I don't think Summit Learning is the worst thing that's happened to these kids, mainly because it looks like nobody already cares.
Silicon valley tried to find an way to fix education and it sucked and failed. Whatever, it was broken before and it's still broken.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
"Some teenagers don't like school" is not exactly some sort of shocker. And outside of the kid with the very uncommon and specific seizure issue, it just sites a bunch of general malaise conditions. I had stress and headaches in highschool, we didn't have anything like Summit.
Going too deep on this is probably outside the scope of this thread, but I'm not particularly enamored by arguments in the vein of "who cares what teenagers think about school? They're going to hate school no matter what." That's also why I asked spool32 to clarify his comments, because I read his line "It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not" as sarcasm, but I wasn't totally sure.
If multiple students are saying that a new program has increased their stress, I think we should take that complaint seriously. Taking it seriously doesn't mean accepting it uncritically, but it also means not dismissing it out of hand either.
Also, kids actually like school if a school is good. They aren't stupid. They know when they are getting screwed.
Fencingsax on
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
I think we may be talking past eachother here. In the typical rotational-model classroom environment, you have 45-110 minutes a day with each student 5 days a week for you to teach, test, monitor, and discuss as a group. Using observation and a keen eye you can identify who is performing well and who needs more mentorship and provide that during or after class. You can also use monitored group work to foster synthesis and a variety of teaching models like flipping the classroom to foster teaching in a variety of ways. That mentoring gets done where needed, and (of course) better with smaller class sizes but the cohort model does provide more face time to observe problems.
Sure, if the teachers were overburdened before they surely still are, but that disregards that there are two different jobs being presented here. As mentioned last thread, advising and teaching are different professions, both with different and hefty preparation requirements. Kansas appears to have flipped their teachers into advisors without understanding what that entailed, and without providing any real cost or time savings for doing so, and also without any real benefit to their students.
Also, you did say "lmao teachers couldn't make time for students" which is not how you are presenting it here.
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
I'm having trouble parsing which of your lines are sarcasm and which are sincere. I think I'm not the only one. Care you clarify your post a bit?
That's fair.
I'm serious that calling out Summit as part of a failure to do individual mentoring seems off base. If it's not happening now, it seems likely that there was never any individual attention and this is just "no change" to individual teacher time except with unfair complaints attached to it.
I'm sarcastic about how great it is to listen to feedback from children when designing a learning system. Children cannot evaluate whether a system works for them, cannot evaluate whether a system works in general, and have monumental perverse incentives with regard to their own education. They're the last people you should listen to.
I'm being dismissive about the importance of socialization but I agree with points made in favor of. School was a nightmare for me personally, one that tracks pretty well with Gabe & Tycho's stories about school, but that's not everyone. As a school-age kid I certainly would have picked being alone in a room with a computer instead of in a class full of people who tormented me, but basically See Above in regard to whether anyone should have listened to me - they should not have! My younger two kids had a staggeringly bad experience with self-directed learning but I can't apply that because it was a facet of a general disintegration of their mental and physical health that overshadows everything else. The social aspect is probably quite important, in general, even if non-conforming students are ostracized in ways they might not get over for decades.
I'm dismissive of complaints by children that self-directed learning is more stressful, and similarly dismissive of parents who echo those complaints, especially in rural districts where the quality and challenge level of the education might have been far far below what the kids are being exposed to with Summit. We don't know and can't find out the truth to do a fair before / after test because there are too many incentives to lie in various ways about the state of education in the district, by students, parents, teachers, administrators, and the School Board.
Basically, I think the article was a joke apart from the one actual real issue, where the district didn't anticipate and hasn't provided accommodations for the epileptic girl. That part is pretty fucked up.
Teenagers are way smarter than you are giving them credit for. At least in the specific sense that teenagers have pretty good bullshit detectors and know when a program isn't working. And they will let you know. They also know when they're learning things that feel relevant. If you have that, they will be VERY excited about it. If they're just learning things, they'll be pretty excited. Kids want to learn stuff, but school in the US is terribly structured. Too many subjects at once for not enough time a day to really master them. Also high schools start WAY too early for them to be functional.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited April 2019
There are empirical ways to measure educational outcomes and saying that the entire educational system is crooked and lying about said outcomes ignores the entire way that empirical research is performed. You show your work, including limitations and influences, so that such lies can't be performed. That's what peer-reviewed research is.
