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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting because neither helping the strongest students, nor helping the weakest, has any reason to be maximally beneficial to society. From pure utilitarian point of view, we should first help those students who would get the most benefit per hour of help. That probably means the middling ones who just need a hand to get them over a hurdle, not the checked-out ones and not the superstars.

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That’s a great, practical point. One anecdote about smart kids though: i knew a number of very smart boys growing up who got bored at school and checked out for that reason, and life didn’t work out great for them - nor did society benefit from the very positive productivity they might have been capable of. I think they’d have done better with appropriate challenges.

This happened with both myself and my sister. Thankfully, I dropped out and started attending community college where I could proceed at my own pace. I don’t think a lot of parents are aware of this option.

I always talked about ideas since I was a kid and got lots of applauses, but no one ever bothered to actually take my hand and try to explore with me. I didn't simply get bored, I ended up in complete social isolation. In my personal case, neglection actually runs deeper and beyond the educative system, but if you fail to "get people on board", any other metric will be irrelevant.

> That probably means the middling ones who just need a hand to get them over a hurdle, not the checked-out ones and not the superstars.

From my experience the middling ones are exactly the students who have the highest cost/benefit ratio. The checked out ones are the students who could have a small amount of attention to get them over a hurdle that’s completely blocking them, which caused them to check out. Maybe you find out they are dyslexic. Or you find out they are not eating breakfast or lunch after a short conversation. Or you find out they’re checked out because they’re bullied. A small change here can yield a drastic improvement.

The middling ones are usually performing at their highest cylinder and still not doing great, so it takes a lot of work to convince them to apply themselves even more.

TLDR; it’s easier to get a student from F to C than from C to A.

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