Comment by dweekly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dweekly | Hacker News Reader

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Yes! The thing that was missing in the original article was answering the most important question in all of this: Does Tutoring Work?

The implication left for a reader of the original article is that tutoring is mostly about exam-prep or that it is under-regulated, ineffectual, and a folly of the rich. But the truth is that the over-regulation of conventional time-based classroom learning is deeply flawed based on our understanding of how people learn. Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success, nor is moving everyone along at the same pace and calling the material complete after a semester of education regardless of the depth of understanding conveyed. We need intensive and personalized schooling with mastery based learning - and to answer the question of "where are we going to get that many teachers?" we need people to teach as part of how they learn. For some odd reason society only starts to embrace this in graduate school.

> we need people to teach as part of how they learn.

I've got a principle I came up with called LTD: Learn, Teach, Do.

The idea is to prioritize activities where I can be doing all three at the same time. An example would be pair programming with a junior on a new problem where I don't know how to solve every part of the problem. "Learn on the job together with a team, and share learnings as you go" is basically the kind of work that I mean. I've found LTD activities are awesome in so many ways. You build up the team around you, grow as an individual, and get shit done all at the same time.

I'm increasingly against activities which focus strongly on only one of these(school being the main example).

teaching is a very effective method of learning. in one community that i am part of it is emphasized that most of the benefits of teaching go to the teacher.

as for a school model, montessori groups children in age-groups spanning 3 years, and older children there routinely teach the younger ones.

Montessori schools are so weird. I'm convinced they're mostly buzzwords to get rich parents to send their kids there - at least around here. I know a couple of teachers and all of them say that the Montessori schools around us don't actually follow most of the philosophies of Montessori.

In our area they seem to be for over-achievers. Want your 4 year old to learn to read, write, and do math? Send them to a Montessori. At least, that's the reason all the parents I know send them there.

the problem is that the name "montessori" is not protected, and schools take advantage of that.

so you have to look closely if the teachers are actually trained and certified by one of the training schools that actually provide proper montessori training, and whether the classrooms have the proper environment.

This is actually a principle of training medics: Learn one, do one, teach one.

>Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success

The problem here is that getting enough money to hire more teachers per student is like pulling teeth. The problem that we as a society are solving isn't "how can we achieve the best overall educational outcome?" It's "how can we avoid a disastrously uneducated population with a budget of $X?" I'm not entirely sure we're doing a good job on that one either, though.

Right - but part of the difficulty and expense in hiring teachers is that we've segmented it off as an expert population with high barriers to entry. If everyone who learned was also expected to teach, you scale the teaching population with the learner population. You can actually see the dynamics of this play out with flight training, since you get your CFI at ~300hrs total flight experience but nobody will hire you with less than ~1,000hrs, so you have this massive pool of certified teachers with 300 - 1,000hrs of experience available to teach as a consequence of the design of the system.

I wonder if you could get some positive results by using students as tutors. Imagine if a certain number of hours per week, you paired up students in grade X with students in grade X-1, to have the older students help the younger ones to learn the material they leaned the previous year. This would also help cement that knowledge in the older group. Then you also have time where the students in grade X are tutored by students in grade X+1, through the same process. During this time, the teachers' jobs would be to provide support.

The biggest problem with public instructions is bullying and everything being targeted at minimum competence. Some 12 year old prodigy graduated college and high school at the same time because the pandemic and remote learning letting him zoom ahead at a ridiculous pace.[1]

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/27/us/12-year-old-graduating-hig...

Bullying is bad, but I definitely knew my role wasn't to be strong but rather academic. That line "nerds will be their boss" was my incentive. (Although I don't personally want to be a manager)

Sure it would be great to get rid of bullying, but I wonder if it's inherent in humans.

I'd focus on things we can control like that minimum competence problem you described.

that's in interesting angle with the grad school advisor reality. Very true, never thought about how an "advisor" would function throughout the entirety of one's education.

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