Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the board of a small private high-school and I'm going to forward this to the headmaster but ...

Sitting all day [1] passively listening to a droning professor [2] and feeling like a nuisance [3] if you don't grasp the material, pay attention and avoid causing disruptions [3] is an important skill for college survival. If we change the curriculum to engage the students more (which I tend to believe will increase their retention of the materials), will we make them less capable of successfully performing 1, 2 & 3 in their college classes?

View on HN

Was your college experience a lot like high school in that regard? I don't feel like mine was. My schedule never involved 6+ hours of sitting without breaks. Even in semesters with a heavy workload, some of the classes were always labs or very interactive, not just lectures. If classes were back-to-back, they were still often in different buildings, so there was a bit of an exercise break between lectures as opposed to walking down the hall in the same HS building. Virtually all professors were open to questions before/after class or had office hours or a TA with office hours -- asking questions was not seen as being a nuisance. Laptops/phones were allowed in nearly all lectures, which breaks up the monotony of sitting passively even during a lecture.

It was ... though I didn't notice as much in my EE/CS classes (perhaps because I was so interested in the content?).

On the other hand, my Chem 12 section had about 400 students in it - there was no chance for the professor to engage us during the lectures. This was pretty common in the classes that were BDRs (Basic Degree Requirements). Econ 2/4 (Micro/Macro), Math 160/161 (Differential/Integral Calculus) and Film 190 and most of the beginning humanities/social sciences were all taught this way.

In theory, recitations were smaller groups where you could be more engaged with the TA (generally a grad student) but half of them spoke such broken English they couldn't be understood (I had a higher-level math TA that described two-thirds as "three under two" - when you're taking notes at the pace required, your pen naturally writes three-halves for a few weeks).

But how many hours a week did you spend in lectures? Certainly not the 30 hours a week that many high school students spend, and you almost certainly didn't take 8 classes at a time.

Furthermore, in college you can get up and go the bathroom or get something to drink without asking permission--you can even leave if you want. Even if you don't always exercise this freedom, just the knowledge that you can is a drastic change.

To address your points:

[1] My college schedule was considerably more broken up, including a 10 minute break in classes that were longer than 90 minutes. In fact, I almost never had a block of classes longer than 3 hours which didn't have at least an hour before more classes happened. During the time I wasn't in class, I was unsupervised and able to walk around a large campus, stop by the gym, go off campus, etc. All of these serve to considerably break up the day versus high school, where I had something like 4.5 hours of classes a day, in 90 minute blocks, with two 10 minute breaks and a 30 minute break which was my only chance to eat food all day.

[2] Even sitting in the classroom, I was allowed considerably more freedom in college. I was (generally) allowed to eat, use my laptop as I saw fit. Further, my college classes were generally more interactive, with strong group/class discussion components, exploring examples in class, etc. The whole process was much more dynamic than my high school classes were on average.

[3] It's certainly true that you shouldn't bother other people during the lecture (such as making loud noises), but my experience in college was again that it was actually easier to ask questions when I didn't understand, either within class or during office hours/tutoring times. Partly, this is just a maturity thing: you get more used to asking people for help as you get older and place more value on your understanding of the topic.

I think the dual role of teenager babysitter and education facility negatively impacts the school's role in education at times - such as when they keep students more controlled and have more instruction time than is likely necessary so that way teenagers aren't just free all the time to wander around town. Colleges (and the experiences of the students) benefit from only having to do one of the two things.

I agree ... in college you don't have to do 1, 2 or 3. The ability to do them is however a necessary skill (e.g. "I was (generally) allowed to eat, use my laptop as I saw fit." - but if you browsed the Internet during the entire class period, you'd have completely missed the presented materials).

So college classes don't force students into these behaviors like high-school classes often do, but the ability to self-regulate those same behaviors are needed for success.

The reasoning goes on. Colleges make people endure boredom & obedience in preparation for future jobs.

People should at least be allowed to decide whether some school should waste years of their lives for these (depressing) benefits. Failing that, this reasoning should be made crystal clear.

Sorry for the late reply, but I think the difference of being able to regulate my level of attention, ie, browsing the internet when the lecture is particularly dragging, being able to look things up when I get confused, etc actually make it easier to focus on the large majority of the lecture. By being able to take quick mental breaks, and not having to expend full focus when, eg, the professor is belaboring the part of it that I already know because other students did bad on the quiz, for instance, actually makes it easier to stay fresh and focused during the other parts of the class.

Self-regulation, even if you end up doing mostly the same thing, is substantially different from being forced to do it continually, at least in terms of the mental strain it places on me. I always got much more out of long lectures where my attention sort of wandered in and out, and was punctuated by a mixture of doodles, thinking about other things, and sharply focusing on the key points and arguments. Let's not pretend every word out of a professor's mouth is golden, and the students are going to be seriously disadvantaged if they miss a few here and there.

Part of the disservice we're doing to high school students is that we're not actually teaching them to self-regulate in a useful way: we're teaching them to do all or nothing.

So your plan for preparing students to endure these things successfully in college is just to inflict the same things on them, with no preparation, no training, no discussion, no allowance for failure?

If true that's as insane as most of the rest of the education system, but it seems to be more likely to be a very weak justification for continuing with the status quo.

It's interesting, because I hear this kind of line all the time, that we need to e.g. "learn to do work we don't like because sometimes in (high-school, college, work) we have required work that is essential, regardless of whether we like it or not."

For some reason it never occurred to me to ask the obvious question "why would we think that just making them do it is the right training for this?". It just seems intellectually lazy to say that "you have to learn" to do something, but the 'learning' is just the demand that you do it. It may be optimal for some things, but it seems very unlikely to be the correct, final answer.

Thanks for this insight.

Why shouldn't college education be more engaging as well?

I'm teaching at the Interaction Design programme in Malmö, which is very much centered around project based learning and because of that inherently avoids the problems mentioned to a large degree. Although I admit that interaction design lends itself better to such an approach than some other subjects.

It should be!!! I believe people like you are the future of higher education - project-based learning where the students can actually see how the skills they're practicing might be used in the real world.

There are, unfortunately, too few of you but at least you're not alone. One of my favorite classes involved solving a problem encountered at a real business. It was free for the business - all they had to do was supply the problem. The students submitted suggested solutions and the business was free to implement the solution or (if they were being generous) tell the students why the solution wasn't used (and if they could, what the chosen solution was).

Is this akin to the Entertainment Technology Center¹ as founded by Randy Pausch, and Donald Marinelli?

1: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/

Are you suggesting that college education is so poorly structured that it is important to give students a few years of practice, instead of improving the learning environment so they can learn more? Maybe the kids wouldn't even need college lecture of they learned the 400person Chem/Calc/whatever 1 class material the first time the saw it in high school.

Getting teenagers to learn more, engage, take charge of their learning will make the less successful at college?

Maybe college needs to change as well. But also, in college you can chose you class and institution. High school you have like 1 elective, you can't really change schools. If your college was like a bad high school, you need to go elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com