It sucks that you had a bad school experience, and lots of people do think as you do. But we have mountains of well-performed, well-documented research on how educational outcomes work. It's also worthy of note that education when we were children is much different than the modern classroom, and the psychological effects of bad education have become much better understood than 20, 30, or 40 years ago by a considerable margins.
Enc on
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
That's how school worked decades ago. Now there are many, many, many schools implementing active-learning strategies to prevent lecture from being the norm. That's obviously not everywhere, nationwide. But at least in Florida its a major element of expectations for the classroom and the core part in nearly all K-12 education degree programs in colleges around the country.
I'm sarcastic about how great it is to listen to feedback from children when designing a learning system. Children cannot evaluate whether a system works for them, cannot evaluate whether a system works in general, and have monumental perverse incentives with regard to their own education. They're the last people you should listen to.
This is gooseshit. Children may lack experience and knowledge, but they're not idiots, and can recognize when they're being taken for a ride,and when a system is not actually focusing on their needs and issues (which seems to be one of the larger parts of the disengagement with Summit.) Not to mention that the perverse incentive argument doesn't really hold up - given a reason to care about their education, students do.
When you try to build a system without any consideration for those who will be in it, you're just planning to fail.
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
That's how school worked decades ago. Now there are many, many, many schools implementing active-learning strategies to prevent lecture from being the norm. That's obviously not everywhere, nationwide. But at least in Florida its a major element of expectations for the classroom and the core part in nearly all K-12 education degree programs in colleges around the country.
I remain bitter that my teacher prep program did not do a good job of giving us examples of how to do more of this in math so I am kind of left to my own devices. Social studies I could do it easily and often.
Sometimes it feels like math education has barely changed since Euclid.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
+1
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
That's how school worked decades ago. Now there are many, many, many schools implementing active-learning strategies to prevent lecture from being the norm. That's obviously not everywhere, nationwide. But at least in Florida its a major element of expectations for the classroom and the core part in nearly all K-12 education degree programs in colleges around the country.
I remain bitter that my teacher prep program did not do a good job of giving us examples of how to do more of this in math so I am kind of left to my own devices. Social studies I could do it easily and often.
Sometimes it feels like math education has barely changed since Euclid.
Flipping the classroom works super well in math education, I'm told. It's not at all my field, but our unit was dinged on some publications about it being implemented in College Algebra a while back.
That said, college is a totally different game for these sorts of things than even High School and I cant imagine a principal being particularly comfortable with students using a flipped model with video capture as primary lecture time.
Teenagers are way smarter than you are giving them credit for. At least in the specific sense that teenagers have pretty good bullshit detectors and know when a program isn't working. And they will let you know. They also know when they're learning things that feel relevant. If you have that, they will be VERY excited about it. If they're just learning things, they'll be pretty excited. Kids want to learn stuff, but school in the US is terribly structured. Too many subjects at once for not enough time a day to really master them. Also high schools start WAY too early for them to be functional.
Teenagers, as far as I remember the research, need more sleep not less and yet my experience has always been that the further up you go, the earlier they push start times. And many of the kids are goddamn zombies at that hour.
Lewis Black:
I flunked that course. It's not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing that you can learn out of one bloodshot eye. After I flunked the first two tests, I grabbed the professor by the throat and I said, "Why are you teaching this shit at this ungodly hour? Are you *trying* to keep this stuff a secret?"
I'm sarcastic about how great it is to listen to feedback from children when designing a learning system. Children cannot evaluate whether a system works for them, cannot evaluate whether a system works in general, and have monumental perverse incentives with regard to their own education. They're the last people you should listen to.
This is gooseshit. Children may lack experience and knowledge, but they're not idiots, and can recognize when they're being taken for a ride,and when a system is not actually focusing on their needs and issues (which seems to be one of the larger parts of the disengagement with Summit.) Not to mention that the perverse incentive argument doesn't really hold up - given a reason to care about their education, students do.
When you try to build a system without any consideration for those who will be in it, you're just planning to fail.
nah it's not. Sure teenagers are savvy but like, 4th graders are super not. And even teenagers are pretty bad at evaluating what things they should care about even if they do care about their education. You can't ask a 16yr old kid "what math do you need to learn" and get a coherent answer - it takes two BAs to answer that question effectively. We could argue that for 30 pages and not get to a solid answer.
