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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

So yeah. Having all the children at same starting point and having a good teacher walk them through with great pedagogy is going to work. yes. and be social

What happens when kids don't get it that lesson, or that week. How do they catch up?

Personalised learning is much more "personalised catch up".

One thing that struck me recently on "The rest is politics" podcast is old Etonian Rory Stewart explaining that his (posh private) school he would get up about 8 and go to bed about ten and the whole day was full of structured learning / events. That (top) private schools might get better results simply because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on.

Perhaps the answer to school is simple - spend 2x to 3x more. we might not like it. But maybe it seemed ridiculous to pay for schools and books for Victorian children in Dickens' day as well

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Spend more time but not doing busy work.

Some schools assign way too much of what is basically memorization, producing students who are very good at memorizing things and not very good at applying them.

Also, students need breaks. “Cram schools” which simply assign too much work and put too much pressure, produce anxious students without emotional skills who burn out and in some cases also turn to be bad at real-world tasks (because they spend all their time learning how to get good grades, taking shortcuts and not “learning” the material).

But a long school day full of sports, student bonding, interesting hands-on or “applied” work, and the boring essentials, seems like it would produce better students.

Or the reverse. Some kids could work through a whole year of math in a single day. School hours feel like prison time, ltterally watching the wall clock ticking second by eteral second going completely crazy from boredom. These days kids have phones, I know. Back then, you sneaked in books, then got punished with more prison time (detention) when caught.

> better results...

Admissions into the most competitive universities.

> because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on

Harvard and MIT are full of kids that burnt themselves out in private schools, cram schools, crazy California & New Jersey public high schools. They were so tired, they did lazy stuff in college and after graduation, squandering their outstanding gifts and great opportunities. Could be as many as 1 in 3 students, and in my opinion, it's rising!

Also, would it really be great to run a schools program - perhaps even a residential one, perhaps even compulsory, perhaps singling out groups of particularly behind demographics - and forces their kids to spend way longer in school?

These ideas have been tried. People have this flawed thing they do, they think the stuff they like is the future and the stuff they don't like is the past. The future is an objective reality, and more often than not, it's the most visibly troubled communities. San Francisco, where I live, is the future, not the past, of chaos in public schooling, every community will have to transit its problems on a journey to improving schools, whereas your "old Etonian" is literally the past, and what we ought to be doing is dealing with "San Francisco" today, because that's how you'll help Chicago, New York, etc. in the future.

Yes! These kinds of initiatives are not focusing on tutoring the ”ahead” kids as some think, they are about tutoring the “behind” kids because teachers cannot possibly overcome multiple grade level differences using classroom differentiation. So as you say, the teaching example in the article is entirely missing the point.

The real question is whether you can get Bloom’s 2-sigma effect without a human tutor (for social accountability) when the student is disinterested. I think it will take more than just a chatbot to make a student feel like somebody cares whether they get it or not.

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