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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell if they believe they have cracked the code that makes learning these concepts accessible or if they are suffering from a severe case of expert syndrome, totally unable to put themselves in the shoes of a novice.

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Through trial and error and the application of some rarely employed, but highly-effective educational strategies like active learning, distributed practice, mixed review, mastery-based learning, interleaving, layering, etc., you end up with a pace of learning that's a little shocking. I realize it's hard to believe -extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that, but that's what got us started having our 8th-graders take the AP Calculus BC exam as as an outside, objective measure.

Opt-in educational programs of all sorts are usually heavily selection-biased toward students that are well-motivated and generally exceptionally easy to teach—good support from home, probably above-average SES, above-average IQ, et c.

Which doesn't mean such programs are useless, just that they're typically far less effective if you try to apply them to a representative slice of the overall student population.

It's true that the students in the school program are high-aptitude, but something like 70% of the students in the middle school where this all started are on the federal free and reduced lunch program (low SES) along with a couple of the top kids in the original cohort, who I taught personally and they were amazing.

> 70 % of the students in the middle school where this all started

but

> a couple of the top kids in the original cohor

Are their parents from a tight-knit immigrant community, highly educated in their previous country, with economic prospects in the US dimmed by language barrier and professional certifications that got dropped at the border?

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