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
That's how school worked decades ago. Now there are many, many, many schools implementing active-learning strategies to prevent lecture from being the norm. That's obviously not everywhere, nationwide. But at least in Florida its a major element of expectations for the classroom and the core part in nearly all K-12 education degree programs in colleges around the country.
I remain bitter that my teacher prep program did not do a good job of giving us examples of how to do more of this in math so I am kind of left to my own devices. Social studies I could do it easily and often.
Sometimes it feels like math education has barely changed since Euclid.
Flipping the classroom works super well in math education, I'm told. It's not at all my field, but our unit was dinged on some publications about it being implemented in College Algebra a while back.
That said, college is a totally different game for these sorts of things than even High School and I cant imagine a principal being particularly comfortable with students using a flipped model with video capture as primary lecture time.
That's something they recommend, but getting my students to watch a video at home, pay attention to it, take notes is, I'm going to say daunting. Though I got my job this year in November, maybe if I were there from the start of the year I could build that norm.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Teenagers are way smarter than you are giving them credit for. At least in the specific sense that teenagers have pretty good bullshit detectors and know when a program isn't working. And they will let you know. They also know when they're learning things that feel relevant. If you have that, they will be VERY excited about it. If they're just learning things, they'll be pretty excited. Kids want to learn stuff, but school in the US is terribly structured. Too many subjects at once for not enough time a day to really master them. Also high schools start WAY too early for them to be functional.
Teenagers, as far as I remember the research, need more sleep not less and yet my experience has always been that the further up you go, the earlier they push start times. And many of the kids are goddamn zombies at that hour.
Lewis Black:
I flunked that course. It's not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing that you can learn out of one bloodshot eye. After I flunked the first two tests, I grabbed the professor by the throat and I said, "Why are you teaching this shit at this ungodly hour? Are you *trying* to keep this stuff a secret?"
It's not necessarily more sleep (though also that) but when they should be sleeping. For that age, natural seems to be midnight to eight (or later). Seattle finally started experimenting with start times this year, pushing high school later in the morning. Saw increased attendance, fewer tardies, better grades, and healthier students.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
I mean, it really is better. It's still bad, sure, because class sizes are too big. But it's still face-to-face in-person time for an hour+ every day. Are you trying to make a serious argument that 10-minutes-a-week is better?
I'm sarcastic about how great it is to listen to feedback from children when designing a learning system. Children cannot evaluate whether a system works for them, cannot evaluate whether a system works in general, and have monumental perverse incentives with regard to their own education. They're the last people you should listen to.
This is gooseshit. Children may lack experience and knowledge, but they're not idiots, and can recognize when they're being taken for a ride,and when a system is not actually focusing on their needs and issues (which seems to be one of the larger parts of the disengagement with Summit.) Not to mention that the perverse incentive argument doesn't really hold up - given a reason to care about their education, students do.
When you try to build a system without any consideration for those who will be in it, you're just planning to fail.
nah it's not. Sure teenagers are savvy but like, 4th graders are super not. And even teenagers are pretty bad at evaluating what things they should care about even if they do care about their education. You can't ask a 16yr old kid "what math do you need to learn" and get a coherent answer - it takes two BAs to answer that question effectively. We could argue that for 30 pages and not get to a solid answer.
I mean I made that choice for myself at about 12 or 13 when I decided on the highschool I was gonna go with (the local vocational tech school).
I'm sarcastic about how great it is to listen to feedback from children when designing a learning system. Children cannot evaluate whether a system works for them, cannot evaluate whether a system works in general, and have monumental perverse incentives with regard to their own education. They're the last people you should listen to.
This is gooseshit. Children may lack experience and knowledge, but they're not idiots, and can recognize when they're being taken for a ride,and when a system is not actually focusing on their needs and issues (which seems to be one of the larger parts of the disengagement with Summit.) Not to mention that the perverse incentive argument doesn't really hold up - given a reason to care about their education, students do.
When you try to build a system without any consideration for those who will be in it, you're just planning to fail.
nah it's not. Sure teenagers are savvy but like, 4th graders are super not. And even teenagers are pretty bad at evaluating what things they should care about even if they do care about their education. You can't ask a 16yr old kid "what math do you need to learn" and get a coherent answer - it takes two BAs to answer that question effectively. We could argue that for 30 pages and not get to a solid answer.
