So we're just dealing with what (some) students have always done: get someone else to write the report or do the math homework. Or have parents pay a tutor to help. Or use Cliff's Notes instead of reading the book. But now it's trivially easy and free. There are no obstacles to cheating other than knowing it's wrong and self-defeating, and those are things that young people don't really have a well-developed sense about.
Then class time is reserved exclusively for doing the assignments. No phones or computers allowed.
If we're talking about K-12 education, that is for everyone and it's in society's interest that the most people learn the fundamental knowledge that we are trying to teach them.
I'm certainly open to the idea that our current approach is not optimal but I'd need to see evidence that a seminar-style approach would work in that setting. Maybe for some high school subjects. In fact some English classes were that way. We'd get a reading assignment, and then discuss in class, and then typically also have to write something about it on our own.
But math, sciences, and English topics such as grammar were all taught by lecture and example and I'm not sure the seminar approach would work as well there.
But seriously, teaching in public schools these days relies so much on technology, youtube, that it makes no sense to have teacher’s as paid professionals, just get subscriptions to technology services for the kids and teach them how to work them. I think we still need places to socialize kids, but that’s a different job. Anyway, yes, too many teachers are simply there to enforce unnecessary social hierarchies and rigid modes of thinking, there is no need for most of them.
I knew some people doing great at high school due to being forced to study. Then they taste the "freedom" in college and fail hard because no one tells them what to do now.
For example, high school poisoned reading for me. I hated fiction for several years after high school.
I've met numerous parents who seem to be offended by the idea that someone would tell their child "You must do this, even if you don't want to" in basically any context. In the past I think such things were said in many contexts where they shouldn't have been, but the pendulum is swinging a bit too far the other way these days.
I’m sure they’ll be very proud when their child grows into a half functioning adult that can’t cope with real life.
These type of parents are so shortsighted it literally hurts my brain to interact with them lol.
It's harder for those who have additional accommodations at home, but we could arrange for those accommodations to be made in the school, and those who have accommodations at home are in a better position to advocate for getting what they need than those with rough or busy home lives.
> I'm surprised the answer of doing all exercises (including essay writing) in class is apparently not obvious.
Of course, the other option is to extend school time.
Here's a good litmus test: if something seems very obvious, you're likely missing some hidden complexity.
It's not a perfect test, but if it's obvious to you and not to the people closer to the problem then there really should be alarm bells going off in your head. That feeling of "this is weird" is your brain telling you "I'm missing something" not "everyone is so dumb" (well... not mutually exclusive)
Homework is the real education time. The lecture is less than half the ingredients. You can't learn without engaging with the material. The best lectures follow a question-trytoanswer-getrightanswer pattern where students are basically doing homework as part of the lecture.
We wrote all graded essays during class. It was great. Nice and timeboxed. When you're done you're done. Also forces you to keep it short enough that the teacher doesn't drown in stuff to grade because how much can you really write by hand in 2 hours?
> The best lectures follow a question-trytoanswer-getrightanswer pattern where students are basically doing homework as part of the lecture.
I agree that homework is where a significant chunk of learning happens but I'm highly skeptical that the utility is preserved through such a short timeframe. Spaced repetition is highly effective for memory, and this is baked into any method which has take home assignments. A collaborative style lecture is good, but this serves a different purpose.
> We wrote all graded essays during class.
Right, this was in high school some 20 years ago in Slovenia and also in college after. Anything graded happened at school. All tests were open answer where you have to write 2 or 3 sentences. We also had oral exams in front of the whole class where the teacher asks you questions and you answer. In college the orals were more private because the classes were huge and the exam periods more condensed.
Homework was graded in that you’d get a + for doing it and a - for not doing it. Collect enough - and you get an F. This was more to make us do the homework than to actually check the work.
Afaik this hasn’t changed but I don’t know any recent school children in Slovenia so maybe it has.
> Are you referring to the Socratic Method?
I don’t know what it’s called. The approach where you challenge students to try figuring out the answer/explanation before you explain it to them because that has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes even though, or because, it’s harder and slower.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I still think things can be done a lot better. I left a much more detailed comment in the cousin to this one.
But yeah, that's called the Socratic Method. Big fan. When I taught I'd frequently ask students to answer. Basically while lecturing I'd stop at some points and ask them how they would go about solving certain challenges or whatever. Usually directly related to what would be on the next slide. This style is pretty common fwiw, and I even saw it throughout my education even prior to high school. But it is also unfortunate that there's also a lot of teachers who just begin talking and don't stop.
