One of my supervisors at my last job (teaching immigrants and refugees English+GED classes)was convinced Coursera and "learn to code" was the future. Ironically, it seems like coding is the job most likely to be taken by AI.
As the saying goes "Code is easy. Architecture is hard." I think coding is a pretty good example of why AI is unlikely to take anybody's job, at least for a decade or two.
Duolingo's doing a similar thing, and also can't admit that its previous system wasn't working at all at ACTUALLY teaching language, but claims the AI stuff will change that which...no. It won't.
I ill admit ChatGPT has been pretty good at generating language exercises for me daily, so I think you could make a genuinely useful thing out of it, but that's just an incremental improvement not a revolution.
A lot of these game based learning approaches don't want to admit some basic truths about learning. I spent a lot of time learning Spanish in classes and on duolingo and I just never got anywhere until I sat down with the 501 Spanish Verbs book and rote memorized hundreds of conjugations. I'm sure others have a different approach, but for many people I've talked to rote memorization to the point that something is internalized seems to be crucial to mastery. The online apps want to pretend everything is just fun and holistic, so they don't make certain rules explicit, and they don't have you memorize how to apply those rules because that's a chore. So instead you're supposed to just uncover relations in a way that never occurs and leaves you still ignorant.
My wife is naturally good with languages and has gotten a pretty solid foundation with German using Duolingo… but also using me, a fluent German speaker, and making me explain grammatical concepts that Duolingo won’t spend more than fifteen seconds on.
And now I'm seeing where state education departments are already getting ready to ask for lots of money and resources for AI computer centers for schools.
They have no idea what those centers will look like, what will be in them, who will operate them, who will use them, or what they'll be used for, but they definitely need them.
AI is the current buzzword, state education departments desperately need a success, or at least some kind of magic bullet program that they can claim will lead to educational success, and there are consultants with programs to sell.
The last genuine innovation in ed tech was the abacus. Change my mind.
I presume a lot of colleges will jump on the bandwagon because "personalized learning AIs" are even cheaper than adjuncts, making the academic labor market even worse. Meanwhile AIs will be grading essays that the students wrote using other AIs.
"Meanwhile AIs will be grading essays that the students wrote using other AIs. "
I haven't taught a for-credit course in decades. Whenever I contemplate doing so, I wonder how tests and grading must work in the age of computers. This tells me how!
While I'm sure that you can do accomplish many/most mathematical tasks with an abacus, time is also an important consideration. I mean technically we could be running the internet, substack, etc. on a machine with the ability to read, write, and erase 0/1s on a paper tape (a Turing machine).
Apparently Richard Feynman was able to beat an abacus master at division!
That is all correct, but the abacus still has a place in my heart as a teaching tool. It lets you get a "feel" for numbers, and for otherwise abstract concepts like place-value. Once you can do the sums right, you can move on to doing them fast as well.
When you borrow/carry one in a subtraction, you physically have to move a bead, and with some experience you get into habits like "to add 7, if it would overflow the digit, subtract 3 and add a bead on the row above (e.g. 10)". Once you then go out with your pocket calculator to do real work, sometimes the number sense you've built up can help you catch mistakes.
It’s funny - Khan Academy videos (and pre-recorded lectures etc more generally) imo *are* very useful tools… but the people who are motivated enough/positioned to do extended self-study (which is what theyre for, at bottom) aren’t poor kids in bad homes.
they’re a cheaper, more convenient way for the top 1/3 to get better, not for the bottom third to close the gap with the 50th percentile… because if the bottom third were positioned to effectively take advantage of self-study, they’d be doing it already.
E.g., in the legal world — I used youtube videos to study and review logic games for the LSAT during evenings/weekends, in lieu of a tutor or expensive LSAT class. Bar test prep is now fully remote, pre-recorded. Another example - UC Berkeley has had issues w/entry level computer science classes being oversubscribed and has at various points switched to streaming/recording lecture as. All seems to work great
But not remotely same population as middle schoolers in danger of failing 6th grade math. If they could teach themselves, they’d be reading the textbooks and doing the homework…making it a video or AI tool isn’t gonna change that
Being able to undertake and enjoy self-directed learning understood at face value, is a necessary and important part of being a grown up person, and arguably the most important product of a good K-12/College education.