I mean I made that choice for myself at about 12 or 13 when I decided on the highschool I was gonna go with (the local vocational tech school).
good job it worked out for you!
You can just look at the number of people who change majors in college to see that even at age 20 we're not necessarily all that great at forecasting what we need to learn. If I'd been in charge of my own curriculum I wouldn't have touched math past Algebra 1 because I was going to be An Author.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
I mean, it really is better. It's still bad, sure, because class sizes are too big. But it's still face-to-face in-person time for an hour+ every day. Are you trying to make a serious argument that 10-minutes-a-week is better?
No, I personally believe both systems are fucked, and none of this is working. We need to start from the ground up, and rebuild our educational system radically.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I was also contemplating as I enjoyed my three day weekend this weekend: should we kill summer vacation and make school year round, but four days a week?
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I was also contemplating as I enjoyed my three day weekend this weekend: should we kill summer vacation and make school year round, but four days a week?
We should do this collectively, as a society, not just children.
I was also contemplating as I enjoyed my three day weekend this weekend: should we kill summer vacation and make school year round, but four days a week?
One of the main points of our school system is free day care.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
I was also contemplating as I enjoyed my three day weekend this weekend: should we kill summer vacation and make school year round, but four days a week?
One of the main points of our school system is free day care.
Also vacation time is good.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Kids feelings about their education and educational experience are important data. But they need to be contextualized against alternatives and baselines and ideally should be measured quantitatively as well (so not seven quotes in the paper).
Their reports about their feelings should also not be run together with their ideas about solutions for their feelings. Kids can be incredibly knowledgeable about what school feels like for them specifically while having no idea what interventions would improve those feelings—let alone which ones would do so without burdening other children more, or which are legally and financially feasible, or...
The issues come up with all forms of public engagement. Engaging the public is great but you gotta be careful to ask he right questions.
I was also contemplating as I enjoyed my three day weekend this weekend: should we kill summer vacation and make school year round, but four days a week?
One of the main points of our school system is free day care.
Also vacation time is good.
In most year long school plans, there are two or three week breaks built into the schedule. It's usually two weeks off for six weeks in class. So there are vacations in there.
All opinions are my own and in no way reflect that of my employer.
The food thing is the best counterpoint, I hadn't thought about that even though it is definitely true. Of course, contrarywise, they're currently NOT getting that nutrition for entire summers.
The story about Lebron James' school in Akron is worth talking about. They're doing a lot of good stuff with the extra money he's providing. What I did not realize when I first heard about it is that it's not a charter, but a public school the city of Akron is letting Lebron give extra money to and run experimentally. And it looks from that article like he basically got people who believe in all the modern education research to run the place. Good job, Lebron.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
The food thing is the best counterpoint, I hadn't thought about that even though it is definitely true. Of course, contrarywise, they're currently NOT getting that nutrition for entire summers.
The story about Lebron James' school in Akron is worth talking about. They're doing a lot of good stuff with the extra money he's providing. What I did not realize when I first heard about it is that it's not a charter, but a public school the city of Akron is letting Lebron give extra money to and run experimentally. And it looks from that article like he basically got people who believe in all the modern education research to run the place. Good job, Lebron.
Schools serve a lot of societal needs beyond education, which is something that people forget.
Problems with nutrition is not an argument for longer school weeks, it's an argument for an real welfare system.
Trying to use a unrelated system to pretend other problems are addressed not only make that system worst, it also does not actually address the problems.
The education system's function is to educate. Some other structures are needed to deal with poverty.
I was also contemplating as I enjoyed my three day weekend this weekend: should we kill summer vacation and make school year round, but four days a week?
One of the main points of our school system is free day care.
also for a lot of families, the only way the kids can get 2 nutritious* meals a day. Cutting that down to 4 days a week would be a huge blow.
*for certain values of nutritious.
This is so odd to me because up here there is, afaik, no government-provided meals at school.
I'm most concerned about the uncritical pulling of information from random linked internet 'resources' by the program to be honest.
And it obviously fails generally at accessibility. I don't think I could sustain so much computer time constantly.