[0] As a side note, I made the claim in another comment about how you could drop a random but average student into a top school and I'd expect not a high variance on outcome. Well I think this discrepency is part of the evidence to that. Though the US varies widely in general education, with some states being world class and others being... well... Alabama is a state after all...)
The most advanced classes I took, including in high school, made us do the reading and initial problem solving at home and then advanced problem solving in class. This was true for math, English and economics. Lectures with application combined.
But that doesn't work if students don't do the reading. Just as lectures only in class doesn't work if students aren't doing the homework. So a compromise is required--it's doing exercises live. Possibly even just one of the problems from last night's homework.
When I ended up teaching during my PhD I mimicked his style as best I could. Made my course very project based, made homeworks easy to get good grades but also included ways every student could expand on and gave lots of feedback. I like to think the students really liked me, as they would frequently stop by my office just to say hi and a bunch would show up the next term either showing me how they expanded their project or wanting to talk about how to do more or just general advice. YET only half the kids ever attended lecture, a third of kids chose to do a final project not much more complicated than homework, a few didn't turn in their final project, and 2 grad students complained to the department when I failed them for not turning in their final (they ended up being given Cs). This wasn't long ago, early GPT and tail/just post covid days.
There's just a time problem with doing the grading in class. You cannot cover as much material. An ideal class is students do reading before lecture, you go through the material together and have a healthy dialogue about where there is confusion, and then the students build on the solid foundation you created. This certainly works for high school and college, though I suspect not as well for lower levels due to lower independence. The unfortunate truth is that when teaching you're also teaching students a lot of auxiliary skills too, like time management and self-reliance. If you aren't teaching students these skills, where do you think they are going to get them? Sure, some will be able to learn them themselves, but you can't look at their success and claim victory through survivor bias.
But I don't think this is the whole problem.
I'll be honest. My experience with students, the big reason for them cheating is grades. Covid and GPT exacerbated the problems[0] (and created some new ones), but a lot stems from what was already there. We place so much emphasis on grades that this is valued more than the education itself. I've seen bright students that cheat because they feel overwhelmed. Because they know to get into the top colleges and top grad programs they need straight As. Strike that, they need a >4.0 GPA. They have to navigate the unknowns of which professors even hand out A+s, will forgo a better teacher for a teacher that gives more As, and so on. *They are not optimizing their education, they are optimizing their GPA*. Not because they don't care about their education, but because they do. Because everyone knows that the next rung of education is more important, so it is wroth forgoing some now to get access to more later. No one will say it out loud, but we all know even pretty mediocore students can play catch-up even up in undergrad and good students can do that in grad school. I'm sure if you randomly selected kids with GPAs >3.5 from high school and dropped them into your top universities you wouldn't see a big difference in outcomes[1]. I believe this stress is part of why some students just check out. But there is some aspect that is simple here: if grades didn't matter, there's no reason to cheat. I'm not saying to abandon grades, but I think it is worth reevaluating the system. I don't think patchwork solutions are gonna solve things.
All of this misses the entire point of education. Honestly, there's a larger crisis that's going on and it is that our world has just embraced Goodhart's Law as a good thing, not a warning.
[0] For example, that it is actually really difficult to punish cheaters. Any serious accusation needs serious evidence. Even more so when departments measure the amount of cheating by how many cheaters are prosecuted. That same metric hacking is why those students got Cs, just as much as it was that the chair was empathetic towards them. Part of that empathy being back connected to the importance of grades...
[1] Legacy students make this complicated but that's a whole other long conversation that mainly deals with connections.
Wat.
The next year, my advisor pulled me aside. He talked about how some student said they didn't know GitHub was on the internet. I thought he was talking about my experience. Turns out he wasn't... He was talking about two other students, who he talked with independently, and were in his sophomore level class.
This was pre-covid btw. The other story was post. Things only got worse post and I heard similar stories from friends in other departments and other universities. A friend of mine teaching history on the other side of the country had Freshmen who failed an assignment that was "call the library, go check out a book."
So I think this context should help in understanding the actual problem here. I do think GPT is a problem. But like I said, I think the actual problem runs much deeper. Kids were turning off their brains before that... But it was definitely a very sharp drop with covid and another sharp drop after 3.5 came out.
High school me was a moron and should not be trusted to do the real work and people who know better should force him to practice the skills lol
Once he's grown and has a job he will one day realize and be thankful for the teachers that forced him to do the work.
Obviously not true for all students but I don't think it harms anyone inverting it but please point out if I'm wrong!