What it does do though is tell you. “No. That’s wrong. Take the module again.” It has little to offer beyond that. A teacher could, though of course the burnt out asshole won’t, look at the assessment and pick out the misconceptions the student still has and work specifically on those.
I believe computer systems, at least in math, will eventually get close to that. But until they do they require a lot of extra work from teachers.
Neither does a book, but a struggling student with an asshole teacher isn’t going to pay attention to the book. You’re really underestimating how important that relationship is. A nonexistent relationship (as with a computer) is not necessarily an improvement over a bad relationship, any more than the vacuum of deep space is healthier than an atmosphere of carbon monoxide.
That “if” is doing a shitload of work. Computer programs in schools, in my experience, don’t lessen the workload. The companies want to persuade administrators that the programs are super-effective, so they create a shit-ton of “personalized” recommendations and charts and data tables. Administrators want to get their money’s worth, so they require teachers to use all these bells and whistles as part of their data analysis for personalizing classroom instruction. Never mind that the recommendations are frequently nonsense (One program, and administrator who loved the program, required me to place third-graders into groups where the lowest group was supposed to practice counting up to ten and the next lowest group was supposed to practice addition and subtraction in numbers up to one million). The way the software/educational complex works, it adds work to teachers’ plates, frequently arbitrary and demoralizing work, instead of subtracting it.
I’d actually say that technology options are extremely valuable, and have a lot of benefits, especially in math and the sciences. A computer program can generate the same assignment for every student in a class, but with different numbers for each of them so they can’t copy the answers, and then for each individual student generate as many additional problems as desired for practice. It can grade all of those problems instantly, and it can instantly pivot the data to show the teacher which questions all the students are doing well on and which questions a lot of students are struggling with. This both saves time and results in better instruction. It does depend on the program being a good one (there are a lot of bad ones out there), and even the best ones don’t replace the actual teaching, but there’s still a lot of value there.
Eh, most IEPs and 504s just boil down to “preferential seating, prompt student to stay on task, and extended time on assessments”. Computers can do all of those things. Those probably aren’t what’s actually needed, but humans have a hard time figuring out what’s actually needed, too.
Well, young and violent. Or young and wildly disruptive. Just being ‘young’ and doing stupid young things didn’t get you put in reform school. You had to threaten teachers, repeatedly beat on kids, be a massive disruption in class constantly, etc. The one kid I knew who landed in reform school was well on his way to a life of crime when he got sent there, and last I heard of him was doing time for felony drug trafficking.
And yes, I imagine reform school was unpleasant. That was the point. It’s not much of a threat if it’s just another school.
The racial implications in the US are certainly concerning. In small city western Canada, not so much.
No one got held back for five years. I think if you couldn’t get through a grade you wound up in special ed, or if the problem was behavior, reform school. But I never heard of anyone being held back more than once. It might have happened, but I never saw it.
There are definitely downsides to holding kids back. Keeping them with their age cohort seems to be the ideal outcome. But if the reality today is that behaviour has become so bad that all the kids are suffering, and teachers are leaving the field, then something needs to be done. I’m open to ideas for reclaiming classroom control that don’t punish the kids causing the problem.
I agree strongly with this. One of the problems in some school districts is that the kids don’t care, and their parent(s) don’t care either. Back in the day, if you got in trouble at school the parents would be notified and you’d get in trouble at home, too. Today, if a kid gets in trouble at school the school is more likely to have irate parents screaming at them for mistreating their child.
Our district a couple of years ago loudly embarked on a “restorative justice” initiative: we were supposed to work with kids who were in conflict or were harming other folks to help them understand how they were causing harm and help them make things right. It’s a wonderful idea, and it requires significant staff involvement and time, and it was completely unworkable when everyone’s work was just piling on and there were fewer and fewer adults in the building, and what it really amounted to was the removal of any effective disciplinary policies. It was a disaster.
This summer, we got a new (interim) superintendent, who’s pretty awesome. He spent the summer working with the leadership team to revamp the approach. Now we have restorative justice, with a full-time staff member at each school who leads it.
Twice in seven days I’ve had kids get in conflicts that needed adult support to process, at times when I couldn’t provide that support. I called the office, and she was there within ten minutes, and took the kids out of the classroom to engage in a real and authentic restorative justice conversation with them. They come back afterwards knowing that they’re supported and respected and loved and also knowing that we expect them to be supportive and respectful (if not loving) to everyone else in the school. So far, it’s a tremendous success: kids are treating one another better, grudges don’t seem to carry over nearly as much, and kids are losing much less class time to suspensions (or even to sitting in the hall trying to come off of a meltdown).
It’s not going to work for every kid, I’m sure. But for the vast majority of kids, it seems like a great approach.
Like pretty much everything else in education, though, it requires staffing.
