Most of the students were always great. But it seemed like every quarter, there would be 5-10 problematic students whose, for lack of better term, entitlement, resulted in far more hours of work than worthwhile.
And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory, because it resulted in different lecture outcomes/attention profiles for students.
0: https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
My 3rd grade teacher wanted to fail me for “discipline” problems. In reality, she simply didn’t like me; I had no discipline complaints in other years.
I had undiagnosed ADHD and was gifted. She did not know how to deal with that, and actively disliked me.
Activist teachers are also a thing.
I dropped out of high school for the same reason, I had a teacher that failed me for writing an essay in three different styles of handwriting, and it just broke me. I wasn't a particularly good student, and I especially had a habit of just not doing essays, but I was making an effort to make it through the humanities and get my shit together, and to have that effort rewarded with a 0/100 just made me view the entire system as an absolute joke. I have a more nuanced take now, but it's still impossible to wrap my head around how comfortable people are with the education system here.
Society is made of people, people! You live in a society. Why do we not want the foundational atoms of it to be the best they can be? It just seems so obvious and simple and non controversial.
- Some teachers are bad (and some students will have them)
- Overriding teachers with policies intended to control the bad ones impairs and burns out the others
Consequently, the reasonable path is somewhere in the middle. Create feedback systems designed to identify and weed out the worse teachers* and avoid overloading everyone else with outcome-less proscriptive policies.
* F.ex. it consistently amazes me that few systems, teaching included, regularly poll their end users (students or employees). "Well, people will give bad reviews if they get bad grades!" No shit, and somehow that's something we can't adjust for with a basic statistical analysis?
That completely ignores the social and political aspects.
You need to understand that the people who have the authority to do so do not want to document bad teachers, ever. Documenting bad teachers makes political waves and principals and superintendents never want to make waves because that impedes their ability to both do their job as well as get their next job.
Even if a teacher is very bad, they may be well-liked or be an important part of the community. If you attempt to remove that teacher, they may rally support from the community that can be extremely noisy and inconvenient.
It's not rocket science to set up a continuous leader feedback mechanism.
By and large, everyone knows.
Data might be useful to tell you "hey that longtime great teacher approaching retirement has checked out early" or "the new hire who was struggling last semester has turned the corner" but it's no secret in a school building which teacher everyone hates and which one everyone loves.
If you woke up tomorrow and discovered you were an elementary school principal, you would have the lay of the land by week two at the latest.
The problem is not separating the flowers from the weeds, it's what will happen if you pull the weeds. Who's gonna take care of that room full of 8 year olds tomorrow? And for the next several years? If a weed shows up every day and doesn't commit any crimes, the downside of replacing them is larger than the upside.
For elementary school they absolutely do not know.
In my town the most acclaimed teachers were those organising many recitals with the kids and stuff like that.
Except that 20 years later parents were saying to the strict ones that just taught the material how good they were.
So yeah everybody knows. Not immediately though!
I still remember all of the teachers that were really good and I remember some of the ones that were bad, the ones that were good. I wish that many of them could have lived long enough for me to say thank you.
Can you? How? Do you have a questionnaire or something?
1. they have very expensive benefit plans
2. they get summers off
3. the only way one could get fired is if they showed up drunk, hit students, or had relations with students
4. teachers only have to work 30 years to get a full pension. That means they can retire at 52
i can only imagine the horrors faced by teachers even on the other side of the bay, much less in a red state that isn't the fourth largest economy in the world
tenure protections can be problematic, but so are activist parents, the system isn't great but it is necessary to some extent, your exposure to bad actors as a teacher is massive and requires commensurate protection, just stochastically you'll get parents trying to get you fired every once in a while
There are about 3.5 million public school teachers in the US. The idea that they are incredible is not credible. As an Air Force brat, I attended many diverse public schools. Some teachers were good, some were not, most were ordinary folks. I don't recall any being incredible, though this teacher was definitely incredible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
Any thoughts on this documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ ?
The Department of Education has spent somewhere between $5 and $6 trillion since its inception, with no measurable improvement in results.
After a few tests, I noticed a pattern. Whenever one of the four answers was "all of the above" or "none of the above", that was the correct answer. So I went to the teacher and asked him about that. He leaned over conspiratorially and said "you're right. They're like that because the kids need a break." Then he laughed. I liked him, he was a good egg.
When I was little, my dad taught Air Force ROTC at the local university. He'd sprinkle the test with questions like "what is the insignia on a Soviet fighter jet?" On the classroom wall was a picture of a Soviet fighter jet. The students would still get it wrong. (The answer is "red star".) It was a favorite story of his.
