I believe that to learn well, you need to be challenged, but not too much. Ability-based evaluation only does that for students whose abilities happen to line up with the expected standard. It is bad both for gifted students and for struggling students.
1. Whoever determined that he does not “deserve” this is wrong. There may be other constraints, but no one gets to frame it as “deserves” when a child wants to learn something.
2. If a teacher is unable to teach Johnny to write a for loop, despite Johnny’s genuine utmost motivation, I would question teacher’s competence or at least fit.
3. Like any mentor, a professor in higher ed may want to choose whom to teach so that own expertise and teaching ability is realized to the fullest. Earlier in life, elementary school teacher’s luxury to do so may be limited (which is why their job is so difficult and hopefully well-compensated), and one bailing on a kid due to lack of patience or teaching competence is detestable.
4. If Johnny continues to pursue this with genuine utmost motivation, he will most likely succeed despite any incompetent teachers. If he does not succeed and yet continues to pursue this to the detriment to his life, that is something a psychologist should help him with.
As for Timmy, if he learns to produce the expected result with least effort, for which he receives constant praise from the teacher, and keeps coasting this way, that does him a major disservice as far as mental mental and self-actualisation in life.
Where is the transition? At some point ability is more important than effort.
There is no benefit in always being praised for your efforts if you cannot deliver the goods.
This relies on everyone's ability to learn being determined solely by motivation rather than innate ability. As someone who has tutored both deprived children and the very bright I can say this unfortunately isn't true, even though the world would be a better place if it was.
> Professor Hawking's laidback approach to education continued during his years studying physics at the University of Oxford. ''I once calculated that I did about a thousand hours' work in the three years I was there, an average of an hour a day.''
[0]: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/at-70-hawking-confesses-he...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#:~:text=Hawkin....
I am really quite confused about what you think the point of education is.
In general, the world (either the physical world or the employment world) does not care about effort, it cares about results. Someone laboriously filling their kettle with a teaspoon might be putting in a ton of effort, but I'd much rather someone else make the tea who can use a tap.
Why do we care about grades? Because universities and employers use them to quickly assess how useful someone is likely to be. Few people love biochemistry enough that they'd spend huge sums of money and time at university if it didn't help get them a job.
By your own logic, the student who fills the kettle with the spoon has produced the expected result. Fast enough with the spoon and sky’s the limit, right?
A good teacher, while praising the effort, would help them find out about the tap. Not praising the effort would give the opposite signal! You have worked hard, and through no fault of your own (no one has built-in knowledge about the tap) you were essentially told that was for nothing?!
And if you have learned the tap, do you want to be done with it? Or be pushed to keep applying the same effort as with the spoon, but directed more wisely knowing that there’s a tap? Imagine what heights would you reach then!
The worst teachers are in whose class 30% of the students are filling their kettle with spoons all their time, 30% simply dip them into the puddle and never get used to do the work, 30% give up because what is even the point of filling the kettle when their home has a hot water dispenser.
Love your analogy, by the way.
It's like looking at a hand carved match-stick judging the result as low effort, not knowing that they started with a seed.
But yes, I don’t know how clear must I be about it—this is learning (for very young humans still psychologically immature), that’s exactly why it has to be spelled out that evaluation must be on the effort, precisely because it is never on the effort in any other activity in adulthood.
> Some kids are going to learn more quickly than others, and for them, no effort will be required.
If no effort is required, then the bar is wrong.
On setting up expectations for adulhood, I think this is exactly backwards:
> If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood.
Praising a child for effort without results seems way more likely to set them up for a surprisingly bad time as an adult. My personal experience has been that the "good grades/rewards without effort" thing has continued and seems pretty likely to continue through adulthood as long as you go into some kind of engineering.
> My personal experience has been that the "good grades/rewards without effort" thing has continued and seems pretty likely to continue through adulthood as long as you go into some kind of engineering.
Based on my observation, people who are comfortable doing the work in engineering achieve completely different heights than people who got used to coasting. As applied ML spreads across industries, the difference between the competitiveness of those two categories will only become more pronounced. Furthermore, from my observation those who got used to coasting suffer from issues like perfectionism, narcissism, rejection aversion, and similar.
Sooner or later in adulthood not doing the work stops achieving results deserving praise.
> Praising a child for effort without results seems way more likely to set them up for a surprisingly bad time as an adult.
Not “without results”. Results are critical. However, if results do not comply with whatever requirements, that is not a factor in whether to reward, unless you reward compliance. Rewarding compliance has to happen to some degree, but should not be overdone unless your goal is to foster uncreative cogs.
If the level of effort made is high, but the outcome does not comply in some way, praise is due. If the outcome complies, but the level of effort is low, there is no reason for praise (what are you praising? mere compliance?) and you must have set a wrong bar.
Not doing this fosters people with mental issues such as rejection anxiety, perfectionism, narcissism, defeatism, etc. If you got good grades at school with little actual effort and the constant praise for that formed your identity, you may be in for a bad time in adulthood.
Teacher’s job is to determine the appropriate bar, estimate the level of effort, and to help shape the effort applied in a way that it improves the skill in question and the more general meta skill of learning.
The issue of judging by the outcome is prevalent in some (or all) school systems, so we can say LLMs are mostly orthogonal to that.
However, even if that issue was addressed, in a number of skills the mere availability of ML-based generative tools makes it impossible to estimate the level of actual effort and to set the appropriate bar, and I do not see how it can be worked around. It’s yet another negative consequence of making the sacred process of producing an amalgamation of other people’s work—something we all do all the time; passing it through the lens of our consciousness is perhaps one of the core activities that make us human—to become available as a service.