"Self-directed learning", in the sense it is used and pushed by the EdTech world, is deeply cynical understanding of what "education" is and is for, and provides students in need with the exact opposite of what they need. I say this as someone who (to my regret), tried to implement it for a few years and has worked a bit at (name redacted) charter school, where that's their whole thing.
The Khan Academy-type videos can still be useful to lower-performing students. They're helpful for differentiated classes, for instance, where I can teach 8th grade content to most of my students while playing a video at the 5th grade level for some others. But they can't be self-directed in the way they're meant to be because I need some sort of engagement check to keep my students honest - otherwise they just zone out. And of course if I have to make three different worksheets based off of three different videos every night, my workload has tripled as a teacher.
People will learn anything from the crappiest source if they're motivated - how many times have we all sat through the world's poorest-quality YouTube video on order to save $400 fixing a car or a home appliance? But getting people engaged in a topic they don't want to be learning about requires some sort of check for retention, whether it's 8th graders learning how government works or white-collar PMCs taking a Code of Conduct training. Production values can't do it - at some point you need to threaten to fail them (or at least make them retake the course) if they can't show they were paying attention.
My 6th grade math teacher gave three different tests each time: easy, average, and hard, based on the previous years state assessment test scores in math. Was good and bad, but bad only because there weren't extra points added to the harder tests, and math grades determined placement the following years. But good because tracking is universally good (not least because it pisses off the people who want everyone to teach to the lowest common denominator)
They've helped the subset of students who wanted to learn something and didn't have anyone who could/would teach it to them. That seems really valuable, right--I'm sure there are smart 14 year olds learning calculus from Sal Khan right now, and that's a very good thing. It's good that smart kids can learn more stuff before the school system gets around to offering it to them, it's good that homeschooled kids can learn stuff their parents don't know, it's good that kids who need a second take on something from class can get it, it's good that when my kid asks me something about his math class, we can watch Khan Academy to understand it instead of me spending an hour working out how to complete the square so I can teach it to my kid. That's all great, it solves real problems, it makes the world a better place.
Khan Academy can't solve the problem that not everyone is equally smart or diligent or interested, or the problem that blacks and whites and asians in the US don't all do equally well at school or on standardized tests. I am an outsider, but it seems to me that educational policy discussions are all very focused on solving these basically unsolvable problems, and that as a result they miss out on ways to solve problems that can be solved. And I think Freddie's making exactly that error here.
Improvements to education that help smart people learn more are worthwhile, even though they will not close educational achievement gaps by race, income, social class, etc.
I've spent a lot of my career in small non-profit adult education (GED classes, etc..) and one particular ed tech worshipping charter school which will go unnamed, and I can report that Khan Academy is VERY popular with gullible/apathetic admin and overworked, burnt out educators.
(Almost all of the teachers and low-level admin I worked with were great and doing the best they could to survive. They're as skeptical of most of this stuff as anyone and it's not their fault they're caught in a bad system.)
"No revolutions are coming to education because school outcomes are dictated by
Inequalities of race and class in American society which ensure that students learn in profoundly different life environments, regardless of what happens in the classroom, and which 40+ years of effort have not been able to ameliorate through school-side reforms, and
the combination of genetic and environmental effects that together produce an inherent, intrinsic, more-or-less immutable level of academic potential for every individual student."
I would say that no revolutions are coming to American education, because education outcomes are first and foremost dictated by how motivated learners are to learn or at least jump through educational hoops.
It’s almost as if trying to control students’ education, as opposed to influencing their interests with experiential exposure and rudimentary social applications, will never work. Hmm…
If there is an interest in improving education and the outcomes for students, they would start teaching analytical skills from the first grade so that students could look at a text and understand what it is actually saying, what the framing is, what isn't being said, and what the underlying assumptions are. This is entirely doable, speaking as someone who has been botha parent, and an educator. What I don't see is anyone actually doing this.
