28
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Why do some educators dislike teaching people who don't already know?
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- Title
- Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?
- Authors
- Jake Seliger
- Published
- Jan 16 2024
- Word count
- 1755 words
2 big issues with the general way we teach:
Students come in with different levels of experience and learn at different rates. Some students get bored because they’re already ahead and learn fast, some students need review and need more of each lesson to grasp its concept.
Professors teach the same classes over and over, so they get bored and disinterested, especially teaching entry-level classes where there isn’t much room for flexibility or creativity.
Unfortunately, these issues especially apply when students need review and ask review questions. For 1), some students would benefit from review lectures, but most would’ve already understood and they would be a waste. Also, review lectures mean there’s less time to teach what the course is actually about, so students who do already understand don’t get the amount of learning they signed up for. But that means the struggling students email and go to office hours for review, which leads to 2), the professor has to waste their time with the same replies over and over (in contrast, many professors love it when students ask unique and interesting questions).
To be clear, I believe the students who need extra support and review deserve it. I also believe that students who learn fast deserve to advance through their classes faster. I think there has to be a better way, so that teachers and professors can spend their time teaching interesting material and answering uncommon questions, which is a better use of their talents, and students can learn at their own rate with more personal support. I’m a big fan of online learning, and I imagine the ideal is platforms like Khan Academy replacing lectures entirely, and teachers/professors only teaching interactive seminars and assisting students who have questions and/or need a form of help that the online tools can’t provide.
IME, professors assume this is the case when, due to the erosion of K–12 outcomes—not standards, more on that later—in the US, it would be beneficial to the class as a whole to take a day for remediation.
This is a total tangent, but when I was far more addicted to Reddit, I'd doomscroll /r/Teachers. One of the frequent points discussed in declining educational attainment is that standards have nothing to do with student outcomes. In fact, overly rigorous standards in elementary schools set students up to fail—specifically in anything with a mathematical foundation (so real science, not just trivia memorization, as well). The facade of academic rigor falls apart each summer when the standards leave insufficient time for remediation and students are permanently left behind by teachers who must prove to administration & auditors that they covered everything in their contract. Instead, elementary math should progress slower with an emphasis on skill mastery.
That said, the same problem of classroom skill distribution still applies—especially at the K–12 level, where the students are willing to become discipline problems if sufficiently bored or checked-out.
My anecdotal experience aligns perfectly with what you are saying.
There is a 10-year age gap between my sister and me (I am the older). We went to the same low-income elementary school, and even had many of the same teachers, but No Child Left Behind passed after I finished elementary and before she started.
She had to take so many standardized tests. I think I'd had to take two a year? But she was taking way more, and the teachers were always cramming the students for it so that their low-income school would not lose desperately-needed funding.
It was apparent to me, when I helped her with her homework, that she was missing out on a lot of fundamentals, especially in math. My sister is very smart, so I was surprised by how much less she understood than I had understood at the same age. She would get very frustrated and cry while doing her math homework because she just didn't get it. She couldn't solve novel problems, and when solved a familiar problem, she would still get very angry because she felt like she had just lucked into the right answer.
So I finally sat down with her and taught her math as I understood it. Even though I wasn't a very good teacher (I had never taught anyone anything before, and math was my weakest subject), I was really amazed at how quickly she picked it up. She learned it a lot faster than I had learned it in school. All she'd needed was for someone to explain some basic concepts to her, and then she was soon solving math problems not just at her grade level, but at mine. It made me so angry that she was forced to spend hours of her life doing rote memorization for standardized math tests, frustrated to tears and stressing to the point she couldn't sleep at night, when all it took me was maybe 30 minutes of tutoring a week to get her up to speed and beyond.
In just one year, math went from her least favorite subject to her favorite, and she became so much more confident and ambitious. She went on to study computer science, where she was top of her class, and now has her pick of companies all trying to headhunt her. She voluntarily makes a lower income than she could because she has decided to dedicate her talents to the non-profit sector—but, even so, she still makes an income that dwarfs the rest of our family's, that let her pay off her college debt quickly, and that allows her and her husband to live a very comfortable, low-stress life even while covering her husband's and in-law's immigration costs and putting him through school (he was a DREAMer and, due to DREAMers being a political football for years, he could not work, study, or even drive for much of their marriage).