There's a part of the article where they talk about an epileptic student who was repeatedly triggered by the high level of screen time.
The clincher was how no one in Summit seemed prepared for anyone with special needs. It's like they've ignored the last 50 years of research on the "one size fits all" approach to education.
Tech companies that are super disproportionately white and male failed to account for people with other life experiences than themselves? Why I never!
Yeah though, this is probably the least surprising part. You could argue (perhaps correctly even) that accommodations are something the school should handle, but the fact that it probably never came up on the Silicon Valley side of things is entirely predictable.
Actually, the most likely reality, its even more depressing. If it's anything like current situation with education in the UK, where a large number of schools are being turned into privatised businesses. Then the actual needs and requirements of Special Educational Needs students end up becoming the earliest casualty on the cost cutting measures to keep balancing the books.
It would not surprise me if some bean counter in a suit within these tech companies saw the cost balance was deemed too high to provide R&D for special needs students.
Problems with nutrition is not an argument for longer school weeks, it's an argument for an real welfare system.
Trying to use a unrelated system to pretend other problems are addressed not only make that system worst, it also does not actually address the problems.
The education system's function is to educate. Some other structures are needed to deal with poverty.
But until we do that, schools need to provide it. Because spoilers, but hungry kids don't learn shit. They are thinking about how hungry they are.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Problems with nutrition is not an argument for longer school weeks, it's an argument for an real welfare system.
Trying to use a unrelated system to pretend other problems are addressed not only make that system worst, it also does not actually address the problems.
The education system's function is to educate. Some other structures are needed to deal with poverty.
But until we do that, schools need to provide it. Because spoilers, but hungry kids don't learn shit. They are thinking about how hungry they are.
I don't think that really affects your proposal though? Like, you aren't suggesting more days off school, just adjusting when they are.
Problems with nutrition is not an argument for longer school weeks, it's an argument for an real welfare system.
Trying to use a unrelated system to pretend other problems are addressed not only make that system worst, it also does not actually address the problems.
The education system's function is to educate. Some other structures are needed to deal with poverty.
But until we do that, schools need to provide it. Because spoilers, but hungry kids don't learn shit. They are thinking about how hungry they are.
I don't think that really affects your proposal though? Like, you aren't suggesting more days off school, just adjusting when they are.
Yeah, it's 180 days still, basically. Traditional two week break for Christmas/New Year's, two weeks in late June, those are your semester breaks. Additional week long breaks roughly halfway between those and random federal holidays also off. Ends up around the same place.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
I failed math my senior year in high school and had to go to summer school. The math teacher I had was a poor teacher, but I also didn't do any of the work. I simply did not care.
Summer school was excellent. It was three hours on just math, with a very small class. Teacher would do a lesson, we'd do some work, do a lesson, do some work, repeat for a while, test. If I had a question, teacher was able to give me her full attention, nearly any time. Looking back, I would have opted to do all math courses as summer school, had I an option.
I know small class size is a pipe dream, but maybe having high school organized for 2-3 longer classes a day is a good and feasible option.
I failed math my senior year and had to go to summer school. The math teacher I had was a poor teacher, but I also didn't do any of the work. I simply did not care.
Summer school was excellent. It was three hours on just math, with a very small class. Teacher would do a lesson, we'd do some work, do a lesson, do some work, repeat for a while, test. If I had a question, teacher was able to give me her full attention, nearly any time. Looking back, I would have opted to do all math courses as summer school, had I an option.
I know small class size is a pipe dream, but maybe having high school organized for 2-3 longer classes a day is a good and feasible option.
My high school experience was four ninety minute classes that lasted a semester and then ended. It was pretty great.
Though also: rich school district that had all the resources and I was basically in exclusively AP/honors classes after my freshman year, so my high school experience was...atypical. Also socially the nerds were sort of the power clique (my best friend was prom king, for example). It was a weird place.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
It would seem to me that it would be the school's responsibility to provide accommodation for students that can't use the machines normally.
That would be all the students though.
It sounded to me that, moving away from the epileptic student, the ergonomics of the classroom were terrible anyway.
Kids were complaining of sore hands, presumably because they were using garbage keyboards and more likely overusing their mice, due to Summit UI design, all day.
Kids were coming home lobotomized, presumably due to using their computers all day without adequate breaks to treat their eyes.