That might be true of some specific cases, but the majority of students are of average IQ, no? So, patiently reading, explaining, asking questions to and encouraging questions back from the kids, regarding the reading, has had good outcomes when I've tried it.
The problem as I see it, is that it isn't happening. Not even a little bit. What I see are students being stifled, given assignments to learn for rudimentary comprehension, and no effort at real understanding.
If using this more analytical way had been consistently tried and failed over the years, then maybe it is a method that just won't work, but I haven't seen it.
I mean, that's what I've done as a parent for my kids' whole life--engage them in discussion about what they are reading or studying, get them to think it through more deeply, suggest questions to ask themselves, etc. I wonder how well it can work in a 30-kid classroom, though.
That's a fair question, but we can't answer it because few to no schools are actually doing that. It needs to start early, and since it doesn't the only examples come from kids who are just at the moment, in your classroom, and first being introduced to such ideas. In a class of twenty-something high school students, I'd say quite a few got something meaningful and new out of these analyses and methods. Maybe two to three looked like they might take some of the ideas for future use. But if we don't do that, or at least try, we are abdicating our responsibility to what our true goals as educators should be.
The next step in your analysis is career outcomes which are governed by the same factors. Even if you’re able to educate someone with an IQ of 100 sufficiently to pass differential equations and get them an engineering degree, they are still going to flounder in their first engineering job as they just aren’t smart enough.
This is what pisses me off when I see complaints that people in dying areas need to just pick up and move to get a new job. Do you really think there's no cognitive difficulty in that, and that anyone can just go from e.g. driving a forestry vehicle to even a low level administrative job in another city across the country without a ton of support?
(Aside) I can't recall the name of the movie as it is over 30 years old, but at one point it showed a college classroom with a large number of students listening to a professor lecture. The progressed through a couple of transition steps until it ended with just a cassette recorder at each desk and a large tape player in place of the professor. How prescient.
A learning environment is a huge advantage for a child. Parents who are around, rested enough to think clearly and educated enough to challenge their children give those children a huge advantage that just can't be overcome by schooling and gadgets. Part of that advantage comes from the warm relationship it fosters between the parent and child. That warmth in the context of learning makes the child welcome and enjoy learning and seek out opportunities to learn.
For example: When my daughter was around 12 I showed her a soda bottle filled with water. I turned it over and timed how fast it took to empty. I then asked her if she could figure out any way to make the water come out faster. We then talked about how air needed to come in for the water to come out. We then discussed how the water trying to get out all at once blocked the air from coming in. We then discussed and tried various ways to let the air in faster. Swirling the bottle before turning it over caused the water to form a vortex and the bottle emptied in about 1/2 the time. This was a fun experience for both of us and it not only taught her some fluid dynamics, but it encouraged her to look at the world with curiosity and to investigate even everyday phenomena.
Are you familiar with the whole Whole Language debacle? Long story short someone noticed that kids who are read to and live in houses surrounded by books often essentially teach themselves how to read. So the theory went if we just surround kids with books and read to them they will figure it out on their own. It didn’t work.
Why? Because what was actually going was high IQ parents having high IQ kids and the books and reading were a function of innate high levels of cognitive ability.
Yes and No. I was around at that time and watched the pendulum swing back and forth. I think the Whole Language vs Phonics makes as much sense as Nature vs Nurture. You need to have a combination of both. Some kids can't break words apart into phonemes and put them back together to form words. Some kids have dysgraphia and pbdq all look the same, along with a bunch of others that get mixed up.
Phonics is a good place to start, but it isn't the be all end all. English is not particularly phonetic. The idea that you'll just read to kids and they'll automatically learn is also absurd for at least a third of students.
That's why real life human teachers mix and match, doing a bit of both but skewed in whatever direction is popular at the time.
That's interesting. In my experience, I read my ass off and my husband has probably read two books in the thirty years we've been together. But our kids' elementary school ran a program that if a student documented 100 hours of reading over the summer they won a water bottle and a tee shirt and a slice of pizza or whatever in September. It was the most ingenious thing because my two 8th graders now read at a 12th grade level and required zero effort by me ;-). We didn't read to them much as babies or toddlers. We have whatever IQs we have, but the contest got the kids motivated and they learned to love reading and all the good stuff that follows. I don't really have a point, other than if you can get your elementary school to do this thing -- go for it.
