Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

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Very interesting read. It's not only a problem with mathematics though, it's nearly every subject in school, whether it's science, languages or math. It seems to me that the problem is that to teach well, you need good, autonomous teachers, and that just doesn't scale. Like the author said, you can't teach teaching.

I'm of the unpopular opinion that digital learning is the only possible solution for this. I'm talking about a digital tutor with infinite patience, with the best qualities of the best teachers. I'm not talking about a robot that passes the Turing test, just one that passes the test for the narrow field of teaching a specific subject.

People say you need real teachers, you need the human touch, but if the average teacher sucks (and they do), then I'd rather be taught by software. And I think it's just one of those things people say because it sounds true: "you need the human touch", just like people said they prefer real books over e-books, face to face conversations over texting, navigating by feel over using the GPS etc. These sentiments almost always turn out to be wrong.

> Like the author said, you can't teach teaching.

Yes you can. I mean sure there is an explanatory gap with things like empathy and identifying scaffolding opportunities. But that just means you can't teach ALL of teaching with a book, experience and guidance is also required.

> I'm talking about a digital tutor with infinite patience...

One that can empathise with a students particular background/learning style and understand what might work to convey a novel concept better?

> People say you need real teachers, you need the human touch, but if the average teacher sucks (and they do), then I'd rather be taught by software.

It's not about the human touch. It's about empathy, and expert diagnosis of learning conditions, which the worst teacher does a better job of than the best computer/software. Just because most of our teachers suck doesn't mean software is the better solution. Better teachers are the solution, perhaps that is better education for teachers, or perhaps it's more communication from the realm of pedegogy down to the teaching curriculum that teachers are taught from.

Software can assist teachers, and can even replace certain aspects of teaching. But you will leave a lot of students behind if you try to replace teachers completely.

My prediction is that data can replace empathy, just as Watson can beat human competitors most of the time. Students struggle with new concepts, but do they all struggle in uniquely different ways? Aren't there patterns? I think the data from millions of interactions, and a curriculum guided by the best teaching minds the world has to offer will be better than the average teacher, up to a certain point. Note that I mean this in a very narrow sense, when constrained to a specific topic, and especially when explaining something intuitively to a student and answering students' questions. I agree though that for the foreseeable future there still need to be teachers.

I'm all for better teachers, but I think it's just not going to happen. They haven't become better in the past few decades or even century, rather possibly the opposite, with the need for many more teachers than there are competent people to fill those positions. The only solution I can see is to make teaching one of the most highly paid and highly respected professions. There doesn't seem to be any incentive for this, and it would require a huge cultural change. And even if that was the case, there would probably be the a concentration of teaching talent in the big cities at top schools, while rural schools will have to do with the scraps. Software at least is democratizing.

Of course what I'm suggesting would require some very sophisticated software that doesn't exist today, but I would say that for me, if I would have followed the videos on Khan Academy (for science and math) instead of the education I received, I would probably have been better off. I grew up in a rural area, and I know how bad it can be. After getting an engineering degree, I now see how little those "teachers" actually knew or understood. It's shocking really. But I'm not surprised when you look at the kind of people that go into teaching today.

You can't teach teaching in isolation. A math teacher has to know math and teaching, but that's not really how they're trained - an undergraduate Math Education curriculum diverges from the Math curriculum shortly after calculus, which is far too soon.

An undergraduate math education is more than enough to teach the current high school math curriculum.

From my point of view though, if my statement above is true, that is very sad. As I don't think it should be. The math curriculum is horribly deficient. But software doesn't seem to be the answer to fixing the curriculum.

> An undergraduate math education is more than enough to teach the current high school math curriculum.

Is that an undergraduate Math degree, or a Math Education degree? If the former, you don't get training in pedagogy. If the latter, you don't get enough proof-based classes to properly understand what math is or to fully understand the subjects you'll teach.

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Augment the average teachers with good software!

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