But if she hadn't been living with a sibling who had received a math education that predated No Child Left Behind, where would she and her husband be now? Most people aren't that lucky. It upsets me to think how many people are caught in a poverty traps because of ridiculous standards placed on low-income schools.
This right here. This is the answer to @Jakobeha's point:
Teacher's know it for themselves, teaching something is often one of the best ways to really deeply learn a subject. It works for students as well. Obviously you can't just have the fast kids constantly teaching the slow kids, but if you leave enough buffer time in the course schedule you can have the faster students help the slower students and at least decrease the spread between content knowledge. Fast students understand more deeply, slow students understand more of the core content. Both win.
Keep getting the same question in a given period? Ask the student if they have asked any of their fellow students, point out the students who could help them, and mention that maybe a different explanation/view will make more sense than the one given in the lecture, i.e. avoid at all costs giving the student the idea you are too busy for their "dumb" question, self-deprecation works.
Of course this only works if you are trying to create a collaborative and positive environment. If lord of the flies style one A per section is your jam, then you're SOL.
I think in the end if one is teaching, one should like both the "slow" and the "fast" students. If one or the other is boring, you might be in the wrong profession. I think a better metric to look at for inspiration is improvement. As long as everyone is improving relative to their own incoming abilities, the teacher should be happy.
Then where does that leave special ed and G&T teachers?
Generally, it works, but the smart kids can get fed up and let personal disputes in (or just lose their patience). I've definitely misled a slower student with plausible-sounding nonsense to get them to shut up so I could focus on my own work before.
I've definitely been that smart student before. It's one thing to help lift up my friends whom are already 90% of the way there. It's another to get paired with the meathead who is barely 10% of the way there. Let alone it happening in every class. It makes you feel like you're doing the teacher's job for them.
WRT special ed and G&T teachers...those are different professions than <subject> teacher. In the same way that a college professor is a very different profession from a kindergarten teacher. A teacher that excels and enjoys working with special needs kids is not necessarily going to work as well with the G&T kids, and vice versa.
Funnily enough I was that student just a few hours ago.
I'm back at school full time getting my master electrician certification. I've helped a few fellow students with various topics and some even semi-jokingly asked if I've considered becoming a teacher after getting my master title.
But every Thursday we've got a practical class where I've been paired with one of the lowest performing students in order to help them out. The guy is unfortunately a complete lost cause. So much so where I seriously wonder how he even got through the journeyman exams.
If I where to take as much time as he would need to fully understand every topic, we could only cover about 20% of the syllabus in the available time. And ultimately I have to take care that I myself get through the exams.
I wonder if a G&T/sped teacher swap would go over better than either swapping with a mainline classroom teacher. Both are used to working with the long tails of the ability distribution. Technically, a wider distribution than the mainstream classroom, but it's no longer a normal distribution. I'd expect the average in a G&T classroom to be lower than the midpoint. Likewise, a sped classroom would have an average above the midpoint of the distribution.
I am 100% not saying this as a callout, but you've just reminded me how back in where and when I was growing up in the 90s, it was a popular derogatory term right up there with queer, fa***t, and re***d.
You don't hear much of it being called out these days, but you definitely fired a neuron that was a bit rusty. Maybe I'll have some new material to cover with my therapist (hooray trauma-induced amnesia).
Interesting. I haven't seen "sped" used as a slur in the wild in my adult years; I've primarily seen it used as four-letter jargon. Back in elementary school, however, my classmates and I called each other "special" (or the classic R-word) all the time—never "sped."
Getting into some tangents:
It really sucks for the people with diagnoses, but I wager it's because when one finds themselves or another doing something so monumentally braindead, and you have to trapse through your mind for something to describe it, the currently accepted term pops up.
I certainly, being older now, have to be very careful to not exclaim the terms I grew up with when I do something monumentally stupid.
I was at a Scouting archery booth with my kid. I now have a video of a 7 year old, best I could tell a fairly average one, after being throughly instructed to not collect his arrows until the all-clear was given, promptly after firing his arrows, hop the fence and walk directly in front of my kid as they were about to unleash their arrow. I would have given said kid a bit more benefit of the doubt if they hadn't already successfully not-done-that 3 times already.
Thankfully all I shouted was "WHOOOOOAAAAAAHHHH."