When I was in elementary school (I'm 46 now) that was called Book It! You tracked how much you read (I think usually over the summer) and if you hit a certain number you got a free personal pizza from Pizza Hut. For an elementary school kid in the 80's that was pretty cool. I loved reading anyway, so it was easy for me to hit the goal and surpass it every time. In retrospect now, I'm like, a personal pizza?? All that did was mean my parents had to take out the whole family and buy pizza for everyone so I could have that.
I'm a sucker for a carrot though. Three summers ago my local library had a "reading challenge" over the summer for adults to get them to read more, and the prize was a specially designed pint glass. It was a fun design, so even though I'm already a big reader, and average about a book per week anyway, I participated just to get that glass. It's a great glass.
I am begging you to watch the video and tell me whether what you've described matches what Khan says his videos are going to do
coursera and all that too. it was going to be a revolution around 2010? didn't happen :(
One of my supervisors at my last job (teaching immigrants and refugees English+GED classes)was convinced Coursera and "learn to code" was the future. Ironically, it seems like coding is the job most likely to be taken by AI.
As the saying goes "Code is easy. Architecture is hard." I think coding is a pretty good example of why AI is unlikely to take anybody's job, at least for a decade or two.
I was in high school at the time, and my dad's frenzied enthusiasm for Coursera *did* end up being a great supplement to public school ed
Don't think a single classmate was familiar with it, though 🤷♂️
I think Andy Ng's ai class was offered by coursea while he was at Stanford. Certainly Python courses were there, and adequate.
No revolution, because learning is hard work.
Just like Prezbo said on The Wire S4: it’s all about juking the stats. Straight bullshit.
Duolingo's doing a similar thing, and also can't admit that its previous system wasn't working at all at ACTUALLY teaching language, but claims the AI stuff will change that which...no. It won't.
I ill admit ChatGPT has been pretty good at generating language exercises for me daily, so I think you could make a genuinely useful thing out of it, but that's just an incremental improvement not a revolution.
A lot of these game based learning approaches don't want to admit some basic truths about learning. I spent a lot of time learning Spanish in classes and on duolingo and I just never got anywhere until I sat down with the 501 Spanish Verbs book and rote memorized hundreds of conjugations. I'm sure others have a different approach, but for many people I've talked to rote memorization to the point that something is internalized seems to be crucial to mastery. The online apps want to pretend everything is just fun and holistic, so they don't make certain rules explicit, and they don't have you memorize how to apply those rules because that's a chore. So instead you're supposed to just uncover relations in a way that never occurs and leaves you still ignorant.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The cult of "if it's not fun it won't work" has killed serious, honest pedagogical inquiry..
My wife is naturally good with languages and has gotten a pretty solid foundation with German using Duolingo… but also using me, a fluent German speaker, and making me explain grammatical concepts that Duolingo won’t spend more than fifteen seconds on.
It's incredible how often we'll fall for this.
And now I'm seeing where state education departments are already getting ready to ask for lots of money and resources for AI computer centers for schools.
They have no idea what those centers will look like, what will be in them, who will operate them, who will use them, or what they'll be used for, but they definitely need them.
AI is the current buzzword, state education departments desperately need a success, or at least some kind of magic bullet program that they can claim will lead to educational success, and there are consultants with programs to sell.
Yeah, but…….IT’S FOR THE KIDS!
My brain initially read it as Chaka Khan, which was infinitely more amusing.
Sal, Chaka, and Genghis should form a supergroup
Years ago, one of the late night shows (I think it was Letterman) had Chaka Khan, Madeleine Kahn, and James Caan as guests on the same night.
william_shatner_yelling_khan.gif
Ain't nobody
Teach me better
The last genuine innovation in ed tech was the abacus. Change my mind.
I presume a lot of colleges will jump on the bandwagon because "personalized learning AIs" are even cheaper than adjuncts, making the academic labor market even worse. Meanwhile AIs will be grading essays that the students wrote using other AIs.