The point of what I posted is the premium value of the benefits package.
For #2, the amount of uncompensated work and just general bullshit they have to put up with is in no way made up for by "having summers off". (Which they don't, really, as they'll often be doing professional development during the summer, and will be preparing for the start of the next school year well before it actually starts.)
(Source: my brother-in-law is an elementary school teacher in the US.)
For #4, is that universal? I feel like that's something that would depend on state or even on school district.
2. Professional development - teachers do opt to get "certs", which result in automatic pay raises. Unfortunately, those certs have no correspondence with better outcomes for the kids. Preparing - yes, this is the lesson plan thing. A teacher told me she worked her fingers to the bone all summer preparing lesson plans. I asked her why she didn't just use the ones from last year. She replied that they had to be individualized for each student. I asked how did she know which students she'd have, as they wouldn't be assigned until the fall? Oops!
4: I googled average number of years until full retirement benefits kick in.
I don't know how it is in your place, but where I'm from governments have — at least for the last 15 years — governed exclusively with a max horizon of 4 years (the time until the next elections). Everything is quick-fixes or patches that kick the can down the road. It's very hard to convince people to care and vote for you if you promise to show results over the next generations, vs if you bump up pensions next year or something.
Basically, to give a different example, that's in essence why you the response to "traffic is abysmal" is "we will widen the urban highways cutting through the city" rather than "we will implement a plan to actually redesign our city away from car-exclusiveness".
Hard guidance is needed for kids. Hard guidance requires authority. So either you give teachers that authority which is very hard especially in diverse settings, or you make the family environment give better implicit and explicit guidance.
Now, the government will always attempt to solve it using the tools they have, which is the school, but it is destined to have vanishingly little success if at all.
Fast forward ten years and the therapist I was seeing for seemingly unrelated reasons diagnoses me with ADHD...
Not that all cases are simply the natural state of kids, but that it's overdiagnosed for that very reason.
"Oh your kid can't sit still and learn about some artificial topic by staring at whiteboards and pieces of paper all day? Better load 'em up with drugs, they clearly have ADHD!"
Sounds like something my Gen X dad, who put zero effort into helping me succeed, would tell me as I failed my way through all school with zero direction or ambition and convinced I wasn't capable of anything useful.
I won't claim more people probably think they have ADHD than actually do, and being bored disproportionately more than most in most situations is absolutely one of the symptoms, but it's a wildly incomplete trivialization of a set of debilitating difficulties that can/do carry long into adulthood. and is heritable.
The opposite, but it doesn't mean the attention is held.
> ...or are these just difficult kids to manage in a room full of kids...?
If you remove "just", "to", and "of kids" then yes.
People—kids and adults—with severe ADHD struggle to manage in all sorts of rooms that others struggle dramatically less in, if they're undiagnosed and have no resources for dealing with it.
If you look back through history, you don't suppose you might find a pattern of people saying, "Kids these days," do you?
I have a close family member with actual attention deficit and extreme hyperactivity.
You cannot mistake it with normal bored kid.
It's like his brain works at 100% intensity all the time.
When you walk with him through the town, he has to touch every door knob, climb every tree, look into every single car, peep into every hole. In a room he finds new object so interesting that he absolutely has to investigate it, for like 30 seconds and then finds another thing and another and another. 24/7. You see his body is tired, almost falling asleep, but his brain won't stop, he keeps finding new distractions he can't ignore.
You would never mistake it for just a regular bored kid.
I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
> And don't get me started on the false disability claims (see [0] for a taste). If you even verbalize questioning one, you're eligible for discrimination.
Case in point. It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.
> I had a student claim...
Again, this is the student expressing the politics in question.
It seems that multiple people read:
> It's exactly because of the politics both that the students feel empowered to make those claims, and that the culture suppressing that questioning exists.
and somehow concluded that I am somehow legitimizing "those claims". I am genuinely unable to understand that.
> I'm not sure this distinction can be made, really.
Which distinction can't be made?
> It's exactly because of the politics...
Which politics, concretely?
I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You said, and I quoted:
> The politics were mostly fine, but the students... were the problem.
The distinction, thus, is between "the politics" and "the students".
In the rest of my comment, I clearly exhibited that the thing that made "the students" problematic for you were "the politics" that they were expressing.
> Which politics, concretely?
The politics that underlie the false disability claims.