Same place theoretically, you're gonna have a range of abilities, the ones on the faster end can help the others.
That's more detailed than my original comment, but my general opinion is it's on the teacher. You have to judge when you can reasonably/politely off load things onto the faster students in a way that they will feel empowered/entertained by helping other students, but at the same time know when to step in and pull back that help you originally encouraged. That actually leads to another point, which is that sometimes you need to step in and tell the slower kids to leave the smart kid alone. Some collaboration is warranted, but if it turns into "just ask Smarty McSmartPants" every time something gets difficult, you need to encourage the students to try first (and possibly fail) before seeking outside help. Emphasize that getting it wrong is ok is important in this situation.
I'd generally go with the corporate style response of "tabling it" "parking lot-ing" it, except in education speak, e.g. "That's not in the syllabus, you'll cover it in later classes, but if you're interested you can come see me on your break", or "We don't have time to go into too much detail on that right now, but here's a very rough answer, I'll send you a link later, and if you have more questions you can email me".
For whatever reason, this became WAY worse in the working world than during ANY of my educational years. Fast track to make me resent a colleague.
That said, in the working world, I've also been in situations where I've simulatneously been Smartypants and the annoying kid because our assignments were mismatched to our respective strengths.
Me being passively vindictive was what I did as a student, not as an educator. Set them up to fail in amusing ways that aren't easily traced to my bad advice. I was never the class clown who disrupted everyone when bored, but I'd certainly egg him on if I disliked the teacher. Kids are shitheads until life teaches them empathy (or societal pressures convince them to play the part).
This isn't even limited to student who struggle in math, tbh, nor do I think it's unique to the No Child Left Behind act-related stuff. I went to a private religious school, so I didn't feel the effects of that act in the same way. I was also one of those obnoxious "gifted" kids who never had to study for anything and excelled as long as I did my homework and turned it in. And my math education still failed me.
Math class started out for everyone as rote memorization of arithmetic. Which I hated. My mom had to bribe me with candy to do my homework. But even once you move past that into algebra and geometry, it didn't stop being essentially a class of memorization -- you were just memorizing more complex methods and definitions. None of our teachers had any formal background in math. So we were learning to memorize things without having any foundation for why we should give a shit, where these ideas even came from or what they were used for. Even my pre-calc teacher, who was a working engineers who was not accredited as a teacher by the state, presented these for us as a series of techniques we needed to learn. Why does the quadratic formula work and how did we even come up with that anyway? Who knows, it's just a think you need to know how to memorize it and apply it to things. I clearly had some sort of natural knack for math -- our unaccredited math teacher sucked at the math teacher part of his job and thus most of my peers needed tutoring to do decently on the SATs and ACTs, whereas I did quite well without. And yet I hated math class. I thought of myself as not a math or science person, because I loathed the experience of just memorizing formulas and techniques for what felt like no reason at all.
Then I took one math course in undergrad -- Calc 1. I took it in my senior year of high school at the local college. I'm not going to lie and say that I loved that course, but damn that prof far outshone anyone else who had taught me math. For the first time, the concepts I was learning were organized in a way that made them build upon each other, rather than being arbitrary nonsense I needed to learn. I remember in response to something in class, I wrote a little baby proof in my free time (I think it was of the idea that for a rectangle with a given perimeter, the largest area would result from it being a square?). This was the first time I'd ever actually had an interest in math. I considered taking a number theory class (at the prof's recommendation) afterwards, but I never did.
Unfortunately, it was too late for that class to really impact the direction I ended up taking. I majored in linguistics in undergrad and then got my master's degree in computational linguistics/AI -- which did involve more math, but more in the "better hurry up and binge 3blue1brown so you know what linear algebra is before we start throwing the word vector around in class" way. But I look back on that class because it so clearly portrays was could have been a completely alternate journey for me. If I'd had teachers introduce mathematical concepts to me in that way earlier in my education, maybe I would've thought of myself as a math person. I love problem solving and puzzles. Now that I'm older, I watch 3blue1brown and numberphile for fun all the time even though I'm no longer studying for anything. There's an alternate-universe version of me who learned to love math just a little bit earlier and went on to major in it. Maybe I would have even pursued it as an academic discipline at a graduate level. I would have scoffed at the idea when I was younger, because math was just "this horrible thing I'm subjected to and hate". But if I'd learned the actually interesting, problem-solving side of math earlier? Maybe that wouldn't be the case.
