Re:Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk
by sanderjd on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @03:19PM
(#6136192)
Your opinions on teachers are really easy to nod your head along with, until you actually talk to some teachers about the effects that they are able to observe, directly, of the in-vogue obsession with "actual metrics" (standardized tests) on the actual, ya know, education of their students. I'm sure many teachers disfavor more testing because they know they fear their unfitness, but I think most of them disfavor more testing because they feel we are already testing too damn much, thus trading off a tangible negative short-term effect for a speculative positive long-term effect. Every hour a student spends taking a test is an hour not spent learning.
(Apologies for the totally off-topic response to your only mostly off-topic comment.)
Re:Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk
by smith7018 on Thursday August 01, 2013 @12:40AM
(#6138700)
That's honestly a very good point; so much of our public school systems are already broken due to testing. Students are mostly taught the requirements of proficiency tests solely for funding and more occupational-related reasons. I've heard many teachers complain that they aren't truly imparting knowledge but merely repeating from a book due to "the state."
Re:Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk
by atondwal on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @08:40PM
(#6137863)
> Teachers' unions are right now fighting the introduction of actual metrics
We would unionize and be fighting metrics too, if they tried to measure how good a programmer you were with the number of goto's you use.
Re:Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk
by craigching on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @06:48PM
(#6137331)
I thought you were doing well until you started in on teachers, you should have left that out because it's actually a more complex problem than you make it out to be.
I like where you were going on programming though.
Re:Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk
by nbouscal on Wednesday July 31, 2013 @10:12PM
(#6138200)
Here I thought the analogy worked well for that exact reason. They're both very complex problems. That's why both fields are still in the state that they're in.
There's a field with a similar problem to our own: public-school teaching. Teacher performance isn't quantified, and so teachers can pretty much get away with only being as good at imparting knowledge as any random member of the population--even though they took years of education-in-Education. Most "teachers" aren't teachers, any more than I'm a teacher; they're simply people paid to repeatedly attempt (and fail) to be teachers.†
We pay a lot of people to repeatedly attempt (and fail) to be programmers.
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† Teachers' unions are right now fighting the introduction of actual metrics on how a student's achievement level's year-over-year velocity is affected by a teacher relative to the average of their peer-teachers in the same school. They are fighting this because the data clearly shows a bimodal distribution, where a lot of people are just extremely unfit to be teachers--their students actually reaching negative learning velocities by their presence in the class--and until now, the unions protected these people, since there was nothing to prove they sucked so very much. It's hard to go back on your decision to defend someone when you later find out that they're indefensible.