I do not believe that an otherwise healthy person can use a computer without breaks aside lunch and recess throughout a normal school day.
Or at least, I'm otherwise healthy and have never been able to.
It would seem to me that it would be the school's responsibility to provide accommodation for students that can't use the machines normally.
That would be all the students though.
It sounded too me that, moving away from the epileptic student, the ergonomics of the classroom were terrible anyway.
Kids were complaining of sore hands, presumably because they were using garbage keyboards and more likely overusing their mice, due to Summit UI design, all day.
Kids were coming home lobotomized, presumably due to using their computers all day without adequate breaks to treat their eyes.
I do not believe that an otherwise healthy person can use a computer without breaks aside lunch and recess throughout a normal school day.
Or at least, I'm otherwise healthy and have never been able to.
That's pretty much what I do at work or on days off so... I think many of the jobs we are preparing students for involve most of your time spent in front of a computer.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Teenagers are way smarter than you are giving them credit for. At least in the specific sense that teenagers have pretty good bullshit detectors and know when a program isn't working. And they will let you know. They also know when they're learning things that feel relevant. If you have that, they will be VERY excited about it. If they're just learning things, they'll be pretty excited. Kids want to learn stuff, but school in the US is terribly structured. Too many subjects at once for not enough time a day to really master them. Also high schools start WAY too early for them to be functional.
Teenagers, as far as I remember the research, need more sleep not less and yet my experience has always been that the further up you go, the earlier they push start times. And many of the kids are goddamn zombies at that hour.
Lewis Black:
I flunked that course. It's not my fault. They taught it at 8 o'clock in the morning. And there is absolutely nothing that you can learn out of one bloodshot eye. After I flunked the first two tests, I grabbed the professor by the throat and I said, "Why are you teaching this shit at this ungodly hour? Are you *trying* to keep this stuff a secret?"
It's not necessarily more sleep (though also that) but when they should be sleeping. For that age, natural seems to be midnight to eight (or later). Seattle finally started experimenting with start times this year, pushing high school later in the morning. Saw increased attendance, fewer tardies, better grades, and healthier students.
Oh right, I should mention: I mentioned this article to my students and they were like "No shit Mr. enlightenedbum, adults are idiots."
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Problems with nutrition is not an argument for longer school weeks, it's an argument for an real welfare system.
Trying to use a unrelated system to pretend other problems are addressed not only make that system worst, it also does not actually address the problems.
The education system's function is to educate. Some other structures are needed to deal with poverty.
It is extremely relevant though when we talk about the effectiveness of different educational programs, because poverty rates are an enormous confound. Sadly, this thread is light on data because the Summit program does not publicly provide data. But even if it did, any comparison between Summit and non-Summit schools is worse than useless (ie, misleading) if it isn't controlled for poverty rates.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
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Silicon valley tried to find an way to fix education and it sucked and failed. Whatever, it was broken before and it's still broken.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Before they had in-person communications and conversations with the students via normal classes, though, right? This is in part meant to replace that, but isn't feasible timewise.
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Also, kids actually like school if a school is good. They aren't stupid. They know when they are getting screwed.
I think the point is that class sizes are already too big. Standing up at the front and telling students things, and maybe getting a response from individuals who raise their hands or w/e isn't really any better.
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I think we may be talking past eachother here. In the typical rotational-model classroom environment, you have 45-110 minutes a day with each student 5 days a week for you to teach, test, monitor, and discuss as a group. Using observation and a keen eye you can identify who is performing well and who needs more mentorship and provide that during or after class. You can also use monitored group work to foster synthesis and a variety of teaching models like flipping the classroom to foster teaching in a variety of ways. That mentoring gets done where needed, and (of course) better with smaller class sizes but the cohort model does provide more face time to observe problems.
Sure, if the teachers were overburdened before they surely still are, but that disregards that there are two different jobs being presented here. As mentioned last thread, advising and teaching are different professions, both with different and hefty preparation requirements. Kansas appears to have flipped their teachers into advisors without understanding what that entailed, and without providing any real cost or time savings for doing so, and also without any real benefit to their students.
Also, you did say "lmao teachers couldn't make time for students" which is not how you are presenting it here.
That's fair.