I'm a data scientist now, so it's not like I can't use math. But my math skills are a lot weaker than they would have been if I hadn't spent the first 11 years of my education being taught to hate it -- especially as the "math" I learned to loath is actually not particularly similar to the actually interesting exploration and problem-solving you see in the actual academic discipline. Even though it was never reflected in my grades, my math education failed me. And if it failed me, how much hope do we have for kids who naturally struggle with it in ways that I didn't?
You're giving me flashbacks to the QM course I took because I enjoyed P Chem so much.
Replace math with physics and linguistics with chemistry, then you have a summary of my college education. Physics didn't get interesting until the upper division undergrad courses (once all the engineers stopped being required to attend).
My high school math teacher's constantly inability to stfu about how awesome being an engineer is has given me some serious real life bias lol... though he also wouldn't stfu about going to Cornell and told me I needed to smile more after I asked him for a college recommendation letter, so I'd be a little unfair in attributing his bad teaching solely to his being an engineer lol.
I know my alma mater's linguistic department had an unofficial policy to try and poach people who dropped out of engineering lmao. But I think that was more on the phonetics side of things. The formal semantics stuff I focused on was surprisingly close to parts of mathematics as well as philosophy, and I still wish I had taken some courses in both those departments.
The most accurate thing about The Office is that Andy never shut up about going to Cornell.
I don't know where 90% of the people in my life went to school. But every person who went to Cornell told me without any prompting.
lol yeah that part of Andy's character was particularly funny for me and my sister for that reason lmao... even the other Ivy League people aren't as intense about it as Cornell for some reason.
My antipathy toward stereotypical engineers comes from my 200-level calculus physics courses. First semester, I was taught by an excellent professor who was promoted to Apple employee for not serving the student population well. His answers were super deep into the algebraic manipulation, yielding answers such as $\frac{4e_{0}µ_{0}^{g_{0}}}{\sqrt{16384\pi}}$. The large majority of the class were engineers who wanted final answers such as 2.47.
Second semester, I was taught by a professor loved by the engineering students and learned nothing despite earning the highest grade in my section. I ended up learning all the material in three weeks when my advanced analytical class gave a crash course in E&M.
My alma mater's chem department used O Chem as a recruitment tool to wrangle pre-meds away from the biology department (and perhaps even convince some of them to drop their MD aspirations in favor of PhD).
O Chem was definitely the filter course for anyone who had to take it at my uni too. My highschool chemistry teacher believed global warming was a hoax and once told me I had an "unteachable spirit" so... suffice it to say it's not a shock I went more towards the humanities.
I was one of those 2.47 engineer students. Here's the thing.
There are some engineering students whom really want and need to be able to do that kind of math.
Then there are those of us whom mostly just loved hacking shit together inventing and solving problems from trial and error. And people told us to be engineers, and they were wrong. But that math class stood in between us and the job we were told would exist where we would get to do that.
This is exactly like how many STEM profs view the average premed. They view the students as fundamentally concerned with getting that A to pass through the gatekeeping—and resent them especially hard if the department forces curves that would deny As to the intellectually passionate future PhD crop in favor of diligence grinding premeds.
Thankfully, my uni did not force curves, so they were willing to help all students who sought to understand the material regardless of their career ambitions. Where they drew the line was students who wanted help bumping their B+ to an A instead of mastering the chemistry.
My kid had 'fast facts', in first grade, when they were first startimg to really do arithmetic with any regularity. Where they are tested on doing up to 12 addition (5+ 6, 6+6, 12+6, etc) as fast as possible.
Ostensibly its because having those memorized makes later math easier, but I can smell a test optimization emphasis from a mile away.
There's very little time (best I can tell) on helping get over hurdles, and more time spent on practicing the memorization.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot I like about how they do math now, but for all the great stuff they're exposed to the emphasis is all test-results driven more than anything.
They generallty don't do long division anymore. And this boggles my mind with wrongness.
Having a lot of worksheets to drill simple math problems sounds like the old-school way to do it. That's how it was taught 30 years ago (for me) and 30 years before that (for my parents). So I'm not sure it can be associated with test optimization.