And also the politics that your student expressed by making the statement:
> I had a student claim, in the classroom forum for a STEM course, that making attendance optional (which I was pressured to do because of the high disability rate) was itself discriminatory
Which are the same politics described in the post above yours:
> it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying.
Which are also "the politics" that everyone means when it comes to conflicts between students and teachers in the modern era, and the ones that form the basis of the conflict that TFA is about. Which is to say, the politics whereby educators can do no right, and everything is discriminatory. You described yourself being put in a double bind: first you were politically pressured to make an accommodation for a "high disability rate" that you didn't even believe to be legitimate (and I think you were probably correct in this), and then you were told that this, too, would be considered discriminatory.
In short: the politics whereby the term "discriminatory" (and "bigoted", and the family of related -isms and -phobias) is simply a political bludgeon, which need not be connected to any ordinary understanding of what it means to treat people fairly or equally.
It is all shell games because the goal is not actually to improve outcomes (there is not even agreement about how to measure outcomes), but to keep the system feeling constant shame for supposed "discrimination" when outcomes are disparate.
> I'm not actually sure what you're saying at all. I don't think you've articuled a point here. I actually came away confused at multiple levels.
I explained a very clear notion: that when you described "the students" causing problems in response to someone describing "the politics" causing problems, you were talking about substantively the same phenomena. The students play a key role in perpetuating the political games, either because they stand to benefit personally or because they have been indoctrinated in some form or another.
> Did you read the linked article? Do you have a response to that?
You seem to be under the impression that I dispute your claims about false disability claims. I absolutely do not, and I was agreeing with you on this point.
What I am trying to explain to you is that these claims are part of a political expression: the fact that they might succeed is a show of political power, and the underlying theory of how to accommodate them is either not scientific or not actually aimed at optimizing per-student outcomes (or both). In particular, the metrics are not based in anything related to the described goals, but given purely in terms of identity-characteristic demographics of those who succeed.
Ancient Hindus divided life into four parts, the earliest was called "Brahmacharya" - core tenet of it was celibacy, but sons of kings and rich merchants lived ascetic lives in the teacher's house who was also an ascetic and a sage - no rich clothes, no luxury foods or comfort.
This was supposed to last till the age of 16, going as high as 21 for some.
The Buddhist monastery-universities of India also kept students under similar conditions - celibate, ascetic, and far from luxury.
A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.
Is there something stopping you, or anyone from writing it down and taking notes in class and then reviewing it later as needed? Not just process it in lecture time, but regurgitate it to physical form for later review.
Also, I would definitely constrain this into educational groups, where K-6 are much different from college (post mandatory) education.
Many people can type as fast/faster than they talk, and when typing it is possible to try and type verbatim what is being said. In this case, there is no understanding. (If you've ever taken a class not all that is said is pertinent and not all that is pertinent is said)
I personally don't revisit my written notes their purpose is uniquely for me to remember/understand what I've written.
Writing down stuff has always been what you make of it.
No they can't. An amazing typist is 120 wpm. A slow speaker might be 150 wpm and fast talkers over 300 wpm.
I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting > typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so (maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated interest?)
here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries over many years, and asking for more research into mechanisms and causation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
and here's a paper from a couple years ago describing differences in observed brain activity between handwriting and typewriting and some discussion of how this could be a mechanism of the kind the video was talking about https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
>Is there something stopping you from...
No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are important.
It is a skill, but everybody seems to think it will just happen on its own.
Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...
The teenage brain is not prepared for addiction of digital magnitude.
You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).
In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.
I'm not disagreeing at all here, I tried live latexing my math courses and it was hard. I wish I had had access to a cellphone + good digitization back then. (just scanning it in was kinda pointless and I graduated about the time Android came out)
This was by far the biggest time sink in my maths courses, and frankly, a giant waste of time. Sure, the end result looked beautiful but I think I understood less of it than if I'd just written it all down on A4 ruled paper in gel pen.
I bought a cheap graphics tablet, and still handwrite my math, but on a digital whiteboard on my PC so I can save and take backups of it, and waste less paper. But I still get the tactility, and its associated benefits (the act of handwriting something helps you remember it better)
The invasion of tech into the classroom has not produced more capable graduates. There's a lot of empirical evidence to the contrary.
The mind is a muscle, and developing that muscle is the education system's main purpose.
...and studies show, inferior for recall:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.
For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.
Ultimately I am sure the majority of students learn better writing it out by hand.
This confuses us, a little tiny teeny tidbit. And that is not helpful!
