Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher?

It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for administering tests.

This is a long article and headline of "personalized learning" and how it was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of "personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The laptop/Chromebook is the primary transmission of material. The teacher becomes a secondary role -- help answer extra questions/etc.

The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the material. This is theoretically possible but reality is that you often get an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning, you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local teacher where you happen to pay your taxes.

As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in-classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math.

That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live instructor to transmit information. This is where we can personalize the curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live teacher.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...

One of the things that learning through a laptop does it give people access to world class teachers. I don't think even the biggest proponents of online learning would disagree that having that world class teacher in person is better through the laptop. The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile? (Or x percentile)

>The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile?

I would separate the question into different parts to isolate the different roles an in-classroom teacher performs:

(1) a 1-way communication -- the act of purely transmitting information: E.g. compare effectiveness of on-site teacher saying, "sine is the opposite side divided by hypotenuse" vs virtualvideo teacher saying the same thing. For this info-transmission activity, many high-quality Youtubers seem to be better at explaining the topic. They have more insightful metaphors, better graphics, better presentation, etc. (Unscientific survey.[0])

(2) a 2-way communication -- providing a realtime feedback loop of skills assessment to the child. E.g. watching the child work out the problem on the sheet of paper and immediately noticing that she's not carrying a minus sign across a calculation and intervening at that moment. Of course, answering any questions the child has is also in this category.

The emphasis in my previous comment is that laptop-led teaching doesn't have to detract from activity (2) because that's the superior value that in-classroom teachers can provide over virtual teachers.

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[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F21S9Wpi0y8

Some viewer comments in that video:

+ 2.6k thumbs up: "Crazy how an 8 minute video, helps more then a paid teacher"

+ 690 thumbs up: "you are better than my math teacher"

+ 115 thumbs up: "I want you to know my math teacher sucks and you're the only reason I get A's. Appreciate it dude"

For whatever reason, the viewers' local on-site classroom teacher didn't "click" with them but virtual Sal Khan did. This is the missing pedagogy angle the author of The New Yorker article didn't highlight.

My money is on the fact that their teacher was managing some other student doing something stupid.

So much of our school problems are rooted in insufficient resources for classroom management, and an unwillingness to impose significant consiquences on the student and their guardians.

>My money is on the fact that their teacher was managing some other student doing something stupid.

But an ineffective teacher also happens in college where professors do not need to deal with any misbehaving adult students.

Surely many of us have experienced a college class (in USA) being taught by a TA that can barely speak English. Even though the students are all quiet and respectful, nobody understands the lecture.

In those situations, the advantages of on-site presence of the professor is overshadowed by the disadvantages of the ineffective teaching presentation.

That's why many Youtube mathematics videos have comments such as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8

+ 261 thumbs up: "Your videos are what college should be like. And isn‘t."

2.6k thumbs up doesn't mean anything: how many people didn't understand the example and so didn't hit like? How many people voted because the presenter looks good? How many people just needed the material presented again to get it and any different example would have worked? How many people spent 8 minutes learning something that they could have learned in 1 from a different teacher? How many would have understood even better if a different example was given?

There are all valid questions (and not the only ones).

>There are all valid questions (and not the only ones).

To me, those would be valid questions if we proposed Sal Khan -- and only Sal Khan -- to become the official & approved math video for all students which means we ban every other alternative teacher (virtual or in-class) teacher as a choice. Nobody is proposing this.

Even if (many) viewers don't like Khan (dislike his voice, his handwriting, whatever) and are still confused by his presentation, it's irrelevant because the underlying problem still remains: the local person that happens to be physically present in that classroom may be a terrible teacher for lecturing the students.

Therefore, optimize the lecture portion (the 1-way communication phase) by finding the best virtual teacher for the topic. This means 2 different children in the same classroom may be watching 2 different video teachers at the same time. (The in-class teacher can even help the student find a presenter that resonates.)

The remaining classroom task for the (possibly terrible) teacher is isolated to interactions like answering questions. The 1-on-1 interaction is the higher value phase of learning. The lecturing portion where many teachers drone on in a monotone voice and students are bored and tune out is the lower value phase.

Your point is good, but there are some issues with it.

The person who is there might be bad, but in person means that person gets real time feedback on if the student understands. This factor alone makes not so good teachers better than a video of the best teacher.

If Khan is not the only teacher that means the student needs to figure out which teacher is a good one. There are too many potential great teachers to wade through them all.

Then there are great lectures who will teach you something wrong. I don't care how great you are at presentation, if you are teaching the world sits on the back of a giant turtle you shouldn't teach. This example seems trivial but for a subject the student doesn't know how are they to know the teacher is right?

There’s also the question of cost: A world-class teacher for (almost) free online vs a non-world-class, very expensive teacher in person.

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