering amounts of money into education. It's certainly not underfunded in raw dollar terms.
Now, the lion's share of that money going to administrators of one kind or another, is a big problem.
Up to a certain point... the bad dancer may be wearing terrible shoes that impedes from learning and becoming great, instead focusing attention on improving unnecessary skill.
We enjoyed (and aced) the classes from the teacher with fewer YOE. Maybe the more experienced teacher was more jaded, maybe the younger teacher was more relatable. Who knows.
I have relatives who are educators their entire lives. One thing I've taken away from listening to them complaining about their work, is that there is an abundance of teachers with long YOE, who are totally checked out from their job, and use their long tenure to bully the younger teachers. There's an idiom they use a lot during these complaints: "Using their tenure to sell their experience."
Finally, it's "you're". Not "your". It was difficult to parse your text when you're not doing it right.
I would also argue that while some of the most 'fun' teachers I had were newer, they were not the best teachers and many of the best teachers I had were older with far more experience but, like you said, had not lost their enthusiasm. When you apply that to the discussion in question I would argue that the author might indeed know how to engage with students, and has come to the frankly not so orginal conclusion that kids like to have fun, but does not have the experience/ability to do more than those that have come before.
Another user replied to my comment about Khan academys founder having no prior experience beyond tutoring relatives, well, there existed a market gap that no longer exists. What killer features are being proposed here? What are the technical solutions to the obvious technical issues that they point out? How do they plan to monetise this solution aimed at high school kids or indeed underfunded schools? How will they help teachers engage their students in the classroom itself via this platform - a poor teacher blames his tools - students need engaging in the classroom not online where you are competing with dopamine inducing auto scrollers.
I appreciate you educating my punctuation, perhaps you have the experience to start an education platform of you're own!
I have 0 experience in teaching, never created a product focussed on education, and schools are paying me to use my product in their class.
You've reached the first step in the process, getting into schools. The next step is show value in outcomes rather than just another grift.
Like I said, my product is not really made for schools, and it's also not my main focus. But plenty of teachers and students seem to get value out of it. I just have to trust their word on that of course.
Calling someone arrogant because they want to create an educational product with only 2 years of experience is really weird for me.
Like many others here, I work in IT and that's the kind of thinking that led to every new project being "Ruby On Rails" about 12-15 years ago and every time a new underlying library gets updated, a bunch of code breaks. Meanwhile, C/C++, COBOL and FORTRAN programs from 30-50 years ago are still running the infrastructure of the world.
Newer doesn't always mean better.
There's so much more to teaching than the actual teaching part. Interacting with kids, controlling a classroom, etc. Those are things you start to pick up as a student teacher, but you really nail it several years in.
I feel like many base their opinions on teaching through their experience as a student or through what they hear from others.
It also highly depends on the school, students, and what type of teaching you are doing (specialist, classroom, support, etc).
A classroom teacher who has well behaved students for two years will have different opinions about teaching than a classroom teacher who has rough classes for two years. Admins do their best to spread kids out, separate kids that cause trouble together or fight, etc.
Sometimes though it's just down to the luck of the draw - you enter your third year and by the end of the day you are crying on the car ride home.
I don't see how starting a startup is any different. Yes, today, this person probably doesn't know everything they need to know for their startup to succeed. But they will learn that over time.
I think you mistake conviction and ambition for arrogance. I mean, how much of a fintech wiz were Patrick and John when they started /dev/payments? How many call taxi companies did Travis and Garrett run before starting an on-demand Limo service? Experience counts for naught. Insights matter more when it comes to inducing mass change in human behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnav9vgHDHs&t=350s / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/qnav9vgHDHs
There is also the fact that your examples and indeed the likes of khan academy filled a market gap or had a niche offering. The education platform market is saturated and if your entire product is to create and deliver educational courses for high school kids I'd wager teaching experience, and more of it, is key.
If Bill Gates took this advice he wouldn't have dropped out of university to run Microsoft. That's fueled by ambition and initiative, not arrogance.
Arrogance is telling OP or young Bill Gates that they aren't qualified enough to do it.
While normally I would applaud work in this area, the sheer arrogance to claim in your article you have the experience to build curriculum’s or indeed that you can build a better education platform for teaching kids to code with this experience is insulting to the teaching profession as well as those building existing platforms in collaboration with teachers and schools alike.
My parents taught for decades. In the same way an experienced programmer takes decades to hone there craft to the point where others should really take note of how and what they have to say, the same can be said for teachers.
Sorry but I just can’t take this seriously and maybe it’s wrong but it just feels… disrespectful to teachers in a way as if 2 years is somehow enough to have mastered the profession and impart knowledge and wisdom to the education world or indeed students.. as if after 2 years you know better than everyone else, you’ve seen enough.