"Meanwhile AIs will be grading essays that the students wrote using other AIs. "
I haven't taught a for-credit course in decades. Whenever I contemplate doing so, I wonder how tests and grading must work in the age of computers. This tells me how!
While I'm sure that you can do accomplish many/most mathematical tasks with an abacus, time is also an important consideration. I mean technically we could be running the internet, substack, etc. on a machine with the ability to read, write, and erase 0/1s on a paper tape (a Turing machine).
Apparently Richard Feynman was able to beat an abacus master at division!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus#Feynman_vs_the_abacus
That is all correct, but the abacus still has a place in my heart as a teaching tool. It lets you get a "feel" for numbers, and for otherwise abstract concepts like place-value. Once you can do the sums right, you can move on to doing them fast as well.
When you borrow/carry one in a subtraction, you physically have to move a bead, and with some experience you get into habits like "to add 7, if it would overflow the digit, subtract 3 and add a bead on the row above (e.g. 10)". Once you then go out with your pocket calculator to do real work, sometimes the number sense you've built up can help you catch mistakes.
I can certainly see how the physical interaction and representation would be beneficial to some learners.
It’s funny - Khan Academy videos (and pre-recorded lectures etc more generally) imo *are* very useful tools… but the people who are motivated enough/positioned to do extended self-study (which is what theyre for, at bottom) aren’t poor kids in bad homes.
they’re a cheaper, more convenient way for the top 1/3 to get better, not for the bottom third to close the gap with the 50th percentile… because if the bottom third were positioned to effectively take advantage of self-study, they’d be doing it already.
E.g., in the legal world — I used youtube videos to study and review logic games for the LSAT during evenings/weekends, in lieu of a tutor or expensive LSAT class. Bar test prep is now fully remote, pre-recorded. Another example - UC Berkeley has had issues w/entry level computer science classes being oversubscribed and has at various points switched to streaming/recording lecture as. All seems to work great
But not remotely same population as middle schoolers in danger of failing 6th grade math. If they could teach themselves, they’d be reading the textbooks and doing the homework…making it a video or AI tool isn’t gonna change that
Yes, this is THE essential point here: the access to all of these online teaching resources have helped precisely those students who need them least!
Being able to undertake and enjoy self-directed learning understood at face value, is a necessary and important part of being a grown up person, and arguably the most important product of a good K-12/College education.
"Self-directed learning", in the sense it is used and pushed by the EdTech world, is deeply cynical understanding of what "education" is and is for, and provides students in need with the exact opposite of what they need. I say this as someone who (to my regret), tried to implement it for a few years and has worked a bit at (name redacted) charter school, where that's their whole thing.
The Khan Academy-type videos can still be useful to lower-performing students. They're helpful for differentiated classes, for instance, where I can teach 8th grade content to most of my students while playing a video at the 5th grade level for some others. But they can't be self-directed in the way they're meant to be because I need some sort of engagement check to keep my students honest - otherwise they just zone out. And of course if I have to make three different worksheets based off of three different videos every night, my workload has tripled as a teacher.
People will learn anything from the crappiest source if they're motivated - how many times have we all sat through the world's poorest-quality YouTube video on order to save $400 fixing a car or a home appliance? But getting people engaged in a topic they don't want to be learning about requires some sort of check for retention, whether it's 8th graders learning how government works or white-collar PMCs taking a Code of Conduct training. Production values can't do it - at some point you need to threaten to fail them (or at least make them retake the course) if they can't show they were paying attention.
My 6th grade math teacher gave three different tests each time: easy, average, and hard, based on the previous years state assessment test scores in math. Was good and bad, but bad only because there weren't extra points added to the harder tests, and math grades determined placement the following years. But good because tracking is universally good (not least because it pisses off the people who want everyone to teach to the lowest common denominator)
They've helped the subset of students who wanted to learn something and didn't have anyone who could/would teach it to them. That seems really valuable, right--I'm sure there are smart 14 year olds learning calculus from Sal Khan right now, and that's a very good thing. It's good that smart kids can learn more stuff before the school system gets around to offering it to them, it's good that homeschooled kids can learn stuff their parents don't know, it's good that kids who need a second take on something from class can get it, it's good that when my kid asks me something about his math class, we can watch Khan Academy to understand it instead of me spending an hour working out how to complete the square so I can teach it to my kid. That's all great, it solves real problems, it makes the world a better place.