Plus because glass is slippery you must rely on your visual system nearly entirely for part of the handwriting performance. Because it's not paper you can't measure distances using tension that your nervous system picks up inside your hand, nearly as easily as you can when there's a high friction surface like a piece of paper to rest your hand on.
Also there is visual fatigue of staring into a light, the LED or OLED backlight, which does flicker imperceptibly but it does tend to flicker. This is more of a strain.
Plus there is disorientation... Your tablet can infinitely scroll long past the point at which your body physically dies, whereas if you run out of paper you got to go get some more paper. You write to the end of a sheet and there's no complex thinking involved around virtual viewframes and scrolling and using the scrolling UI.
In the early internet days I couldn't help but notice people who read zero books now spend the whole day reading.
I think it means the tool is used the wrong way? Interactive should be e-paper or real paper. Dull cramming or basic reading skills would be a good fit for glowing displays.
Perhaps we even need a device that can do both.
My take is that the test won't make kids better at math. At best, it'll drift towards investment in reward-hacking the exam (like it always was).
I think it was idiotic to make it optional to begin with. The stats they're talking about, though, can't be a primarily admissions-signal problem. Whatever they're using these days in lieu of exams are imperfect proxies for math skill, sure, but it's not like they're admitting kids off their CoD K:D. Kids taking APs and stacking extracurriculars are generally motivated. So, if even the motivated ones show up unable to do middle school math, the cause is more systemic than "we stopped testing."
My vote: TikTok brain rot. I build LLM products and I see how the parasocial pull shows up even when the products have nothing to do with companionship. I watched one user obsessively spin up 44 separate chats around a K-Pop vampire character over a week. The product is NOT designed for that. The pull toward frictionless digital reward is just that strong, and that's what kids' attention is up against now. Math is the most effortful, least immediately rewarding thing they do. Doesn't stand a chance against an infinite feed, and I guess infinite vampires either.
Which is why the ask from the faculty is kind of arrogant. The article, at least, doesn't even float a hypothesis for WHY math skills collapsed, simply assuming standardized testing fixes it. I wholly believe in standardized testing — but it measures the problem, it doesn't fix it.
I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.
The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.
It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.
All digital tests I have seen allowed paper and pen. You would draw and calculate on paper and submit the result.
It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.
Teachers don’t make those decisions, school boards do. School boards are elected or appointed political entities.
Teachers are humans just like you, and like or dislike work for the same reasons you do, including your unoriginal display of classic American anti-intellectualism.
So even a willing school board is unable to do more than rubber stamp the status quo.
please remove the devices from the students but provide slides
I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters."
And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations)
My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).
1. pay attention for the first 5-10 minutes. I'm really going to try this time!
2. hear something interesting, and your mind starts wandering
3. uhoh, i have no idea what the lecture is talking about now. i'll just keep daydreaming. don't even think about raisigin your hand to ask a question because it'll reveal that you haven't been listening.
4. go home and read the textbook to figure learn the content
For me this meant I recalled it way better. I hardly looked at the notes afterwards, but writing them down were crucial. I also could follow the process and ask questions where I didn't understand a step. When I did review the notes, they were very well structured and thus very informative.
The absolute worst lectures I had were slide-based. I either had to focus on transliteration to notes, but that meant I had to focus on that rather than what the professor was saying. And if I did the opposite I didn't write notes and thus could hardly recall the details if at all.
This is like the pi vs tau debate.
I seriously do not understand why maths teachers are so unable to relate to their non-mathematically inclined students
Visualisation helps of course, but if you want to be good at maths, you need to put the work and try to solve tons of problems. Most of what 3blue1brown shows in his fancy videos are things you can drawn on your own on a paper, and if you've never done it yourself, chances are you don't understand.
The problem with digital tools is that it's easy to get distracted. If you watch 5 minutes of 3blue1brown and then 20 random videos, it's not going to help.
I will just say whiteboard > blackboard. I get allergies just thinking about it x)
I used to hate writing on the ipad but the thing that was transformational for me was a “paperlike”[1] screen protector, which makes the surface feel a lot nicer to write on.
For a lot of things, good old blackboards are just fine as are pen + paper exercises. Maybe even for most high school math. That was frowned upon though by the higher ranks. If I was evaluated as a teacher and didn't include some iPad shenanigans in the class that I was getting audited for, I would have been in trouble. How behind the times!
I got along really well with most of my teenage students, it was a lot of fun interacting with them. But the politics behind it all got too annoying. Also, you're under very tight control on what you teach and how, that was super annoying. So I stopped teaching a few years ago and never looked back.