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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

> 2. Teach to the middle of the class. Be aware that the weakest students will be perplexed much of the time, and the strongest will be bored.

True for the weakest students, but it's always possible to give harder material/exercises to the strongest students. And it doesn't even take much time for the teacher because these students are more autonomous. I only taught CS and maths, but it's very easy to keep the good students busy.

I personally like teaching CS lab classes. The key is to design projects with gradual difficulty. Even the weakest students should manage to complete a few tasks.

But overall, I think that heterogeneity makes teaching much more complicated that what it could be, especially when basic pre-requisites aren't met. It's a bit heartbreaking when you get students which are obviously losing their time and money.

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Great ideas.

I sneak in advanced things into lectures and preface it with "for students that are more advanced or have more prior knowledge in the subject..." I usually see the more advanced students perk up and the other students exhale and zone out a bit to rest their brain. Seems to work fairly well.

I've been quite curious how to "divide and conquer" the problem by weaponizing the bored genius into teaching the perplexed and lagging. It may save teacher time for teaching the middle group while also teaching the genius what it is to explain something so intuitive to someone who doesn't. But it may backfire ..

>> by weaponizing the bored genius into teaching the perplexed and lagging.

This seems like a great idea but should be used very sparingly. Your "bored genius" isn't necessarily a great teacher, and that's not their job anyway. I've found you're better to give them more challenging options. If they want to be bored that's on them; if they pursue it they'll likely do it independently.

I agree but there's a huge value in showing them how diverse can brains be. As a smart person, it's very important that they tame their own needs and open their mind a bit too.

That said, making them chasing challenges is also a great thing.

> It may save teacher time for teaching the middle group while also teaching the genius what it is to explain something so intuitive to someone who doesn't.

So, really no benefit for the genius and all the benefit for the weaker ones and the teacher who does not have to run their patience thin.

No, I think giving the genius a challenge that they came for is the best way to go about it. If you have none, that's fine, let the genius discover things on their own, they were almost certainly doing so anyways and its best to not get in their way.

Upper-year students often work as teaching assistants which is something to this effect. That is, if they hold tutoring sessions or office hours and not just do grading.

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