I was wondering what they might be replacing long division with, so I searched for a bit and found a few pages mentioning the "Big 7" method. Is this what your kid is learning? I watched a few videos explaining it, and I kind of like it. It's closer to how I would solve division problems in my head. After seeing some of these "new math" techniques, it seems like they rely on students being really strong on basic operations up to and around 10, then do stuff like "make 10" above that, which might help explain the worksheets.
I agree, having done it the old school way. But this is different. Every week is "Fast Facts Friday" They have like a minute to fill out a sheet with problems like this:
Notice it's all +3. There's about 20 on the page, and there will be some duplicates. This is a sample of the
3'spage. They repeat every Friday until they pass that page, then they move on to4's. They don't return back, or have a random distribution of other numbers.And it occurred to me late last night why it bothers me: Being able to pass a speed test in math is a good thing... but not when that is the primary focus. Being able to do small addition quickly comes naturally over practice, and testing periodically for speed provides a small indicator of how well the kids know it. But the way they've structured this purely incentivizes rote memorization.
Oh god, that's terrifying to me. I remember the only time I really had really struggled academically in primary school was when we were being taught the "times table". I just absolutely cannot remember numbers for the life of me. We would have timed tests for them and I would get terrible grades on them not because I couldn't do the math, but because I had to calculate them manually nearly all the time and didn't have enough time for the work. Between that and the requirement to show work I really hated math up until post-algebra. I think it's the primary reason why my mental math abilities are so poor today.
I never sat down with a multiplication table and memorised it, but still expect I could produce one rather quickly—mostly if not entirely from memory. If you properly learn concepts and repeatedly apply them, then patterns will emerge and you will remember the things that come up frequently enough to be useful.
Do they solely rely on calculators now?
I hated those as a student. Being forced to use the facts in context during long division made me end up memorizing them. In a way, I benefitted by the school not pausing to collect the students who were behind—had I not been exposed to long division until I got good at memorizing them, I would've given up because math is stupid.
Honestly, I forget exactly where I picked it up...there's a lot of teachers in the periphery of where my children are at, and hearing that particular point really stuck in my head. Maybe it was an anomaly. If there are more elementary teachers that could confirm or deny (and explain), I'd be thrilled. Edit: this might be part of it. Teaching the other two methods over the algorithmic method, at least at first.
I've also heard some 3-9th teachers returning to handwritten essays over typing. The natural response to LLM, the same way that math teachers needed to ban calculators.
I sometimes wonder if the biggest problem with public education in the United States is the lack of a personal touch. Between when I started and when I graduated, class sizes in my school district doubled. Even if it had not, the structure of most public schools after elementary school has teachers deal with hundreds of students and so it's difficult for them to take steps to help students who are falling behind.
I would generally agree that having high standards causes people to fail, but in the case of education I don't think that the solution is to lower them. It sounds (from the outside) as if it's more of a problem of implementation, and that problem is exacerbated by the very "broken-up" nature of the US education system where states and districts can have wildly different policies. I'm sure that everyone involved is trying their best to improve things, though.
A decade ago in college, I had a summer job on the data analysis side. It's a problem of garbage in, garbage out. Once the kids are out of elementary school, they no longer put effort into standardized testing. They've figured out (or assumed) that the tests do not matter for their personal educational goals. Instead, state boards of education are making recommendations based on very expensive and labor-intensive tea leaves.
That's an excellent point. Once students are old enough to figure out they can put "A" in every column then nap at their desk they'll do so.
fwiw, I think the far more common situation is that the struggling students continue to struggle without doing these things. Every lecturer I've had, from grad students to professors with tenure, has been absolutely begging students to come to office hours. And the students most likely to show up, in my experience, aren't the ones who need it most. I certainly never attended office hours for the classes I struggled in, because they were usually classes outside my major that I was already a little checked-out of. By contrast, I attended office hours for the courses I was doing very well in because I was interested in pursuing that field on the graduate level and the professor was a great source of advice.
Original title: "Why don’t schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?"
It was inspired by [https://danluu.com/teach-debugging/](this essay about programming and the mindset of systematic debugging). It's a collection of examples from various fields of professors who did not like students who didn't come in already knowing fundamentals and made a point of keeping them behind.