Yeah, I completely understand. My ideal school system would have ‘tracks’ with subtopics, and you could be at different levels within each track. So if someone struggles with grade 7 math but breezed through grade 7 history, they move on to grade 8 history but keep working at the grade 7 math subjects untl thyey finish the grade 7 track, then move on to grade 8 math. Or make it even more granular - there are a host of subjects that you must get to position ‘x’ on the learning scale to get a diploma. Have more difficult tracks for honors students and such.
We sort of did this back in the day. I was reading and writing at high school level by grade 6, so I was excused from those classes and was allowed ‘enrichment’ through self-study in the library. Kids who were behind grade level would get remedial lessons while the kids who breezed through were allowed to move on.
We still had a grade system, but at least at my elementary school they tried to accomodate us. The same at my Jr. High - a few of us finished grade 9 math by the end of grade 7, so they put us in a then-experimental computer class and taught us BASIC and got us timeshare on the university’s computer system (110 baud modem, ASR 33 teletype machine to work on. We were thrilled). Other advanced kids were given other enrichment suited to their interests, and the class that remained would get remedial instruction. I think it was a pretty good system.
Computer learning systems could fill that role - rather than try to use them to teach remedial stuff, use them to give enrichment courses to the good students who will pay attention and do well, freeing up teachers to pay more attention to the troubled students.
All I’ve got is anecdotal evidence - the kids around me talked about ‘flunking’ a lot. My brother was threatened with being held back in grade 9, and it freaked him out so much that he agreed to a giant stack of summer homework to avoid it, and the school enlisted my mother to ensure the work was done by him.
But it also wouldn’t surprise me that it causes some of them to drop out. It’s pretty humiliating to get held back, so some kids likely just walked away if they were old enough.
Again, no one disputes this is hard on the kid being held back. The question is whether it’s better for the school system as a whole. If so, then maybe something similar could be devised.
Coming from Alberta, I don’t buy the ‘higher pay’ argument. We have the same issues here - teachers threatening to leave, etc. But teachers in Alberta get paid very well - the average teacher salary in Alberta is $116,000, including salary and compensation. Teachers get extremely good public service pensions, full health, dental and optical insurance, etc. This is well above the median income, and no one except government employees get retirement benefits like they do. And all that includes summers off.
I don’t actually think that’s the question. There may be rare kids with involved parents where you can frighten the kid with flunking and change their behavior, and it may be that the threat only works if you sacrifice another kid in order to show them you’re serious, and it may be that nothing less drastic would get their mom involved enough to get the kid back on track. There are a lot of questions there, I admit. But the question isn’t whether it’s better for the school system as a whole: the evidence on this is pretty one-sided.
These are all bullet-points; the link above contains links to the research.
That compares to an average public teacher salary in the US of US$61,730, according to this article:
which converts to CAN$81,049.17.
This is a really good article talking about a big issue that leads to burnout, and ties into some of the discussions here. Teaching is an inherently emotional job: you need to build relationships with a random set of people every year, relationships that enable them to trust you and feel safe with you, relationships that motivate them to work in your class even if there’s nothing else motivating them. Building those relationships requires you to be calm and in control of your own emotions even when your students’ emotions are completely out of control. It’s not something a computer can do.
And when kids are suffering from rampant social ills, the emotions they bring to school are often so disregulated that the work of relationship-building with them is overwhelming, and exhausting, and teachers leave the profession.
If we want to really fix public education, we gotta fix society.
Like everything else, it depends. The district my wife worked for, which she recently left, provided zero health benefits.
And it’s for the same reasons that about the same percentage of nurses leave within 5 or 10 years: mainly, having to deal with decisions made by higher-ups who do not work in the trenches, and may never have.
I agree! There are many similarities.
Heres a sutuatin my nephew encountered in his first year of HS … His math teacher would read out of the math book to show then what they were supposed to do and then give a specific youtube video to explain it better if they were having problems
Why? youtube you ask ? because she was a literature teacher but the person she was supposed to replace ended up not leaving and since she was under contract and needed the job so they put her where there was a vancacy she just didn’t know what the class was until a week before it started luckily this was a rather smart ap type of class
for years there’s been a k-12 school that’s been advertised on all the kid’s channels with what looks to be about a 7/8 grade blonde girl talking about how helpful and great it is … and I’ve always wondered on how true that was seeing how difficult it was in being in a normal class online ,
One big issue with computer paced learning is that it seems to inevitably take a mastery approach: you stay on 1.1 until you master it, then you move on. The issue is that for most subjects, that’s a very inefficient way to learn. It requires a lot of encoding of information with not much to attach it to, which means you have to recall on rote learning and lots of grindy active recall stuff, which is lower level, tedious, and kills interest in learning. People learn in layers. They do so much better if they build a framework of big ideas and then learn by creating connections, by slotting things in, building a network. And that network needs to be highly personal: different from each person and from day to day for a person. A strong teacher helps a students do this by leading them through activities that help them do this. When you do that, you have much much stronger initial encoding, which means retention is better, and you need to spend less time endlessly grinding to retain.