Khan Academy can't solve the problem that not everyone is equally smart or diligent or interested, or the problem that blacks and whites and asians in the US don't all do equally well at school or on standardized tests. I am an outsider, but it seems to me that educational policy discussions are all very focused on solving these basically unsolvable problems, and that as a result they miss out on ways to solve problems that can be solved. And I think Freddie's making exactly that error here.
Improvements to education that help smart people learn more are worthwhile, even though they will not close educational achievement gaps by race, income, social class, etc.
Bingo! 🎯
Exactly my experience with my kids.
Hey now, to be fair...
I've spent a lot of my career in small non-profit adult education (GED classes, etc..) and one particular ed tech worshipping charter school which will go unnamed, and I can report that Khan Academy is VERY popular with gullible/apathetic admin and overworked, burnt out educators.
(Almost all of the teachers and low-level admin I worked with were great and doing the best they could to survive. They're as skeptical of most of this stuff as anyone and it's not their fault they're caught in a bad system.)
"No revolutions are coming to education because school outcomes are dictated by
Inequalities of race and class in American society which ensure that students learn in profoundly different life environments, regardless of what happens in the classroom, and which 40+ years of effort have not been able to ameliorate through school-side reforms, and
the combination of genetic and environmental effects that together produce an inherent, intrinsic, more-or-less immutable level of academic potential for every individual student."
I would say that no revolutions are coming to American education, because education outcomes are first and foremost dictated by how motivated learners are to learn or at least jump through educational hoops.
It’s almost as if trying to control students’ education, as opposed to influencing their interests with experiential exposure and rudimentary social applications, will never work. Hmm…
If there is an interest in improving education and the outcomes for students, they would start teaching analytical skills from the first grade so that students could look at a text and understand what it is actually saying, what the framing is, what isn't being said, and what the underlying assumptions are. This is entirely doable, speaking as someone who has been botha parent, and an educator. What I don't see is anyone actually doing this.
What sort of specific things did you teach to the bottom decile or quartile to accomplish this?
That might be true of some specific cases, but the majority of students are of average IQ, no? So, patiently reading, explaining, asking questions to and encouraging questions back from the kids, regarding the reading, has had good outcomes when I've tried it.
The problem as I see it, is that it isn't happening. Not even a little bit. What I see are students being stifled, given assignments to learn for rudimentary comprehension, and no effort at real understanding.
If using this more analytical way had been consistently tried and failed over the years, then maybe it is a method that just won't work, but I haven't seen it.
“ but the majority of students are of average IQ, no? ”
Depends where you’re teaching. Almost all of the kids in Greenwich are above average and almost all of the kids in Bridgeport are below average.
I mean, that's what I've done as a parent for my kids' whole life--engage them in discussion about what they are reading or studying, get them to think it through more deeply, suggest questions to ask themselves, etc. I wonder how well it can work in a 30-kid classroom, though.
That's a fair question, but we can't answer it because few to no schools are actually doing that. It needs to start early, and since it doesn't the only examples come from kids who are just at the moment, in your classroom, and first being introduced to such ideas. In a class of twenty-something high school students, I'd say quite a few got something meaningful and new out of these analyses and methods. Maybe two to three looked like they might take some of the ideas for future use. But if we don't do that, or at least try, we are abdicating our responsibility to what our true goals as educators should be.
The next step in your analysis is career outcomes which are governed by the same factors. Even if you’re able to educate someone with an IQ of 100 sufficiently to pass differential equations and get them an engineering degree, they are still going to flounder in their first engineering job as they just aren’t smart enough.
This is what pisses me off when I see complaints that people in dying areas need to just pick up and move to get a new job. Do you really think there's no cognitive difficulty in that, and that anyone can just go from e.g. driving a forestry vehicle to even a low level administrative job in another city across the country without a ton of support?