I'm serious that calling out Summit as part of a failure to do individual mentoring seems off base. If it's not happening now, it seems likely that there was never any individual attention and this is just "no change" to individual teacher time except with unfair complaints attached to it.
I'm sarcastic about how great it is to listen to feedback from children when designing a learning system. Children cannot evaluate whether a system works for them, cannot evaluate whether a system works in general, and have monumental perverse incentives with regard to their own education. They're the last people you should listen to.
I'm being dismissive about the importance of socialization but I agree with points made in favor of. School was a nightmare for me personally, one that tracks pretty well with Gabe & Tycho's stories about school, but that's not everyone. As a school-age kid I certainly would have picked being alone in a room with a computer instead of in a class full of people who tormented me, but basically See Above in regard to whether anyone should have listened to me - they should not have! My younger two kids had a staggeringly bad experience with self-directed learning but I can't apply that because it was a facet of a general disintegration of their mental and physical health that overshadows everything else. The social aspect is probably quite important, in general, even if non-conforming students are ostracized in ways they might not get over for decades.
I'm dismissive of complaints by children that self-directed learning is more stressful, and similarly dismissive of parents who echo those complaints, especially in rural districts where the quality and challenge level of the education might have been far far below what the kids are being exposed to with Summit. We don't know and can't find out the truth to do a fair before / after test because there are too many incentives to lie in various ways about the state of education in the district, by students, parents, teachers, administrators, and the School Board.
Basically, I think the article was a joke apart from the one actual real issue, where the district didn't anticipate and hasn't provided accommodations for the epileptic girl. That part is pretty fucked up.
It sucks that you had a bad school experience, and lots of people do think as you do. But we have mountains of well-performed, well-documented research on how educational outcomes work. It's also worthy of note that education when we were children is much different than the modern classroom, and the psychological effects of bad education have become much better understood than 20, 30, or 40 years ago by a considerable margins.
That's how school worked decades ago. Now there are many, many, many schools implementing active-learning strategies to prevent lecture from being the norm. That's obviously not everywhere, nationwide. But at least in Florida its a major element of expectations for the classroom and the core part in nearly all K-12 education degree programs in colleges around the country.
This is gooseshit. Children may lack experience and knowledge, but they're not idiots, and can recognize when they're being taken for a ride,and when a system is not actually focusing on their needs and issues (which seems to be one of the larger parts of the disengagement with Summit.) Not to mention that the perverse incentive argument doesn't really hold up - given a reason to care about their education, students do.
When you try to build a system without any consideration for those who will be in it, you're just planning to fail.
I remain bitter that my teacher prep program did not do a good job of giving us examples of how to do more of this in math so I am kind of left to my own devices. Social studies I could do it easily and often.
Sometimes it feels like math education has barely changed since Euclid.
Flipping the classroom works super well in math education, I'm told. It's not at all my field, but our unit was dinged on some publications about it being implemented in College Algebra a while back.
That said, college is a totally different game for these sorts of things than even High School and I cant imagine a principal being particularly comfortable with students using a flipped model with video capture as primary lecture time.
Teenagers, as far as I remember the research, need more sleep not less and yet my experience has always been that the further up you go, the earlier they push start times. And many of the kids are goddamn zombies at that hour.
nah it's not. Sure teenagers are savvy but like, 4th graders are super not. And even teenagers are pretty bad at evaluating what things they should care about even if they do care about their education. You can't ask a 16yr old kid "what math do you need to learn" and get a coherent answer - it takes two BAs to answer that question effectively. We could argue that for 30 pages and not get to a solid answer.
That's something they recommend, but getting my students to watch a video at home, pay attention to it, take notes is, I'm going to say daunting. Though I got my job this year in November, maybe if I were there from the start of the year I could build that norm.
It's not necessarily more sleep (though also that) but when they should be sleeping. For that age, natural seems to be midnight to eight (or later). Seattle finally started experimenting with start times this year, pushing high school later in the morning. Saw increased attendance, fewer tardies, better grades, and healthier students.
I mean, it really is better. It's still bad, sure, because class sizes are too big. But it's still face-to-face in-person time for an hour+ every day. Are you trying to make a serious argument that 10-minutes-a-week is better?
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I mean I made that choice for myself at about 12 or 13 when I decided on the highschool I was gonna go with (the local vocational tech school).
good job it worked out for you!