Maybe it’s possible for a computer to teach like that, but I haven’t seen it. Khan Academy is grindy grindy grindy, mastery based. If it works for anything, it’s math, because in math there are a lot of potential connections backwards, to what you’ve covered. But for most disciplines, its not a good way to teach. It’s a great model if you want to do “data driven instruction” and generate loads of spreadsheets, but it makes teaching and learning awful and ineffective.
Teaching for mastery is not required in many subjects. You don’t have to master history, and only learning half of European history you should have learned in Grade 10 won’t hold you back studying American history in grade 11.
But in subjects that build on prerequisite knowledge, passing someone who only learned half of the prerequisites is simply setting them up for failure or at best mediocre performance in future. So a student flunks order of operations in math, but you promote them anyway and now they have to learn advanced subjects that require an intuitive understanding of order of operations, and they struggle mightily.
If a subject requires prerequisite knowledge, students should not be enrolled unless they actually have the prerequisite knowledge. Just passing the previous course with a D- doesn’t assure that.
In software engineering we talk a lot about ‘technical debt’ - deferring tasks that should have been done but weren’t. Get too behind on technical debt, and you leave many gaps that make future work harder or otherwise weaken the product or the team.
The way we educate now causes students who can’t keep up to accrue ‘educational debt’ which makes subsequent education harder and harder. How is a kid who couldn’t grok algebra supposed to succeed in pre-calculus or geometry as well as catch up on algebra?
People who are sure they are ‘no good at math’ probably had this issue, assuming they have an average or better IQ. They just got to a place in math where they have so many gaps in their prerequisites that they just can’t work through the new stuff, and conclude they just aren’t mathematically oriented, when in fact they just got a lousy math education in previous years and were allowed to move on anyway.
Interesting. In Louisiana after your 4 year education degree you have to intern at a school for one year. And pass the national teachers exam (PRAXIS). Then you can apply for a job. And Louisiana is 49th in the nation in education. If you have a college degree in a related field you can apply for a waiver, but you still need the academic education to be a teacher. You just have time to get that education on the side. And you are telling me this is unusual in the rest of the country? I am surprised.
no health benefits for teachers? That is surprising… The teacher employee group is almost ideal for insurance companies. ie mostly young people with desk jobs. What school system can’t afford to offer medical insurance to their teachers? OTOH, here in Louisiana the system isn’t allowed to offer benefits to part-time employees. School systems are contracting out the subs to private companies to get around that rule (such moves have to be done carefully to avoid running afoul of the law).
This is a good point, and what I’m about to say shouldn’t be taken as a disagreement with it but rather as playing a bit of Devil’s Advocate to present a more balanced picture (and it may or may not be along the lines of the point @MandaJo was making):
Often in math (and probably in other subjects as well), people find that they only feel comfortable with a particular skill or concept, like they’ve truly mastered it, after they’ve gone on to the next level where they used that skill or concept in the service of something else.
I vaguely recall hearing about an employer who would only hire people who had passed calculus. Even though no calculus was required for the job, algebra definitely was, and the employer knew that people who had passed calculus would have to have mastered algebra.
Requiring students to spend hours and hours mastering prerequisite skills before going on to more interesting or more relevant areas where those skills are used could easily become discouraging—like requiring piano students to spend years practicing scales and studying music theory before they get to play any actual pieces of music (this example may be inspired by “Lockhart’s Lament”), or requiring a prospective computer programmer to learn all the variations and subtleties of syntax of all of a language’s looping mechanisms before writing a program using even a simple for loop.
My experience is strictly California, but other teachers I’ve talked to across the country confirm that the way we do things isn’t unusual. Got my BA in Liberal Studies, which doesn’t transfer as “area knowledge.” So I PRAXIS’ed Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, English and Social Studies. 1 year of graduate work in Education, practice taught at a middle school and a high school. Paid the required fees and earned a Secondary Single Subject Credential with 4 endorsements. Plus GATE and CLAD certifications. California seems to feel that you should know your stuff before you are allowed to teach it.
I’m specifically addressed computer-mediated instruction. The main, oft-touted advantage is that it is “self paced”, but that seems to inevitably mean a stucturce of “when you master concept 1, you can move on to concept 2”. The inherent problem with that is that learning to “mastery”, however that is defined, is generally a slow, joyless, ineffective process. I saw if described once as painting a landscape startibg in one corner and working towards the other, adding all details as you go, never going back. It’s miserable.
Rooms full of kids learning “at their own pace” via computers may eeault in kids who do well on tailored assessments, but it will take a ton of work to get there and their retention will be poor.