Nobody with an IQ of 100 is getting through DiffEQ
(Aside) I can't recall the name of the movie as it is over 30 years old, but at one point it showed a college classroom with a large number of students listening to a professor lecture. The progressed through a couple of transition steps until it ended with just a cassette recorder at each desk and a large tape player in place of the professor. How prescient.
A learning environment is a huge advantage for a child. Parents who are around, rested enough to think clearly and educated enough to challenge their children give those children a huge advantage that just can't be overcome by schooling and gadgets. Part of that advantage comes from the warm relationship it fosters between the parent and child. That warmth in the context of learning makes the child welcome and enjoy learning and seek out opportunities to learn.
For example: When my daughter was around 12 I showed her a soda bottle filled with water. I turned it over and timed how fast it took to empty. I then asked her if she could figure out any way to make the water come out faster. We then talked about how air needed to come in for the water to come out. We then discussed how the water trying to get out all at once blocked the air from coming in. We then discussed and tried various ways to let the air in faster. Swirling the bottle before turning it over caused the water to form a vortex and the bottle emptied in about 1/2 the time. This was a fun experience for both of us and it not only taught her some fluid dynamics, but it encouraged her to look at the world with curiosity and to investigate even everyday phenomena.
Are you familiar with the whole Whole Language debacle? Long story short someone noticed that kids who are read to and live in houses surrounded by books often essentially teach themselves how to read. So the theory went if we just surround kids with books and read to them they will figure it out on their own. It didn’t work.
Why? Because what was actually going was high IQ parents having high IQ kids and the books and reading were a function of innate high levels of cognitive ability.
Yes and No. I was around at that time and watched the pendulum swing back and forth. I think the Whole Language vs Phonics makes as much sense as Nature vs Nurture. You need to have a combination of both. Some kids can't break words apart into phonemes and put them back together to form words. Some kids have dysgraphia and pbdq all look the same, along with a bunch of others that get mixed up.
Phonics is a good place to start, but it isn't the be all end all. English is not particularly phonetic. The idea that you'll just read to kids and they'll automatically learn is also absurd for at least a third of students.
That's why real life human teachers mix and match, doing a bit of both but skewed in whatever direction is popular at the time.
That's interesting. In my experience, I read my ass off and my husband has probably read two books in the thirty years we've been together. But our kids' elementary school ran a program that if a student documented 100 hours of reading over the summer they won a water bottle and a tee shirt and a slice of pizza or whatever in September. It was the most ingenious thing because my two 8th graders now read at a 12th grade level and required zero effort by me ;-). We didn't read to them much as babies or toddlers. We have whatever IQs we have, but the contest got the kids motivated and they learned to love reading and all the good stuff that follows. I don't really have a point, other than if you can get your elementary school to do this thing -- go for it.
When I was in elementary school (I'm 46 now) that was called Book It! You tracked how much you read (I think usually over the summer) and if you hit a certain number you got a free personal pizza from Pizza Hut. For an elementary school kid in the 80's that was pretty cool. I loved reading anyway, so it was easy for me to hit the goal and surpass it every time. In retrospect now, I'm like, a personal pizza?? All that did was mean my parents had to take out the whole family and buy pizza for everyone so I could have that.
I'm a sucker for a carrot though. Three summers ago my local library had a "reading challenge" over the summer for adults to get them to read more, and the prize was a specially designed pint glass. It was a fun design, so even though I'm already a big reader, and average about a book per week anyway, I participated just to get that glass. It's a great glass.
Yes! It's still called "Book It".
Do they still give out the cool pins? (The purple and holographic ones from the 80s, I mean.)
You know the answer dude. They get like $5 gift certificates for the Roblox marketplace :-)
Real Genius. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt4vXaoPzF8&t=197s
Beat me to it. Fictional version of Caltech.
The reason why scheisters exist, and will always exist, is because suckers have, do, and will always exist.
There ain’t no cure for stupid.
Regarding the next great idea, the book The Quick Fix by Jesse Singal is a good read.