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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

>How is any of this relevant or isolated to any particular teaching method?

It's evidence that pretending all the students in a classroom are one person (or a small handful of people) flies in the face of reality and is a bad abstraction that you should not use.

A good teaching method gracefully handles the problem that there are ~30 different individuals with different circumstances who cannot be reasoned about as a collective. The Socratic method is not that, because it engages a handful of people at a time.

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This is the wrong place to have that conversation. This is a submission based on the premise that one must teach a group of students, as is the case in any classroom environment such as the one described.

You're arguing with the premise, which is unhelpful. You either accept the premise and engage in this topic, or you disagree with the premise and leave the rest of us alone.

Of course you must teach a group of students. Grandparent is arguing that, because you must teach a diverse group of students, the Socratic method is not the magic bullet one might think, i.e. contradicting the thesis, not the premise, of the article.

I didn't see any place where this method was claimed to be a magic bullet, or even a more common silver bullet. In fact, the author specifically mentioned this:

> When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher > believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and > excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The > three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very > beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at > all.

That's a very clear explanation that this method didn't work for every child in the class. In any class there will be children that are difficult to reach. This isn't necessarily an article about that.

Thank you. Correct, the method is not claimed to be foolproof, but just a good method for many students, and it works well in large groups, often even better than with one student at a time, because if someone gets stuck, others have ideas to keep the discussion going.

> Of course you must teach a group of students.

`brudger was not agreeing with this premise. You are.

Welcome to the conversation.

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