You can just look at the number of people who change majors in college to see that even at age 20 we're not necessarily all that great at forecasting what we need to learn. If I'd been in charge of my own curriculum I wouldn't have touched math past Algebra 1 because I was going to be An Author.
No, I personally believe both systems are fucked, and none of this is working. We need to start from the ground up, and rebuild our educational system radically.
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We should do this collectively, as a society, not just children.
One of the main points of our school system is free day care.
Also vacation time is good.
Their reports about their feelings should also not be run together with their ideas about solutions for their feelings. Kids can be incredibly knowledgeable about what school feels like for them specifically while having no idea what interventions would improve those feelings—let alone which ones would do so without burdening other children more, or which are legally and financially feasible, or...
The issues come up with all forms of public engagement. Engaging the public is great but you gotta be careful to ask he right questions.
In most year long school plans, there are two or three week breaks built into the schedule. It's usually two weeks off for six weeks in class. So there are vacations in there.
The story about Lebron James' school in Akron is worth talking about. They're doing a lot of good stuff with the extra money he's providing. What I did not realize when I first heard about it is that it's not a charter, but a public school the city of Akron is letting Lebron give extra money to and run experimentally. And it looks from that article like he basically got people who believe in all the modern education research to run the place. Good job, Lebron.
Schools serve a lot of societal needs beyond education, which is something that people forget.
Trying to use a unrelated system to pretend other problems are addressed not only make that system worst, it also does not actually address the problems.
The education system's function is to educate. Some other structures are needed to deal with poverty.
This is so odd to me because up here there is, afaik, no government-provided meals at school.
Actually, the most likely reality, its even more depressing. If it's anything like current situation with education in the UK, where a large number of schools are being turned into privatised businesses. Then the actual needs and requirements of Special Educational Needs students end up becoming the earliest casualty on the cost cutting measures to keep balancing the books.
It would not surprise me if some bean counter in a suit within these tech companies saw the cost balance was deemed too high to provide R&D for special needs students.
But until we do that, schools need to provide it. Because spoilers, but hungry kids don't learn shit. They are thinking about how hungry they are.
I don't think that really affects your proposal though? Like, you aren't suggesting more days off school, just adjusting when they are.
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Yeah, it's 180 days still, basically. Traditional two week break for Christmas/New Year's, two weeks in late June, those are your semester breaks. Additional week long breaks roughly halfway between those and random federal holidays also off. Ends up around the same place.
I failed math my senior year in high school and had to go to summer school. The math teacher I had was a poor teacher, but I also didn't do any of the work. I simply did not care.
Summer school was excellent. It was three hours on just math, with a very small class. Teacher would do a lesson, we'd do some work, do a lesson, do some work, repeat for a while, test. If I had a question, teacher was able to give me her full attention, nearly any time. Looking back, I would have opted to do all math courses as summer school, had I an option.
I know small class size is a pipe dream, but maybe having high school organized for 2-3 longer classes a day is a good and feasible option.
My high school experience was four ninety minute classes that lasted a semester and then ended. It was pretty great.
Though also: rich school district that had all the resources and I was basically in exclusively AP/honors classes after my freshman year, so my high school experience was...atypical. Also socially the nerds were sort of the power clique (my best friend was prom king, for example). It was a weird place.
That would be all the students though.
It sounded to me that, moving away from the epileptic student, the ergonomics of the classroom were terrible anyway.
Kids were complaining of sore hands, presumably because they were using garbage keyboards and more likely overusing their mice, due to Summit UI design, all day.
Kids were coming home lobotomized, presumably due to using their computers all day without adequate breaks to treat their eyes.
I do not believe that an otherwise healthy person can use a computer without breaks aside lunch and recess throughout a normal school day.
Or at least, I'm otherwise healthy and have never been able to.
That's pretty much what I do at work or on days off so... I think many of the jobs we are preparing students for involve most of your time spent in front of a computer.
Oh right, I should mention: I mentioned this article to my students and they were like "No shit Mr. enlightenedbum, adults are idiots."
It is extremely relevant though when we talk about the effectiveness of different educational programs, because poverty rates are an enormous confound. Sadly, this thread is light on data because the Summit program does not publicly provide data. But even if it did, any comparison between Summit and non-Summit schools is worse than useless (ie, misleading) if it isn't controlled for poverty rates.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.